I haven’t posted here before but I’ve played a lot of TF/WG-type of games so figured I could let out some of my thought here. I’m also an aspiring video game designer and programmer so I’m very interested in game design and such.
I’ve been thinking about weight gain as a mechanic and how it is often very similar across games. It’s typically a stat that either does very little or basically nothing in relation to the game rules and I think that can be a bit of a waste. So I’ve tried to think of ways to make the weight of the character actually have some weight in the game. Pun very much intended.
Perhaps it could be seen as some sort of class among many. Like someone in a party who eats people, fights with their body, expands and so on. Though the downside is of course that one would have to put in a lot of work to make the classes that is not based on weight gain but perhaps other transformations.
Another one that I have thought about is weight as level. This would probably work best for slower gaining or it might get very out of hand. But to then create classes around different types of gaining. Like perhaps one class uses their ass to fight and the weight/levels focus on that, while another might be more sumo-like and a third perhaps focusing on slob and damaging their enemies with foul odors and such. The problem here is of course making it all fit well together and also that it requires a lot of work with a multitude of classes.
The third one is essentially a game about weight as status. You start by gaining weight but soon you might be rendered immobile but the having worked up enough to have people come to you instead, shifting the focus a bit and making it a bit more manager-like. Having to balance your resources to get the most gains. Perhaps you end up as a moon, or as a new planet yourself, changing up how and what you can focus on. The issues with this might of course be having to create a multitude of ways to play depending on what scale you are on, but if you are clever I think it might be able to fit it within one system.
Mechanics could of course also be combined but I think we could gain (lol) more by looking at how to use the weight gaining itself rather than creating games around it.
I have never created a game like this but from personal experience I’ve always felt that the best stuff comes from using the least amount of things to create the most amount of game, making the things that exist more versatile rather than adding more things.
Hopefully this could be interesting to some, and I would love to hear other creative ways to mechanically use weight gain in games!