Personally I find it kind of pushes me away from the game, reminds me more of stuffing than gaining. I know this is decently common in RPGmaker games but I prefer more incremental weight stages due to choices that carry over between fights. I think I would enjoy if this involved an increase to the healthbar, as your “capacity” increases with weight.
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in general I would say I don’t like tying hp with weight because it puts some strange incentives into the game
if at max hp you are at max fat then it rewards a really boring play style where you don’t want to take any damage ever. usually leading to playing super safe and slow
if it also works the same for enemies then you are “punished” for hurting them
if it is the opposite then you are rewarded for being hit. if the game is something like an FPS then it matters less because you can’t really see yourself anyways.
at least hitting enemies to make them fatter aligns with what the game and player wants without any issues
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I think it depends on how the game implements it. I don’t think it works if it’s just a basic heatlh system where it increases with weight. Something like what “The Drop” did with its “Health” would be preferable to me.
That game had three different “health” bars called Body, Mind, and Soul. If any of these bars got depleted completely, you die. These three bars were used, referenced, and embodied throughout the game in its items, creatures, and races. For instance, you could use bandages would recover your “body” while you could drink tea to recover your “mind”. You, and enemies, have to spend points from your bars to use any skills and each creature/race have strengths/weakness/ to their bars. Like how skeletons are weak to mind skills and easily charmed due to being lost without their former masters.
There was more to the game’s systems, like the environmental interactions, but I think I made my point.
I like hp increase scaling with weight, so larger characters get tankier
I pretty much agree with everything that Yamhead said, if you’ve got a couple enemies to beat up, then getting fatter with lower hp is usually the better of the two.
It’s definitely a very tricky balance, one that I’ve been trying to get right in my own game. The health pretty much works by becoming more bloated the lower your health is, only difference is that my health standard is super small (like 2 hp for the player and most enemies), and that that there is a peril state (1hp) right before the KO’d state (0hp) that makes entities very limited and vulnerable.
I wasn’t going to make the player character swell up when they take damage, but figured it’d be better if they did just to fit in with the rest of the entities that do. Most of the fattening happens when your hp reaches 0, and the little bit of peril fattening really limits your moveset, but is only temporary before you recover your health back in a few seconds.
I’ve been really worried about rewarding the player for getting hit, but I’m hoping with how it’s set up it’ll discourage people from doing it, since if someone wants to experience the majority of that specific expansion sequence, they’re purposefully dying.
However, I don’t think that’s enough, and I have a trick or two up my sleeve.
The biggest one is that: There is a very big incentive to collect the coins of this game, called crumbs, while playing through a level. However many you get combined will determine what happens at the end of the game, BUT, there’s also something that’ll happen at the end of every level too.
When a player beats a level, they are awarded with a little expansion sequence, and how big the player character gets is determined by how many crumbs you’ve collected in that level. It’ll also probably use a few of the sprites from the player’s peril and ko animations, so it’ll be a bigger and better version of the player KO expansion.
There’s one other thing though, something that ties it all together, the player looses a LOT of crumbs when they get KO’d.
I guess what I’m hoping to do to get around the issue of awarding the player for getting hurt / dying, is:
- Making the health system in a way where the player will be playing through most of the game topped off at max health, as it’s nearly impossible to get anywhere in the game with anything less. Even when at low health, it only takes a few seconds before the player recovers health and is topped off at max again, as the player only has 2hp anyways.
- Cancelling out the dying reward with an even greater complete level reward (and even a complete game reward).
- Punishing the player for dying by taking away a chunk of the completely level reward every time that they reach 0 hp.
- And of course, giving the player a lot of other kinky stimuli through enemies, player transformations, cutscenes, bosses, etc; that encourage the player to actually play the game, and never starves them to the point to where they gotta KO themselves just to feel something.
Sorry if that was a lot, I just wanted to dump my thought process on how I’m attempting to get around this issue. I don’t know how well it’ll work yet since this game is still in a prototype state, and a couple of things like the end-of-level expansion sequence hasn’t been implemented yet.
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a scoring system can be pretty good as an counter insensitive, especially if you get the best fats for the best score. I would probably give points for picking up hp drops when at max hp assuming they can’t be milked for infinite points
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Never liked gaining weight as a punishment. One; its bad because the whole reason you are playing the game is treated like a punishment for poor play, unless its the super secret golden ending exclusive weight gain which I never cared for personally.
Two; because you getting low on heath gives you a bigger hurt box, so you can be hit easier, and often slows you down, so you can’t avoid danger. Both of these mean you are too big or too slow to avoid danger when you are on the brink of “death” so the solution is to basically do a no hit run and heal of the weight whenever you take damage, ignoring weight gain in a game that is allegedly about weight gain.
Fat Knight, a game that got linked here recently, has this exact problem which sucks cause otherwise I think that game is rough but good otherwise.
As for the inverse, I don’t think I’ve seen a game with that feature but I think you’d just make the largest size not feel as impactful if you constantly saw it whenever you are at max health. I think it would work a bit better if normal 100% your character was chubby to kinda fat, and the larger sizes we’re more based around a “overheal/temporary health” system, where you could get the bigger sizes but that health and size would decay if you don’t top up or you can keep it permanently but there’s some trade off so the player would have to weight when to use it instead of just always being big.
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I feel like TotsMcLegit has the right idea here and I think a best way to explain it is as making getting fatter objectively better for the player with some penalties to counteract the benefits.
In the original Super Mario Bros and basically all 2d Mario games until the DS, you start out as normal Mario with a small square hitbox. If anything hits you in this state, you lose a life and have to restart the level. If you collect a mushroom, you become Super Mario and can take one free hit which will reduce you to normal Mario. But this comes with the punishment of having a larger hitbox and being unable to use some of the narrower safer paths that Normal Mario can take.
It is always objectively better to be Super Mario rather than Normal Mario (except for hard core speedrunners) because the punishment of having a larger hitbox is completely negated being able to take the extra hit and then you’re just normal Mario.
I like the idea of starting at a low weight level, gaining weight as extra health and then having it decay over time or even have it decay faster as the player moves, like in Sonic XL. It encourages the player to move steadily and efficiently while avoiding damage and collecting as many food items as possible, all of which I think would incentivize an aggressive playing style.
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I agree with what you and TotsMclegit said. To be honest, I don’t really like when on some games and mods make it so that the player gets heavily punished for getting fatter. In some ocassions I get is for “realism” or similar, but it also discourages the player for attempting to use the fetish content in your fetish game/mod.
There is also a case of extremes, in some games where characters can gain or lose weight, there is no reason to not get fatter, while in other, getting fatter must be avoided at all cost to not suffer from their penalties.
I don’t think that getting fat shouldn’t give penalties to the player, but it should give a reason as to why you want to get fatter. Dungeon of the devourer by glaciepuff is a good example on how to use weight as a mechanic. I think Roundbound is also like that, but i haven’t played that game in a long time.
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The one exception I can think of to “making weight gain mostly a detriment is a weird thing to do in a fetish game” is when the character struggling is part of the fantasy.
However, this has only worked for me in narrative/puzzle games. In an RPG, a character that gets weaker/harder to use gets benched, so you’re incentivizing your players to keep the object of their desire off-screen
There was a Japanese game on here (curse dungeon appraisal/inspector? or something thereabouts) where weightgain was a punishment, but you needed to do it anyway to get enough max hp to fight the boss.
I thought it worked fine there because after every run you would reset anyway, though I wish there was a system that made your ‘baseline’ weight increase overtime (cause the plot sort of hinted at developments like that) so there would be at least some aspect of slow kinda permanent growth.
Generally though I don’t really like the whiplash of going up and down between sizes as a game mechanic.