Hey guys,
A couple months ago, I had an idea for Ren’py game similar to many on this site, but set on a cruise ship, with a varied cast of characters, locations, and fetishes.
The game would use VaM assets and would play very similarly to Fattening Career and Feeder Simulator, with an open-ish world populated with different kinds of characters that you would find on a cruise ship. The player would interact with the girls and take them on dates around the ship, slowly fattening them up.
The player and his girlfriend have decided to go on a cruise to spark some excitement into their relationship, but find out due to suspicious circumstances, a lot of the staff have quit last minute. The ship still embarks but is highly understaffed, so offers of casual work go out to the passengers. It’s up to the player to discover the reason why so many workers suspiciously quit…Or just enjoy being on a cruise with a bunch of beautiful women.
My master design document has around 10k words, describing everything I can think of, such as:
- Rough storyboarding for the 12 main girls and the main story
- 20+ different locations and what can be done there, as well as a mechanic where the ship ports at a variety of cities and towns, each with their own scenes and residents
- Different ways of earning money and the pros and cons of each method
- Player skills that can be trained and viewed on a smartphone, as well as stats for each girl. \
I’ve also got a pretty good idea of what the ending of the game would look like, as well as a bunch more stuff I don’t want to spoil.
Given that I have never written any sort of novel before, or any kind of code for designing a game, or even had any experience with 3d modelling and staging and rendering, I accept that this is going to be a difficult process. Regardless, I’m up for the challenge.
Over the last month I’ve been busy gathering assets for each location and character (of which there are 12 who have full story and weight gain, 12 that just have weight gain, and 20+ side characters), writing interesting plotlines for the main girls, and even sourcing royalty free sound effects. I haven’t started any work on Ren’Py yet, as it’ll be the steepest learning curve
The biggest issue I’ve come across is that I am understandably struggling to find decent 3d assets for some of the essential locations on the ship. While I’m happy to attempt to learn Ren’Py coding and VaM posing and set design, 3d modelling a cruise ship is far beyond my skills as a humble musician. I’m looking for environments of a cruise ship pool, a control/command deck, an exterior deck, a storage/engine room, a restaurant, a commercial kitchen, a casino, etc. Most of which I’ve had no luck finding.
I’m left wondering if I need to move away from VaM and go for a more hand drawn art style to have cohesion between the characters and the environments, but that would probably mean outsourcing all of the visuals for a very hefty game, something I’m reluctant to do for many obvious reasons. At least if all visuals were done in VaM, I would have control and responsibility for the quality and quantity.
Another option is to slap the VaM models in front of a backdrop, similar to D.I.E.T and A Broad Semester, and have a more sprite-based style, but I personally find that look to be a little jarring at times. Ideally the characters and the backgrounds should be the same style, and this method would likely use stock photography for the backgrounds, which put VaM models in the uncanny valley by comparison.
Another another option is to use AI, either as a filter over VaM stuff or generated sprites from scratch, but I’m sure most people agree it doesn’t look nearly as good as drawn sprites or models, and it’s not great to be using AI when there are so many talented artists in this community who would do a better job.
I guess if someone knows of a way to get cruise ship assets into VaM, or has a separate idea altogether, I’d love to hear it!