One way to approach it that I’ve been thinking of is to go an “Alice in Wonderland” route - the ability is new to the PC due to some circumstance: they’ve awoken new superpowers, they’re in a new world where the laws of logic affect them and now they have the potential to get as big as possible without consequences, maybe they’re having culture shock in the same world but there’s a country/culture where being fat is not only normal, but can be done without worry.
Like Alice, it’s a strange new experience that they’re trying to get used to, so the natural aversion to gaining weight is there, addressed, but there’s room for the PC to adapt.
Avril’s Appetite was actually the first game I thought of for the “Toy With” category! I did leave it out because the separation between Avril and the PC is an important part of the game. Avril spoilers: Love the ways she betrays her supposed desire not to be fat or to be the protagonist of a wg game. Sure Avril, you only wanna be a normal vg character. That’s why you have hearts every time you eat cake and give an extended monologue of all the cake-based levels we missed out on.
The loosely-sketched PC is interesting, and I think how I feel about it would be on a case-by-case basis. Is the PC a cipher but distinct, like a nameless farming sim farmer or tomogatchi-style owner? Or is the PC so featureless that they don’t exist outside of UI elements, like ball shooter games?
And I’d love to hear about reluctant NPC techniques, too. They may not have the same friction as reluctant NPCs, but that’s not the same as being “easy.” Avril seems like a hard character to write and animate! Too far over-reluctant or overeager and the magic is gone.
(Non-kink game) Citizen Sleeper has this loop where you have a finite energy meter per day to do activities, but it’s always a gamble whether you’re going to have some interruption or complication that uses up your energy. What if you had some kind of craving meter, and if you failed to manage it and overindulged, you’d miss out on chances to advance other goals (like fattening up NPCs, getting money for new clothes, etc)?
Was that beyond being just a badender and allowing weightgain during normal gameplay- the dev wrote in a kind of ‘canon’ outfit change event in every chapter that you needed to reset to the baseline weightstage to begin. But in every chapter (aside from one of them?) this baseline weight was higher than the last event to show the blessing is still having an effect even if you’re not trying to gain weight.
Thanks for the mention. Really was trying to flesh out the ideas described by the OP. Project BOB unfortunately at this point is effectively a prototype to what i have in the oven. My idea did work just not in renpy, I have been quietly building a twin sister game in C++ were you can have 10,000 npcs and have it all calculated in under 1 second. And this one does come with a mod tool, so everyone will be able to change things to an extent, one day it will be ready for release, and hopefully fingers crossed as a more complete fleshed out game than Project Bob.
I think my biggest struggle with even my new game is how to allow the player through interaction, mold the mindset of the PC, without it being to obvious as to what the exact outcome is. I think their is a fine line walked of making every decision matter, however in a subtle way. Less big decisions and more little ones that add up.
Hmm, could have a PC who is relunctant to gain weight, but maybe its how she gains power in her world, could be an interesting conflict between her desire to maintain a thin physique, or her determination to grow in strength
An example of a game that doesn’t do a good job with this (at least in my opinion) is Skirjasaga - Tale of a Heifer. The tone of the weight gain is just too mean-spirited to be enjoyable, and I think that tone is quite important in whether or not a player wants to engage with the fetish content. I couldn’t bring myself to continue the game because I felt like shit for failing to save her from what is, effectively, identity death. Part of this might come down to the fact the the boss in question is a mandatory fail boss, and not a particularly well done example of the kind. It doesn’t help that I played it for the first time hot on the heels of finishing DMC5, which has a really, really good example of a mandatory failure boss, where the only thing really standing between you and victory is your own skill. And needing a hand.
On the other hand, (and a different fetish, but who’s counting?) Seeds of Destiny balances this quite well, specifically in the dungeons. In dungeons specifically, becoming too pregnant is a fail-state. But, it’s not a permanent one (usually!), and there are often hidden bonuses to unlock from failing too many times. In addition, even if you play the dungeons perfectly, you still end up engaging in the fetish via interacting with NPC’s.
About Skirjasaga (one of those spell-check-every-time names!): I may not normally be a fan of mean-spirited fetish material - stuff like degradation, the ugly bastard trope, and generic moral corruption turns me off, too. But somehow the scene you mentioned did work for me, and that helped me realize that my objection hasn’t been to (fictional!) people treating each other poorly, but to them being presented as disgusting. And the game managed to have one character, uh, flagrantly disregard the boundaries of another without hitting any of those disgust triggers, and I found the intensity very engaging. In other words, I think Skrrjshala did a good job, just not to everyone’s taste. I will agree that its combat has tended towards the frustrating, although I think it’s been nerfed down to a more fun level of challenge.
(And, I’ve been half-meaning to play Seeds, but something about pseudopregnancies frustrates me.)