Weight Gain Game Questions!

If this is the wrong category please feel free to delete this and tell me where I should go!

So, I’m making a text based (with images) pseudo real life sim weight gain game (currently super early in development but I’m making good progress!). The ‘shtick’ of this game will hopefully be my reluctance to provide information outside of what the player knows, and sort of pseudo weight gain based challenges (outside of major health stuff). Ex. You won’t be able to see what you look like till you buy a mirror, you won’t know your weight till you get a scale, you won’t be able to see what you look like outside of your house without a phone, and you won’t be able to walk very far with a BMI in the triple digits, etc.

In the regard, I have a few questions that’d I’d love to ask some people! Hopefully these will be able to give me more ideas for this game and clear up some confusing points i’m running into. I’m open for any answers, and would love any and all advice!

If you feel like you’d discuss the contents of the form just drop a comment on this post and I’d love to talk more!

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My advice is to focus on the fun of the experience. A lot of questions on Realism, but lets be honest, reality can be not so fun a lot of times.
Don’t let realism bog you down too much.

For most games I would agree - realism is just not the same thing as fun; just look at real life! But I think one of the dev’s main motivations for this game is realism, and that can be harnessed to make fun, so… Let 'em try, and good luck!

Unstable Frienemies does consequences really well, I’d recommend playing that if you haven’t yet: Unstable Frienemies v0.9.4 (Updated January 27th, 2025) - #57 by JakobY

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Huh, I guess this is the thread where I disagree a lot…

Unstable Frienemies does not do consequences well - you can aim for one thing, miss by a little, and be forever locked out of the path you were going for. Trying to get the thick but not too fat path is torture! Savescumming or resorting to someone else’s recipe is basically mandatory.

That said, if you have a loss of control fetish it’s great! You lose control no matter what path you take.

I would say Fill Me Up and classics like The Weighting Game and Tramp all do better - you get what you aim for, and you can course-correct along the way.

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Ah, I do agree with you there, the locked path and different endings quest is indeed a slog.

I just felt that during each of those journeys, how the game changed, the choices, and the use of energy felt coherent towards the story and the path (as well as how the dialogue changed based on your fitness level, etc…).

There’s kind of two mechanics at play there. One of them I think (the consequences to the story of the game options) is done well, the other (choice along the path and ability to steer) is not.

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As the author of Unstable Frienemies, I endorse that sentence. Those three are royalty, and if you set them as your aspirational material, it’s a “Shoot for the moon, land amongst the stars” type situation.

FMU is very clear about how choices affect what’s going to follow them (both the single moment hard divergences and the ‘lifestyle’ choices that accumulate into something larger but don’t lock you in from dipping your toes in the water), and Tramp is basically the model for how to do a slow boil where each choice incrementally nudges things along towards eventual consequences. TWG I’d argue with as an example of giving player choice consequences since it’s 99% on rails with the player controlling the throttle, but it’s like the single best thing out there in the genre (YMMV) so it’s worth checking out and learning from anyway. Great example of slowest viable pacing and evolving event instances, even if it doesn’t branch enough to model consequences (outside of ~two moments).

A technique I employed with UF to keep the weight gain vaguely in the realm of realistic viability was the use of time skips. It’s not a universally correct tool, but might be worth considering, especially if you want some of the consequences of the semi-opaque weight gain to broadside the player.

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Thank you all for the responses, I do want to preface that the word “pseudo” in pseudo life sim is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. For reasons I don’t want to spoil, it will start with realistic weight gain, but will quickly become a challenge to manage. Though not something that is impossible, just difficult. Unfortunately this will not be a super easy game at first, though I will probably add something later on to lower the difficulty I have in mind. My biggest inspiration are games like Accidental Woman which isn’t really in the same vein as these other games, but it’s a gameplay style that i enjoyed and I’d like to replicate.

I do want to say when I say “life sim” I don’t mean like health stuff or anything like that. My focus is more on the ‘reality’ of being so fat so quickly, like being overzealous with your ability to walk long distances, bumping into things, not fitting into spaces, clothing troubles, and many more. Its’ something that I feel that most games tend to skimp out on. I don’t mean to say I’ll do anything else better than those other games, I just want to make something that I feel hasn’t really been created yet.

Regardless, I’m still mostly in the conceptual phase with a decent bit of the frame work coded out (eg. only the beginning vaguely written and some of the mechanics in the ‘testing’ phase), hopefully i’ll have a playable beta out sometime this year, but I have no idea how quickly I’ll work on it.

Anyway, Thanks again for the responses! If you any of you haven’t already, I’d love if you could fill out the form! all of these questions have been immensely helpful and I may create another one later to get a little bit more specific results!

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