I’d like to make that happen, but there aren’t any planned right now. I’ve got too much to finish with just the basics of the above first.
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I am truly excited about this game. I have always thought the forum was missing a fully developed SCP Game, and the fact that it is going to be made in a proper 3d engine makes me be even more hyped! Based on the current videos, the only thing I would like to ask is… Will the character’s faces get chubby as well, or will it be only their bodies? I know it may seem like a very small detail, but personally I truly love a chubby face!
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I have blend shapes for fat faces for some characters, but not all. Notably, I don’t have them for the main player. I am reluctant to go back and tweak the character model until I have more game done, and that’s slow going because work has been kicking my butt the last few weeks.
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Oh, a small bit of progress, though this feels more like it’s on the inflation side than WG. I really like how in Control there are bits of live-action interspersed with the gameplay. Since when I get tired of programming I like to edit videos I’m thinking it might make sense to start to add some “recovered VHS tapes” of test subjects.
Spoiler: implied popping.
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Popping implication aside, I love it. 
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Outside of all that, I have finally gotten the dialog system in place. I expect I’ll either work on Title and New Game next or do some more writing for Altered Objects.
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Still busy with work, so not a lot of time. I have started working on the Lobby and Offices, and as a distraction started to fix the animations that looked really bad. I picked up a cheap pack of motion capture animations and, while I’m mostly happy with them, the idle animation is very masculine and interacts badly with the animation system.
Note how the player, when they get fatter, has something of a stammer with the left leg forward. I liked that the old animations didn’t have that as an artifact. I might try to work around it somehow, but I think I need to be focusing on pushing the gameplay forward.
I have also a small idea for an Anomalous Object:
VAOID: 12345
Aliases: Unplanned Office Snacks, Surprise Snacks, Who Brought Snacks, Wandering Food
Tags: Non-hostile, corporeal, potential-memetic-comonent
Description: A tray of small office snacks that appears to manifest just outside the fields of views of observers. Subjects coming within 2m of VAOID#### report finding assorted pastries, cheeses, and candies in their hands. Subjects will unwittingly consume said snacks, only for their hands to be refilled. Some subjects have reported being unable to put down the snacks, consumption being the only way to empty their hands. Subjects have limited dexterity until said snacks are consumed. If subjects leave the vicinity of VAOID#### it does not pursue. The snacks produced by VAOID#### appear to adhere to most dietary restrictions. Experimentation with mutually-exclusive dietary restrictions is pending.
I haven’t decided if it would be too annoying to prevent people from using doors until they eat the food that appears in their hands.
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The ass is oddly flat for how fat you can get. Relatively speaking.
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Maybe. It’s big enough to block the camera and visibility of the floor when things are maxed out. Or maybe I broke the butt size when reimporting.
The width seems fine, but the depth seems off from the video. IDK.
I have an amusing anecdote that I feel reflects a lot of what makes video game development fun, interesting, and difficult.
We’re going to be solving the issue of “how does the player make a choice during a dialog or interaction?” Pause for a moment and decide about how that should work. We can probably agree on a high level that there should be text shown to a player and two or more options to select from. The details are what we care about, though.
Do we pause the game while the player is thinking?
If no, how do we handle enemies attacking the player? Do we pick a default option when they’re attacked? Do we close the menu? Do we prevent enemies from attacking the player?
If we pick a default option, what if that option is a bad one? Our writers need to remember that the last dialog option will get picked if the player is attacked. What if the choice is one of immense gravity – a one-time event, like “take or leave the source of immense power”? Should we still decide for the player? Perhaps neither and we close the menu, but if we close the menu, what if the dialog is at the end of a cutscene or exchange? Sure, we could just resume the dialog from where we left off, but if the player is broken out of the exchange then what if the character offering the choice dies while the player is in combat? So let’s force the player to go through the dialog again. I hope you don’t re-check that the player has any quest items because those might have been removed during the dialog.
Perhaps that all sounds too complex, but if we prevent enemies from attacking the player during a choice, then you had better remember that, because you’ve got a bug in waiting. Fallout happens to have such a bug.
Or perhaps you want to avoid all that headache, so you decide to pause the game. I personally think that’s reasonable. I have a state in my game for paused that gets set when the pause menu is up or the main menu is showing. Sounds okay so far.
We pause the game and wait for the player to pick one or the other.
I have only one pause state: the game is paused or it’s not. I don’t have a ‘paused in menu’ and ‘paused while making a choice’ as separate states. This means when the player pauses the game to change their controls or volume settings…
Our pause menu pops over the dialog menu. More importantly, though, the game unpauses when the player closes the pause menu, as it should. So we could split the pause state into ‘paused waiting for selection’ and ‘paused waiting for menu’, but hold on wait, what if the player decides to pause the game in the middle of making a decision and save it, then loads the game? Now we need to remember that a dialog was open and the player was in the middle of a choice. I hope you have everything saving and restoring properly and that you have a good way of triggering events.
Or maybe you did. But I hope your choice menu was expecting not to be preempted:
This is why we can’t have nice things.
So let’s take the easiest thing: the player can’t access the pause menu while and popup menus are open. I hope you’re not expecting to use the multiple choice menu to enable and disable the pause menu, because if a story trigger preempts the closing dialog (like a scene change) then your player won’t be able to access the main menu any more.
Ultimately, the solution in this case is to have the pause menu check to see if there are any option menu or pause menu popups visible before it will allow itself to pop open. This does put a dependency between the two and makes the code less trivial, but it’s the least messy option I’ve found.
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I really want to share all of the stuff I’ve been making for the VHS cassettes that you can find through the offices, but I feel like I should save them so people can find them in the game like intended. I probably spend 20+ hours on each of the few-seconds-long found films which I should be using to put them into the game.
I think I’m avoiding working on The Office level since I don’t like Godot’s level editing tools.
Veil Anomalous Event Report:
A239889
Public Exposure: No
Cover Status: Not Required
Event Date: [REDACTED]
Event Description:
A young woman reported "feeling strange" to her partner, who promptly began to videotape
the event because "nobody will believe me." Someone off camera can be heard saying,
"you okay babe? I'm gonna' get help," before leaving the camera on a nearby nightstand.
Veil intercepted the emergency medical response in-transit and dispatched a recovery team.
The video cassette was seized and the house was sanitized. The woman was transferred from
the Veil Medical ambulance to a larger transport after she outgrew the vehicle en route.
She was taken to [REDACTED] for observation, where she remains. Her expansion has
abated but not stopped.
UPDATE [REDACTED]:
The board will be hearing the proposal to move her to [REDACTED] before she becomes too
large for conventional ship transport.
Also if anyone happens to know any actresses or actors who are into this, let me know. Happy to pay for good acting.
14 Likes
Not much in the way of updates since the Get Large Jam. I’m back to trying to put together the office. The game is still very much a walking simulator like Silent Hill, but with even less combat.
For a while I had the player getting a crowbar so she could bash the other monster planned (the tentacle monster), but it didn’t feel good to play. I’m thinking about whether it will be too boring to just have people wander around in an office finding story elements, solving puzzles, interacting with altered objects, and avoiding slimes and tentacle monsters.
The game is still missing something. Early attempts to justify getting skinny again with purgation circles (turn your fat into power) feel like they’re falling flat because there’s no need to upgrade weapons. Turning fat into paracausal energy to power up something like a keycard to get further into the offices and labs makes sense from a mechanical perspective, but not really from a story angle.
I think I’m hoping a good answer will fall out of the blue like it did for Drivin’ for Dine-in.
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I have an idea though not a particularly good one.
You could say that the scientists were using a method where depending on how much gain a person gains from the experiment you took part in the more advanced your keycard could go for example: you have just done an experiment where a woman grew by 200 pounds you had 4 colleagues with you, so each one of you gain 50 WG Points (200:4) on your keycard card allowing you to acess more areas of the facility.
Homewer as you can see with this logic is that the system would basically make no sense in case of things they didn’t know about, as in you are trying an experiment with a strange camera you and you alone are performing an experiment on a prisoner, you take a photo, they imediately gain 500 pounds, so you would gain 500 WG points, which you can see make no fking sense.
Considering the part about combat, maybe just don’t add it, make it so you have to find alternative ways to either avoid or temporarly deal with threats, an example would be: there are tentacles roaming the halway you wanna pass, you could a) sprint through risking gaining a ton of weight b)trigger the emergency sprinkling system which would bloat the tentacles making them unable to move for a while allowing you to pass through but they would regain their movement after a while or c) you find a spray can and a lighter and you stealthy aproach them and click a button to kill them making it so they are permanently gone but using up items that you could have used for other things like using the lighter to iluminate a dark room that you will now have to pass through while blind. I think this way would also slightly encorage players to get skinny so they could do this more risky run throughs. One thing that you will need to do though is make multiple routes(none of them should be completely safe, homewer the level of safeness can be done through a puzle that might require an item like the can) that you can take or make it so you can lure enemies to places where option B can be used, also you should NOT give enough items for the players to eliminate all the enemies, inversely enemies should also not respawn nor multiply having a set number. I think this is all good luck and have fun.
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Have you considered ranged combat instead of melee? It’s often more satisfactory and “snappy”. Give the fatty a pistol!
I thought about it. I even built camera snapping that still exists in the current build. It just didn’t feel very good, and the fat/inflated body modifier interfered with aiming at larger sizes. When the character is extremely inflated the rig controller forces the arms and legs out to the side, which I can just ignore or override when aiming the pistol, but that doesn’t look good and is distracting.
“Ah yes, I’m too inflated to properly walk but I can still aim a pistol like normal.”
The other option was a PDA like in The Atrocity Archives, which did a lot to inspire the story.
The idea was, get as close to bursting as you can, use a purgation ritual to convert the adipose to paracausal energy, use paracausal energy to power the PDA. It had the same problem as the gun, weird when at high-levels of fill, and really just didn’t feel fun to use. Both made the game feel too fast-paced, like shooters. My problem with those is you’re too busy surviving to pay attention to the character inflating or getting fat.
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Crazy idea. Give them guns, or melee, or whatever you think it’s best, but once they reach certain weight, they drop them/are not able to use them anymore. It makes getting inflated and fat an issue, and gives the different methods of weight loss and inflation reduction a real purpose, incentivizing the player to find’em.
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I had an ideia on how to deal with the problem of accesing different areas. DISGUISES. What I mean to say is, there could be an anomaly used for security that was used to sort of recognized who was entering or leaving a certain area, homewer it was not that good at it’s job, as in it could recognize things like a shirt, glasses, wigs, their WEIGHT, and that sort of stuff, but couldn’t recognize faces, nor detailed features of a person, that way you would have to go around the facility looking for the belongigs of a person to acess the next area as well as match their weight, and let’s be honest if you are dealing with objects that can make people fatter in an instant you are bound to put on a few, so it would make sense why you would need to have an higher and higher weight to pass checkpoints.
Now that in itself could get really anoying having to change weight and disguises all the time just to pass through a door, and that is what the enginners thougth too, so they were trying to reconfigure the anomaly so it could maybe see on the genetic level and they succeeded, partially, they were able to make it so if you could match the specifications of a person’s looks it would then associate your genetic information to that identity, so you could wear any clothes you would like and pass right through. The problem is that anyone that meets such especifications would overwrite the already existing data, but I guess that for you that wouldn’t be much of a problem would it?
That is a good reason to reduce weight, but we’re still left with the “gunplay doesn’t feel good and draws the game in a direction that distracts from the weight gain mechanics.”
I’m thinking I’ll keep the purgation system that converts the players fat to energy, but energy goes to upgrades like higher max weight, more speed, or higher jump. Is this lifted from Yuki Pop Repeat? Yes.
I keep coming back to Silent Hill and Resident Evil, but it’s worth talking about Control, which I really enjoyed as a game, maybe more than all the others. The gameplay is top notch and I love the world building behind it. The power fantasy and fast-paced flying about and shooting aren’t what I wanted to hit here, though. I’m hoping to hit the slow-looming evil and “plenty of time to think” aspects of RE and Silent Hill.
Resident Evil (the original) is a neat example if we think about it in terms of being a story game which is separated by puzzles which are separated by real, if not particularly challenging, threats.
Maybe the slimes will fill that groove well enough. I guess I need to just finish the office level and the entryway so we can see.
3 Likes
I look forward to seeing this game complete/a demo available