Feel free to just jump down to “ideas”, but it can help to hear the reasoning first.
Prelude
I used to do one-shot interactive animations back in the days where dinosaurs roamed the Earth, before Flash was owned by Adobe and bbwchan was still around. I tried a lot of things but never had any huge success aside from the first handful of animations which are lost to time. Most of the stuff I’ve made has never seen the light of day because it’s not finished enough to be public.
Most fetish content runs into either or both of these problems: First, gameplay is disconnected from the mechanics of a game. “What if a roguelike but inflation,” or “What if a platformer but weight gain.” It’s really hard to make things that are good games and integrate fetish content in a way that’s satisfying. It’s been done, and I can think of more than a few games made by you all here that do it really well, but it’s not the majority. Second, and more importantly, games with pre-canned expansion drawings eventually tap out of content. Like, if you make a game and one of the characters has four levels of fatness, then by the time you’re at level four there’s nothing more to do. I like it when the games keep you slightly guessing and always anticipating a character getting bigger, so anything with a fixed story and fixed assets is out.
That leaves text adventures, games with 3d assets, and physics simulations.
Text adventures can get away with the theater of the mind and use combinations of descriptors to make a lot of content. I’ve found Trap Quest to be really good in this respect, and spend a lot of time losing in that game. That’s particularly noteworthy because there’s not a lot of expansion in that game but I still find myself looking for new and interesting ways to try to blow up the character. Fatty Text Adventure, CoC to some extent, Boundless, and more than a few others I’m forgetting are really good at this. They use language well and have a lot of surprise content which makes for interesting multiple playthroughs. More on that later.
Physics simulations have arguably the most content, as long as they don’t get too caught up in the “infinite bowls of oatmeal” problem where the content is technically infinite but it’s all just the same bland oatmeal. I tried and failed to make a verlet simulation where you could import characters and blow them up, like some of my old animations, but more interactive. (Smasher and the Will o’ the Thiccs did something like this in an awesome way.) I’d like to come back to this idea eventually, but I have never gotten it to work. 3D would be even harder and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the right way to get two-way-collision interactions between soft characters working, but I haven’t found any solutions.
That leaves 3d games. These can still get stale if you show the character in the final form right away. Unreal Bellyful Life by fierylion does this really well by having the player work up to larger sizes. You’re left guessing a lot of the time about big you can get eventually, so it extends the playtime. The biggest downside is the content is really hard to create if you’re not an experienced artist. I definitely sunk several hundred hours into just making characters and assets for Accident in the Alchemy Lab, and that did not turn out well.
Ideas
Bunkers Survival
A text adventure where a blueberry virus has wiped the planet. This was first inspired by 60 Seconds! where you get random encounters with an ever-diminishing supply of people. Each ‘day’ you get one, two, or three choices to make and different outcomes, like CoC but with some more risk and roguelike permadeath options. I liked this concept because it was easy to add new random events and story with good surprises. The programming is also a lot simpler compared to the others, if you don’t mind making up for it with lots of manual story writing. When I first tried it I thought it might be too boring, but I may revisit it eventually.
Village Alchemist
This was inspired by a cyberpunk game whose name I’m forgetting. You would craft augmentations for people based on their problems. They’d want to be taller or more intelligent, and you could give them what they wanted or you could give them what they needed, like social enhancers to make them less shy instead of taller or focus boosters. I thought with Village Alchemist you could first experiment with mixing different things to see how they worked on your player avatar, and then serve the ones you needed to patrons who would tip you. This idea didn’t work for three reasons. First, I couldn’t really get the alchemy bit to be interesting. It felt like trial and error with mostly no results and just wasn’t satisfying. Second, I found it really hard to make the art and characters. I am not an artist, and I’m not a fast not-artist either. Third, while I could add incentives to not give everyone a potion of unlimited weight gain, it didn’t really seem like that would be a way most people would go.
Inflation Roguelike
This was a text roguelike “dungeon” crawler set in a near-future compound. I feel like this one had a lot of possibilities, but it was really technically complex with even just a few moving systems and I never felt like it was really satisfying to play. I like the idea of emergent gameplay here, but it never worked out. I think of all of them, I’m least likely to try and remake this one, but there are a few things I’d probably steal from it, like the two-part expanding compounds and the mind-control bits.
Wrapping Up
Those are a few of the games I’ve tried to make. I’m not sure which I’ll pick up next, but if anyone feels compelled to share similar experiences with why things did or did not work, I’d love to hear it. Post mortems are neat. Let me know if you try any of these or if you know of games that have done this, but better.