When you hit Start it’s supposed to be like that for 2-3 minutes. It’s like a short “movie” but instead of a video I set automode and blocked some user input. If you’re talking about later, it shouldn’t be like that.
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Disabling the text box is just wrong. It could work if you ensured some sort of consistency like in project realism how dark every screen is… but as is, it just makes it far harder to read for no benefit.
If people want to see your full artwork they can just hit h to hide the textbox.
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Dev Log 11/05/2024 and Support
Hi everyone, I’ve been working on the game. I finally set up the project so that it will (hopefully) handle the whole game which will be divided in 4 chapters + 2 endings. I don’t really want to hype up anyone, I am just happy I managed to continue the project that will have no astonishing features but only simple sprites like the ones you see teased in the image above, with some simple facial expressions (mostly mouth variations, blush). You can really expect just a longer and A LOT more refined version of the short prologue which is already downloadable by everyone (no subscription required) in the previous post but I should advise you to just wait the new build coming out in days hopefully. I can also say that I already completely remade the prologue with different dialogues, different backgrounds and flow but mantaining and overall spirit. Looking at the prologue I released some time ago now I really think it was pretty bad but I hope it gave you an idea. My overall goal is still to create a long school themed classic visual novel romance which follows all the stereotypes of these games but with big girls.
That said, I decided to open a tier subscription here so that if you want you can support me. A little support will really help me continue the development. Anyway, this is a pure passion project and I hope it shows that I was just having fun when making it. The final game will still be free to play. For now there will be no perks for supporters since I will surely release the first chapter of the game for everyone. I don’t know about the future but my intentions is to release many builds between now and the final release.
Also, support keeping in mind that I could also stop developing because of real life reasons, which I hope will not happen, but it’s a concrete possibility. Despite all I wrote, I am no real developer, just a random guy that likes big girls 
Tl;dr: lower your expectations and only if you have money to waste think of supporting the game with the tier subscription I will open after posting this dev log which basically will grant you nothing except for my thanks
The link to the patreon is the same: eisenwg | Developing "The Weight Romance", a WG visual novel | Patreon
@namad I understand your point. For now I’ll keep my choice because it works well with the overall game. I also already replaced most backgrounds and increased the font and the contrast should be a lot better now. I think the “action” scenes will benefit from having no textboxes, you could think of that as subtitles. Textboxes could be added as an option, but I will work on the UI and settings at the end.
Anyway, as I said above a new build should (hopefully) come in a few days. I saw from the poll a lot you (like me) are fans of Miss. Taylor so be prepared because her parts are among my favourites 
To end the log I would like to ask for suggestions about a potential later-on aspect of the game that will be completely avoidable since it will be tied to a specific route. That is some kind of alien/fantasy/strange body mutation always related to big fat female bodies. It isn’t really a spoiler because I think the whole setting will be quite unexpected. So feel free to comment below some strange body mutation that you particularly like to give me some ideas (I never really explored this particular side of the fetish myself).
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Subtitles often make use of a drop shadow on the font (in other words it’s white text with a tiny black shadow outline), which helps it remain readable regardless of the background, not sure how to enable that in renpy.
In other words, I can totally imagine a solution to the problem other than to just leave renpy’s generic lame text background enabled. But it’s extra work to come up with a functional solution. If you can’t do that work or figure out how to make the text readable without the background, the simplest solution is to leave the background in place.
I kind of hate playing any VN with WORSE features than stock bog standard renpy, because those features come without an ounce of work or effort, so to meet a lower standard just feels incorrect to me.
I googled it for you, and it looks like drop shadows are possible, but I haven’t a clue how to implement them myself.
https://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewtopic.php?t=51799
https://renpy.org/doc/html/style_properties.html#style-property-outlines
https://www.reddit.com/r/RenPy/comments/o9stpu/adding_drop_shadow_to_main_menus_title/
https://www.reddit.com/r/RenPy/comments/nrpcpo/add_shadow_on_all_fonts_in_the_game/
TLDR: I recommend coming up with a brilliant solution like subtitle style dropshadows, OR, to save your time and effort, just leave the text default. No “action” is worth a nonfunctioning GUI.
P.S. Any renpy veterans reading this? Able to explain how to use/enable dropshadows on all the dialog in a renpy game?
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The shadow could be an option but as I modified the backgrounds now and enlarged font I think it’s quite readable.
In the end it’s my stylistic choice to try not to put the player out of the game and make it as immersive as possible. I am aware you could just press a key to hide UI but in my opinion that will just be a distraction in this particular game. I will use pauses and such to keep it as movie-like as possible and pretty guided. To each his own I guess
Edit: thanks for the links, I will look into that but as I said I pretty much like it with no textbox at all. It is very similar to the style used in Muv Luv Extra/Alternative and I think it worked pretty well there.
The links aren’t about textboxes, just about a way to outline the letters in the font, like how subtitles do. I’ve never figured it out in renpy myself.
Also, yeah, if the backgrounds are darker near the bottom, that’d fix it too.
Like this is technical and confusing, but it lets you do a 1pixel wide outline around all the text in a font Style Properties — Ren'Py Documentation
A single pixel wasted isn’t going to take up any more space than making the font 1 size bigger, it wouldn’t cover up the images the same way a textbox would.
I agree, the textbook looks stupid, it’s just the easiest/laziest solution 
Wait, the outlines have always been there: https://img.itch.zone/aW1hZ2UvMjEyNzk0Ni8xNjEwODUxNi5wbmc=/original/J8x7Pn.png
Now the text font is even bigger.
If you mean something like https://www.reddit.com/r/RenPy/comments/ydud2f/how_can_i_achieve_this_dynamic_textbox_behind/?rdt=50552
then I kind of managed to do it yesterday but it looks bad because black transparent boxes appear behind each letter and gives a bad visual overlapping effect (I don’t have a screen right now because I discarded it). I was just using the style properties with outlines as you said.
Edit: I was using this property outlines [ 1, "#000", 0, 0 ] with other values obviously. But even giving it a color black transparent and a size of 10-20 it looks pretty bad because the outline is per letter and they overlap. To achieve a better effect I suppose you should know the dimension of the dialogue at run time and resize some kind of image every time which could maybe be done with the Frame class but I didn’t look further. I’m going trial and error mostly 
I’m sure someone more experienced could come up with a solution.
Apparently I am referring to the feature that was always on! my bad!
But in the original version wasn’t it white? The red is actually more readable I think! nice.
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@namad Sorry for the late reply. Every character will have its own text color with black outlines.
Small update
I think I said I was going to post the next release in a few days but it is taking more time than planned.
I am the type of person who does something and then does it again and again because it’s probably not good
Plus, I am already slow like the death but I said to myself “Yeah, why not add another character… and also this one would be cool”. I am working on this 2-max 3 hours per day and the dialogues really are taking a lot with my poor english experience.
About concrete progress:
- I am confident I have
outlined the plotnow. - I completely
rewrote Yuna's characterto now fit the archetype of the “forgotten childhood friend” who will oppose Rize, “the true childhood friend”. - I put
animated emotesalongside character expressions so that more combinations will be possible.
P.S: I can’t wait to finally get to stage 3 and actually see those bellies hanging 
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I’m working “hard” on rewriting the first chapter but I need some feedback 
About the art state, you can expect something along the line of the one below. Her weight in that is the “middle” stage. Final stage should have the belly cover like 3/4 of the width. Face/thighs gain is also present for every girl. Let me know if you like it
Miss. Taylor date outfit concept
Narrator style
More importantly, I am kind of stuck with choosing the narration style. I am using first person narrator but I can’t figure out how to use it “properly”. I will try to explain what I mean.
-
Option 1: description of everything as I describe what I do/happens to someone else (in present tense)
Miss. Taylor suddenly takes my hand and slowly places it on her belly. I can feel its softness and…
Shocked, I ask myself why she is doing that.
-
Option 2: all is written like I am talking with myself, describing to myself what just happened to me.
What?! Miss. Taylor just took my hand and placed it on her belly! I can feel its softness and…
Why is she doing that?!
-
Option 3: a mix of the two. Use of classic first person description when needing to the describe a scene and “talking to myself” to convey more immersion.
Miss. Taylor suddenly takes my hand and slowly places it on her belly. I can feel its softness and…
Why is she doing that?!
The problem arises because I wouldn’t want to use description at all. Like, if Miss. Taylor takes my hand and places it on her belly, I would want to make it clear to the player with some sort of “visual clue”, but I don’t have the resources to do that (I think almost all vns have not… not for any single events happening). So I will probably use some descriptions like in the examples above but I would like to still achieve a feel of constant inner monologue of the protagonist. Those are probably all known things but while I played many vns before I didn’t really paid attention to those details and going through everything for the first time step by step
Please feel free to correct any grammar mistakes. I am a bit tired and I am still learning to use the language better
Choices approach
For now, I plan to have all girls advance in weight on their own without any player influence. There are choices but they are not related to weight but story. Like, girls will gain weight or not regardless of your choices but you will have different/more intimate scenes with them based on your choices. For example, Miss. Taylor will get fat regardless but you could miss the opportunity to go on a date with her and see her chubby belly 
I realized it’s too much work to have different dialogue lines based on weight for each possible situation for each girl because they constantly interact with each other.
I also chose to make it possible for the MC to end up with every girl. Currently, there are the five I already revealed plus other two girls. Yeah, it was a good idea to add two more characters… this little maneuver’s gonna cost us 51 Years
Emotes
I ditched the animated emotes but kept static ones, so now a question mark or heart or blush balloon appears when needed. Also, I added a little bounce effect for the characters.
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sorry for asking but is there other kinks in the game?
Apart from weight gain, I’d say a bit of breast expansion… I could insert some strange body mutation later on.
ok dunno why i expect to see pregnancy… sorry i am weird
Ahah now that I think about it… one ending I have in mind has that
Edit: don’t know if you consider it a kink but I love to put characters in wedding dresses
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ok that good to know. So now I have to wait for it to come out?
Yes I should upload at least the first chapter soon.
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Narration style: Option 3, italicize thoughts but not narration. 
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Option 3 sounds the most natural to me. Option 1 makes the inner monologue sound stilted, and Option 2 will probably feel like too much inner monologue.
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Thanks for your feedbacks @BadIdea4 @clarkpalmed . I went with option 3 that just sounds better.
I’m still writing the first chapter while continuosly updating some things. For the things you didn’t know you needed… the other day I implemented with success the eyes blinking effect. Now it feels so alive I’m amazed
I leave you a screenshot with a new girl Hiromi (pink hair) that has romance options and fills the tsundere-type.
Plus, with the new font I think the text is quite readable. I think with the sprite quality I am at a good point. Everyone has its six simple facial expressions, basically only mouth changes plus eyebrows when angry
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I was busy lately but I’m still working on the game. I added another teacher character that is partly recycled from my other game but I think it’s quite cute, and starts as already chubby.
Writing is going a lot slower because it’s hard, I won’t lie. Especially with characters and dialogues dealing with kind of absurd situations. Facial expressions turned out pretty good though.
If you would like to support me with a small donation on patreon it will really help, especially to get more high quality backgrounds and maybe in the future commission some CGs. I will drop this thing as well, that is voice acting which I don’t even know where to begin with but I will love to do once the game is in a more advanced state. Take it as just wishful thinking.
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