What has everyone been up to? - Progress sharing

[Kitsune]

I wanted to ask what everyone on this site has been doing lately, and maybe share what projects they are working on - if any. Because I personally haven been spending the last few years working on a weight gain game, and while progress is slow, I think I am getting at least better at the whole “making a game” thing.
And I have heard a lot of things over the years, but lately talk about how there’s a lot less activity on here seems to be circulating. I really wanted to respond then, since I haven been working on something, but I usually think I don’t have anything ready to share, and if I don’t have something for people to play, then I shouldn’t say anything at all.
Any maybe other people are like this too, with projects in the works but not in any state to play, nevermind release them.

I personally really love this site, since it’s a place for developers to share their works and stories, and while I haven’t been very active at commenting or posting in a while, I really should just post this instead of having it only in my head. This is the reason for this tread. I want to at least share what I’ve been doing, even if it’s not at all ready for any sort of playing and probably won’t be for years yet, and maybe other people will want to share their stories too.

Who am I?

But first, a bit of background. I’ve found this site in 2019, and participated in the jam that year. You can’t download that entry and more (it wasn’t very good anyway), but I think some videos of it might have survived? My project files certainly didn’t. It was a top-down pixel art game made in Unreal Engine, but well, I had maybe a year of Unreal Engine experience and maybe two or three of coding in general (self thought at that), so bad is an understatement. The pixel art itself was also poorly done. But like with everything you do long enough, I’ve gotten better.

Then just a year later I’ve made a translation/mod of Feeder Fantasy by Fallboy. Without being able to understand Japanese. Just thinking about it is really embarrassing, and I really feel bad about some of the “additions” I made. Originally I just wanted to improve the machine-translation, move the dialogue so everything fits on screen and check the dictionary what each word means and adjust the dialogue based on that, but since I didn’t understand the language I may have taken a few (a lot) of creative liberties. And if I’m messing around with it, surely it wouldn’t be a bad idea to add some sprites, and while I’m doing that why not change some of the things I’m less comfortable translating and replace them, or add to this unfinished section …

Yeah, in hindsight maybe not the best idea. I have no idea what the developer though of this, but I personally feel bad. I know mods for games exist and thus did not think much about it, but just changing things in someone else’s game…

The year after that, I tried translating another game “A maid’s long vacation”. I think I got better at translating, but I still did not and do not properly know Japanese, so it’s still just a dictionary translation. (That is, using a dictionary to look up all the words and figure out what everything means that way)
Then came “Raising money in town”, another translation, this time with sprites-changes again, but instead of rudely changing things, I just added overworld-sprites for all weight changes while trying to stay really faithful to the game’s illustrations and descriptions. I think that worked well, and the developer for this game also seemed to like my sprites and used them for the Japanese version, so that is great.

I did try translating other games later as well, but I really wanted to fully learn and understand Japanese first, and that’s still going on, so I sort of just stopped with translations. It doesn’t help that while I started with Japanese in 2018, I haven’t had any formal classes or courses (there aren’t any around here, and I don’t think I would have had the time either), so it’s various different methods of self-study using textbooks. Well, at least currently (so seven years after I first started …) I’m better at learning a language to the point where I feel like making real progress. It’s still going to take a at least a year more until I’d call myself elementary school level, though. Oh well, progress is progress.

2022 was the next year I participated in the game yam, with another game in Unreal Engine. This one still has a working link too. Raiding Fairies was a 3D … something game? You can build houses to spawn fairies, and it has a really bad text-adventure component that gives you resources and makes the fairies fat. It … really wasn’t great. There effectively isn’t any fun gameplay present. Game-design wise I’d call it a failure. The building part is just placing pre-made houses, which fulfil their function at that point and are not needed any more, while the text-adventure/expedition section is too repetitive and just plainly unfun. This lead me to rethink my general project and start the current one (which has thus been in development for three years), but first, what have I been working on before that point anyway?

I’ve been wanting to make games since about 2018, so I’ve been learning programming since then. First with C++ and an SDK (which dramatically failed, obviously someone without any experience should probably start with something less ambitious, but), then Unity, first in 2D and 3D. The first project wasn’t very good (obviously), but it did contain self-made models, a map, enemies, trees, mushrooms and so on. Though since I still didn’t know much programming it was poorly made and ran badly, but oh well. Unity needed a subscription for eventual commercial use though and Unreal just announced not taking any money, so I switched to playing with Unreal again. (I can’t really call it developing since at this point I had less than a plan and was mostly experimenting. I guess Unreal’s marketing worked?)

That was in early 2019, so when I found Weight Gaming and heard about that first game jam, I joined, but I wrote about that already.

At this point I had some idea of what I wanted to do (and made my own editor for game-data in C# too, first for Windows-CMD then with Xamarin for Windows and Android), so I definitely got better at programming. I also got a job as a programmer apprentice. But while I had an idea, and some structure, proper game design experience I had not. Nor had I any experience with projects and consistency, so I flip-flopped between 2D and 3D depending on what kind of problem I experienced at the time, and didn’t make a lot of progress at actually making a playable game. Some of the ideas I had would work better in 3D though, so 2D doesn’t make sense, right? But 3D also has issues…

Then it was 2022 and time for the next game jam.

I learned several important lessons then. The first being: I do not enjoy working with a 3D workflow.
Compared to just drawing sprites, especially pixel art, 3D is less fun for me.

The next being: I really should think about a fun game design first, before anything else. So I tried that. I benched my current 3D project and started over, made a concept document, thought a lot about gameplay-loops, and started on a 2D pixel-art game in Unreal Engine.

I’m going to go into more detail in the next subsection (as if I haven’t written way too much in this preface already), but to say one thing first: Unreal Engine was maybe not the best choice for the kind of 2D pixel-art game I am working on. Ouch. Good thing I realised this after only three years…

What I’ve been working on

The initial idea (and that I’m starting like this really shows how good I am at planning and keeping to said plan, doesn’t it?) was to take the building and resource gathering aspect from “Raiding Fairies”, and flesh that out. Using proper well-defined characters, VN-style dialogue, a better expedition and task system in a turn-based style, putting in resource management with hunger, food and so on. From a gameplay perspective, you were supposed to send characters to do tasks in a UI, receive the rewards some turns later, get surprised with events in between, receive daily summaries, the whole management experience, plus a cooking minigame, with other minigames planned. I even managed to write an external Data-Editor in Kotlin (Compose) for Android, Windows and Linux so that I could use a data-driven approach for game objects.

Then I tried playing what I made and … ouch. I did not enjoy it at all. Seems like, while I did learn something, I failed to see the fundamental problems “Raiding Fairies” had and thus just expanded on them. And I hadn’t even implemented the building system yet. A bit over a year of work and still nothing to show for it, yay…

Well, back to the drawing board as it were. At least not everything would need to be changed. I asked myself, what kind of games would be fun? What about this wasn’t? Because fundamentally this is a hobby project, a game I’m making because I enjoy programming and drawing and designing, and even though I might not have much time to work on this, especially with my job also being programming and thus leaving me too drained to program privately on most days, I still want to make a game I will have fun playing.

So I switched from turn-based to realtime and from top-down observer to directly controlling the the main character in everything. No expeditions and boring UI, the plan is now to tell your characters what to do and have them really do it. Well, it’s a work in progress. The switch to realtime worked, you can now pick overworld items up properly, respawns and object-placement works, and so on. Still, reworking the code for nearly all systems (and it’s mainly systems since I wanted to wait with concrete content like dialogue, sprites and events until all base systems were working) too a while. That is done though, so while the system for telling your characters what to do, as well as the building system still need to be added, I am getting somewhere.

Some screenshots with unfinished and placeholder sprites and UI

I did have a lot of trouble with the cooking minigame though. The first iteration was missing the “game” aspect (which seems to be a theme, though literally just making a Gnatt Chart as a supposed mini-“game” is a new low), while the second took to long to play for something you likely had to do quite often and encouraged repetition instead of experimentation. The third attempt seems to work better, even if the initial design was also taking too long. Well, it’s just roasting food over a campfire for now, so this minigame reflects that in that you take a skewer of food and must hold at the right distance from the fire, so that it evenly roasts (without burning or charring it), while also managing the fire itself. It’s still a work in progress. I think the first-person view would work nice for this at least.

Really low quality gif of the in-progress cooking, a lot needs to be redone or adjusted, like having the hand follow or adjusting the size of everything to fit correctly (I made a mistake with the test scene, so everything is to big) This should at least illustrate the idea.

I think it looks decent already, right? But like I already hinted way too many words ago, it did take me until now to realise some fundamental problems with using Unreal Engine for this…
Mainly, Unreal Engine is a 3D engine. That means, the scene, the way graphics are rendered, the way objects are arranged, and so on, all are designed for 3D. I naively thought, since it had 2D support it would be fine to use.

What a fool I’ve been.

It’s nearly impossible to display anything pixel-perfect. Each pixel gets stretched when the resolution isn’t an even multiple of a certain base, which is sadly the case when trying to use consistent scaling for different screen resolutions. So either I accept non-square pixels or that my game looks horrible on most screens (it also messes with planning the sprite-sizes and full-screen CGs. Joy.) UI-elements are misaligned in regards to the world’s pixels, nevermind the text even with a pixel-art font.

In addition to that, trying to make sure characters can go in front of or behind objects is a nightmare for either visuals or performance. Slightly tilting sprites allows for a performant variant, but bigger sprites break that completely. It also messes with the pixel display, even at 0.5° tilt. (That was the solution I used in my 2019 game jam game). Meanwhile, dynamically adjusting the position of all objects on screen depending on their Y-Coordinate costs quite a lot of performance.

In general, performance is a bit of an issue. I know I’m not the best programmer, even without any code running the engine sometimes falls under 60 fps with just a few sprites on screen. With the moving algorithm that can sometimes end up even lower. Ouch. I might be able to optimise things a bit more here, but without having even added some of the heavier logic yet…

So in all, Unreal might not have been the best choice, though the pixel display issues are by far the ones that annoy me the most.

Future progress

I’d love to be able to say I’m going to have something playable by INSERT DATE HERE, but that’s not realistic. But what I can say is what I’m planning on doing now, so that is at least something. (Though considering those plans, well…)

I’m going to switch away from Unreal Engine. And make my own. And I’m aware that this will be really difficult and likely take a stupid amount of time, but it would really make me a better programmer, it sounds like fun, and none of the currently available engines are really ones that I want to use. So I’m going to be busy with that instead of working on directly game-related things, but at least the result should hopefully be good? Since I’ve got nearly the entire December as vacation time, it’s an ideal time to start. The goal is an optimized engine for 2D Pixel Art using OpenGL in C++ for both Windows and Linux (any maybe Android, though not as a priority)

It will just take time.

So what has everyone else been working on? What development stories do you have to share, even if it’s something that is not yet ready? I’d love to read about that.

[coldsteelj]

I am still working on “Vermonut” project(Unreal Engine 5.4 currently) which I mentioned there: Vermonut (playable version isn't ready)
I guess I need to make an update to that old post, because gameplay changed significantly over time. Instead of third person Action RPG it is now TopDown Action RPG. Every time I work on project and make some progress I create a post with date, description and some video demonstrations in my discord server which mentioned in description. So, I just don’t use this forum for that, because it will be like me making a thousand comments under my post and talking with myself. Plus, you can’t upload videos here

[MuckMage]

I really like the idea of this post! It’ll be cool to see everyone’s experience and plans. Hopefully it’s also inspiring to at least one person.

Who am I?

To be honest, these past few years have been less than fruitful. I officially started developing stuff when I attempted to make something for the 2022 Gain Jam. I didn’t finish in time, but I wanted to keep developing it. I coded a ton of stuff and had loads of fun, but then I got to the point where I needed to make assets. I have never been an artistic person so trying to make good assets felt like pulling teeth. I eventually just dropped the project altogether, which is sad because I really liked the concept. It was gonna be a game show type thing where you spun a wheel and tried to get as much money as you can before becoming overweight.

2023’s Gain Jam was a similar story, except I made even LESS progress before giving up. I was also in the process of finding a job at the time, so I’m not gonna be too hard on myself.

For 2024, I actually made the smart decision and did the Jam with a team! We made Poke-r Gut and I had a blast! The whole process was so much easier and it was good to have people to share progress with. This trend continued with the GET LARGE Jam that recently happened, and again, I had a good time making a game and actually posted it.

The main problem is my failure at finishing projects. I have at least 8 or 9 different projects I’ve started and given up on. The really sad part is they almost all end the same way, I start making assets, get frustrated, and give up. It really demoralized me which just made the problem worse over the past few years. But every once in a while I get a moment of clear-headedness and I think “I really want to make this work”, so I just keep trying.

I’ve always been ok at programming and awful at art, so I’ve been working to improve my art skills recently. I’ve done more work in Blender and I’ve been making an effort to draw everyday. It’s been really fun after quieting my internal critic and just enjoying the process.

What I’ve been working on

Since I’ve been improving my 2d art skills, I really want to go back and work more on Tubby Tomes, a Twine game I messed around with. It also suffered from me hating assets I made for it, so I eventually just pushed the demo out with text only.

I also have that pile of concepts and unfinished games I would like to work on. The biggest one that I need to revisit is a collection of short scenarios, designed just to give me practice with 3d art. Like with Tubby Tomes, I want this to be a learning experience so I can actually grow as an artist.

I’ll jot down some more unfinished concepts, just to give an idea of how much failure it took for me to finally lock in:

2 projects for 2 different Preggo Jams, one that was fancy brick-breaker and one that was a crappy Temple-Run clone

A dating sim that I was working on with others before we all had tons of things go wrong for all of us. On indefinite suspension now, but who knows, it might resurface.

A game for Team Quimbly’s first Belly Jam that I didn’t release in time, spent MONTHS trying to finish, and then hated the art. The coding was also sub-optimal, so I canned it. This one was probably the closest to being done, but it was little ambitious for someone of my art skill.

A minesweeper type game that someone suggested in a post. I ended up just remaking basic minesweeper and that’s it.

There’s also like 3 or 4 other projects that I’ve made design doc’s for but haven’t developed at all.

All of this to say, DON’T EVER GIVE UP. Keep pushing through if you really want to make something. In the process of all this I may not have released a lot but that doesn’t mean it was in vain. I met a bunch of cool people, learned a bunch of new skills, and all the struggling has helped me learn more about myself and what I need to do to work well. I am so excited to keep learning and applying what I learn, and I hope everyone can feel as pumped about their own projects!

[bweem]

Adorbs I love the cooking system! Translation is noble.

I’m working on sounds in my C++ game, where web has them:

(in case sound doesn’t work)

And desktop is currently playing a sine wave with WASAPI (todo more)

(in case sound doesn’t work)

Will make a shader that draws the sound buffer for debug fun too
My game currently has performance issues on low end devices too-- it draws characters with a full screen shader for every body part since they can grow arbitrarily, then it copies that result onto the screen for transparency compositing. I think making the per pixel cost lower would be the best way to fix this, but I wonder how much it can be done.
One nice thing about the windows version is you double click the EXE and load time is very quick.
I would lose all of my motivation if I used a game engine-- I am happy. (´꒳`)

I would like to finish this game and have it be good. That means working on the right things.
Sound is because I really want to give a polished experience and make an enjoyable game.
I’m not rushing the main story since I want to work on things that make the game really interesting.
Writing for this game is a very intense meditation-- it is this text adventure genre where I get to experience something so drawn out and all-consuming as if I live in it ('・ω・´)

[thatweirdfatguy]

I’ve made a handful of mods for the sims 4, however an update a few months ago broke all of them and since the sims weight gain discord was deleted I haven’t had motivation to fix my mods (also I don’t have social media anymore and I can’t contact the artist I got some icons from for free because of that and I don’t want to assume consent on a free thing). Though I’ve started playing the game again recently and miss having my mods, so I’m probably going to get back to work on that soon.

Due to the admittedly amateurish way I made all of the mods I will need to start from scratch on all of them, but now I actually know how to make the things I want to make so I can skip the long process of figuring out how to get literally anything to work how it’s supposed to.

[Dapk_Macmep]

I’m currently trying to make a game for the new year. It’s similar to Plants vs. Zombies, but instead of plants, there are buildings, and instead of zombies, there are robots and bugs. I’ve commissioned art and it’s in the works (I’ll eventually have to face the challenge of producing art for my games myself; this can’t go on forever).

Before this, I created a couple of games that were bad, but not as awful as the last couple. Although I commissioned art for them, they were stupid and unworthy of attention (they probably get this attention because they have art and maybe they’re trying to support me. Thanks for the support; if it weren’t for that, I’d probably take a long break before posting anything). The last game of this year should be at least somewhat worthy of existence (I’ll try).

Artistically, my work isn’t terrible, but I can’t say it’s at a decent level. I think I can handle music production (so-so at the moment), but the biggest challenge that awaits me ahead is programming (there’s not much). I have a superficial knowledge of English and no real experience to speed up my learning, so it will be a long road. I’m also mastering a 3D engine (3D Rad) and learning an editor for creating models for that engine (the compiler is in Google SketchUP Pro 8.0.16846, and I’ll be doing animations in fragMOTION).

I have plans, I just need to implement them (at least partially by next summer).

[Chugachugs]

I’ve lurked here since finding the site in 2018. Didn’t care about fetish games until I really enjoyed Apostles and Some Bullshit in 2020. I’ve always had a love for VNs and story-focused games (usually with very little gameplay). I had a few failed game projects over the last 15 years that weren’t fetish-related and I never shared online.

This forum is the primary reason why my first actually successful game project exists, The Abugida Effect. The next substory update should be in a few weeks.

[Ares42]

Like others have said I really like the idea of this post. Keeping to the original format - because I like that idea too.

Who am I?
Where to start? What feels like 100 years ago I wanted to be a professional developer. Life had other ideas in mind for me though - let’s call it more interest in girls and partying than in studying and time passed by in the way it often does. Years later I thought about getting into games journalism - after all I can write and I like playing games, what better way to get paid to do two things I enjoy? Then I remembered what I found out when I thought about being a professional tester. When its your job it stops being something you do for fun - to get away from your job. So all that fell by the way side and I got on with living my life.

In the intervening years, I dabbled with making various mods, skin packs, even a few 3D models for various games - back in the days when character models had just slightly more geometric complexity than a Minecraft character. But game development and technology quickly out stripped my meagre artistic abilities. And whilst I enjoyed sketching and digital manipulation it was never anything I had a real talent for - no real “feel” for it. It wasn’t art - it didn’t have soul. It didn’t have feeling. Just lines on a page. Not like writing. That, I most definitely have a feel for. Whether or not my writing is any good your mileage may vary on. But I can feel it - it’s got soul, I get that tingle in my finger tips when I have a story, an idea that I want to put into words.

Fast forward (quite a few) years and COVID happened. I was bored and looking for something different to pass the time. I can’t remember what happened first - but for the sake of moving things along let’s say I stumbled across Weight Gaming. I don’t remember the first games I found and played here. But some of the earliest that made a lasting impact on me were @Owlkaline’s Insatiable Hearts @Weirdobeardo89’s Goddess of Gluttony and @tiggertoo’s The Weighting Game.

Around the same time, I stumbled on stuffer.ai. And somewhere between playing several wonderful indie fetish games here (and several more not so wonderful but not without their charms) and mucking around with image generation the seed of an idea was born when I realised the images I was doing just for fun on stuffer.ai could be turned into characters for a game.

Now, I know what some of you will say, boo, AI bad etc. That particular topic has been done to death and I’m sick of it. I had an idea for a game, I had a way to get visual assets for the game (as a bone to the anti-AI crowd I’m using that term instead of art). But then I hit my first major problem. I’m not a programmer. Was always terrible at it. Then I discovered Twine used HTML and CSS and I thought - oh! I can do HTML. Especially since most of it is done by Twine itself.

So I followed the tutorials. Made my first “game”. It was literally the tutorial - then modified it a little bit beyond what the tutorials gave me. Awesome, I thought, let’s get cracking. So Weightcraft Chronicles Genesis was born. And died. Whilst I had an idea, I didn’t have a plan. At all. It was far too ambitious a project for my first foray into game development. It had ridiculous feature creep and had an absolutely insane number of variations for every single scene. And ultimately, I stopped enjoying reading walls and walls of text after a long day at work - I’ve since stopped playing text adventures. I just can’t maintain focus on long blocks of text for that long any more - even reading books engages my parasympathetic nervous system and I’m off to the land of nod before long. Probably down to years of only sleeping about 5 hours a night.

Anyway, I digress. I took a bit of time off and decided I’d try again, this time using Ren’py. It seemed a much better fit for me being a very visually orientated person. Shorter blocks of text, a more immersive visual environment. This time - I did a plan! And this became Weightcraft Chronicles - New Dawn. And I worked on that for about a year before burn out started setting in. Again there were too many systems, and while I had done a plan I hadn’t thought it all the way through and it ended up feeling directionless and hollow. I was spending more time fiddling with economies and XP and making combat work than I was on writing story.

Around the time I stopped working on it, I lost my grandfather. I nearly walked away from this community and making games entirely at that point I was in such a bad place mentally. But eventually the itch to make something came back. Thanks in part to while I was taking time off I kept writing - this time songs. That really helped me through what was going on in my life and continues to do so.

Why Use AI?
I feel like there’s something here I should touch on. You might have seen some of it in my posts around the place, you might have gleaned some of this from the above. I’m not a professional developer. I don’t want (anymore) to be a professional developer. I do this for fun, for a hobby. I put a lot of work into creating the visual assets I use. Arguably, there is more soul, more creative effort in the images I create, alter and tweak with AI generation and digital image editors than anything that I could do with a pencil and a sheet of paper.

But at the very core of why I use it is that I am learning. I didn’t get into this with any real knowledge of what I was doing. I’m still learning. I’m making this game as a passion project, and for fun. I’m making it myself because I want to understand the game design and creation process end to end. And of course, there’s the finances and “life happens” angles to consider too. Finances speak for themselves. But if I’m doing this by myself - if I’m too busy to work on it, no one is relying on me. If I’m ready to release a demo - but one crucial piece is missing, I’m not relying on someone else. I learn, develop and create at my pace.

What I’m Working On Now
This is running longer than I anticipated and I’m running out of time. So, to cut this short, what I’m working on now is Weightcraft Chronicles - New Dawn (version 2) - this time with a much more developed plan, a tighter narrative structure and refined focus on telling stories without getting bogged down in XP, economy and combat mechanics. If you want to know more, take a gander at the page for it here: Weightcraft Chronicles - New Dawn

I’m also working, as a side project, on writing songs and about to release my second album.

[WobblyWirra]

I’m still very new to this website, but this is the little game I’ve been working on :3c
I was thinking about calling it Sweet and Bitter, but that doesn’t really fit the theme of the game anymore. But dang, it was a good name though…

This game is about my character, Mel, a Bee/Goat hybrid (kinda). The best way I can summarize it is she has lived in a small farming village for all of her life, and she wants to go live out in the city Very cliche, I know q: there is more to it, but I won’t make sense without the context of how her species work, and that’ll be at least two paragraphs TwT

The game is still in its very early stages, and I was greatly inspired by TITS, Insatiable Hearts and others. I’ll need to compile a list q: I’m still working on more complex game mechanics, like a status bar, mood/emotion mechanic, and game over. But it’s coming along better than I thought it’d be!

The main gameplay loop, hopefully, is gonna revolve around you managing your weight(Mel makes honey and stores it like fat), mood, finances, and friends. You’ve gotta get fat/produce and sell honey to make money, but get too fat(getting stuck or Immobile), and you’ll pay a price, which can be either money, relationship status, or your emotional well-being, and if you don’t have enough money, it’s game over. As you explore the city, certain areas will be locked behind conditions like needing to have a certain weight, time, or relationship level with a specific NPC. As you explore, you’ll find and buy upgrades allowing you to handle greater weights or making you more efficient at digesting food/producing honey. Will this be fun or not? We’ll only see once I get a basic prototype finished. If you have any feedback on the concept, I’d love to hear it ^vv^

I would also like to rework the menu system; it’s not the nicest thing to look at in my opinion, and could use a touch-up. And the inventory system could use one too; it’s clunky, but it shouldn’t bee too hard to polish it up.

I’m probably forgetting something about the game, but I think I’ve gotten most of the important stuff :3

Edit: OH YEAH, the background image in the video is a placeholder and was made by Arseniy Chebynkin. I don’t wanna leave them uncredited O.o

[WobblyWirra]

I love the Abugida Effect! I still need to play episode 7, but I’ve been looking forward to playing it. I’m very excited to see where the story goes :3

[oceanaga]

It’s neat seeing what y’all are working on. Guess I’ll contribute to keep the thread going.

I’m Oceanaga, I mainly focus on pregnancy and bimbofication 3d art but I dabble in weight gain stuff as well. I’ve participated in two of the gain jams and had a blast with those. I was working on a weight gain game where you’re in charge of an orc camp but I lost those files due to an unfortunate drunken distro hop so that project died.

For the past year or so I’ve been working on a pregnant/hyper pregnancy game called The Matriarch and it’s coming along alright. Lots of stuff done, lots of stuff to do for that one.

More relevant to this site, I’ve also been working on some rough drafts for my next game and have three promising test builds ready to go (two of them are weight gain focused) so once I get The Matriarch in a spot I’m happy with I’ll decide which project to focus on and go from there. While 3d is my bread and butter I’m thinking about giving 2d a go again for the next game or possibly looking to collab with other artist and writers since doing all of that solo is rough. We’ll burn that bridge when we get there though.

I frequently check in on this site because I love seeing the projects that pop up here. Looking forward to seeing what y’all are cooking up!

[Weirdobeardo89]

Thank you @Ares42 for mentioning me

I have personally decided to stop making games anymore, and withdraw from development completely. After a year of struggling financially and feeling more attacked than appreciated on this forum it simply doesn’t feel worth it anymore. Especially after what tiny bit of financial support a dollar a pop on itch was giving me just disappeared over night.

My online presence will slowly dwindle over the next week or so. Patreon is already taken down, as I didn’t want to let people hanging. Link-tree is gone. Ko-fi will be down soon. Discord will be taken down over the weekend.

My games will stay up for free on itch for those who still enjoy them.

-WeirdoBeardo89 out.

[Ares42]

You’re very welcome my good sir. You’ve been an inspiration. And whilst I am saddened to see you leave, I understand you’ve got to do what’s right for you. All the best.

[Raz0rm2nded]

I’ve been thinking on how to approach this, since many have already done, so I’ll try now.

Who am I? and a little about me

Well, before the whole modding things I’ve been doing. I was studying for my career (I’m a Computer/software engineer). But I was feeling not comfortable with it and tried to do other things to both increase my weaker skills and to help with my autism by engaging more with others. I made some friends (one of them being @Kurikinton ) and I was interested in working on something related to games.

Eventually, since I was playing games like Fallout, I got interested in making mods and tried to do first a costume for FO4, but I had zero idea on how and the results were bad and I’m the type of person that gets easily frustrated and stressed when things don’t go well on the first tries to the point I get depresed, thinking that I’m shit at everything and worthless, so I decided to switch to something more easier and also try to deal with my frustration, which led me to learn about League of Legends modding and since I was a big fan of that game, I started doing mods for league. They were simple model swaps and the first one I made was putting Chun-Li from SF (one of my favorite characters) replacing Miss Fortune and while it wasn’t perfect, it was fun and I was amazed that I was able to pull that off, so I kept going. At the time I wasn’t interested yet in making fat mods, since I didn’t knew how and Maya (the program I used for those mods) was quite complicated to use.

Then as I was getting use to do mods like that, one day my hard drive died. That was the worst thing that could happened, since I was in the middle of also working on my thesis. While I was smart enough to make backups of the thesis, I didn’t make ones for my personal projects and all that work got lost. Despite I could start from scratch, losing all that work was disheartening and I lost motivation on working more on league stuff.

Then, things changed. Kurikinton showed me this site and also asked for my help on working on their game (well, it was mostly if could do some art of their characters). I’m no artist and my hand pulse is shit, but when I did my first draft of the protagonist of their game, they told me that it looked like the CD-I Zelda games and it was fine and it was the style they wanted,and that I could always learn and improve from this, so I started learning a little about art. It was also the moment where I was looking for mods where I could play with fat characters or added WG mechanics.

While I saw some mods that allowed to play as a fat character, most of them were for more modern games (and my pc at the time was shit). Also, some of them got lost or were behind paywalls and I was not okay with that and didn’t wanted to pay someone to do the work. So, I wanted to learn to do mods for more older games that anyone can enjoy and get access, but, I didn’t knew were to start. Until one day I came across a video of a person (who has completely dissapeared from the internet i think) on the streetmodders forum showing how to edit the characters of USFIV, and decided to give a try, doing a mod for Chun-Li. It took a lot of time and I made a lot of mistakes, but I learned a lot also and I was both amazed and happy that I could make it, motivating me to do more and Kurikinton offered to help promote my stuff (and initially they even showed my mod under their name on some ocassions since I was hesitant to show or be related to fat fetish stuff, but I got over it later). Later I got interested in pixelart and pkmn romhacks and after playing some, I wanted to make my own, which I finished and released last year under the name of “Big fatty crystal”. My experience working on it allowed me to learn and Improve a lot on my art skills (which were shit and now are… less shit). I also made a little mod for Sims 4, but I lost interest in that game since updates often breaks mods.

But the thing that was a breakthrough for me was the D’arce mod for Fear & Hunger. I got intrigued by that game, but never wanted to play it, until I found the work of roxas617, who was working on a mod, but never finished and left the assets in case someone wanted to finish the job. I said “I’m interested in it” and that was when the real game began for me. I really wanted to put effort on it and started working on the mod, learning how to use certain tools and practice on GIMP and asking for advice and help and after more than a month, I finished it and released it on Nexus and I was really, really happy that people were liking the mod and that was also when I oficially joined Weight gaming and wanted to share directly and properly my work.

After that, I wanted to diversify and try other stuff, such as doing Yakuza mods since Kuri told me about the mods that @Snansy was working and I was really impressed, but also wanted to do something that not many have done and that’s when I went for the RE games. For a long time I wanted to work on that series since I’m a big fan, but most tutorials I saw were for 3DS max (an older version that is not possible to acquire currently, at least not legally) but when the progress on Albam (a plugin that allows to RE games on Blender) advanced enough to work on most titles, then I started on that with RE0 and now I’ve done mods for not only that game but also REV1, RE6, the remake of the first game and now doing one for RE5. The most recent stuff I did was for Mass Effect and Borderlands. Also, since I was getting more and more acustomed to doing art, I officially took the role of the artist on Kuri’s game.

A sidenote, on some ocassions I investigate if other games can be modded, being the reason I also worked on BL2 and Mass Effect, but I also searched for games like Vampire: the masquerade - bloodlines and 2d games like Streets of rage 4. I personally like searching and finding about stuff like this.

However, all that work eventually can become tiring and stressful, specially when I can’t make progress and my irl job at the time being so unberable that I had to change for a better one. Culminating in my “crash out” when I tried on working on mods for RE6. And I have the bad habit of working on many things at the same time, so lately I’m trying to be more organized by focusing my attention on one thing at a time and making an schedule for everything.

What I’ve been doing now

Is pretty obvious that I’m still working on making mods at this point, but I’ve been wanting to take time to re-make my older mods. But also, since my art skills have gotten better and people have approached me about the possiblity of doing comissions and request, I’ve been thinking about that possibility also do more and more art. However, I’ve been talking with my family and relatives about my health (both mental and physical) and that I should take time to relax from everything . Kurikinton also told to not push myself too hard and take my own time. All of this I’m seriously taking in consideration because I have been working too much lately and it has become noticeable on my daily life that I’m often tired and stressed, being the reason I’m focusing on one thing only and organizing my schedule.

I’m still working on Kurikinton’s game and I’ve been designing some new characters that they want to add and show soon. With nothing more to add to this long bible here, I’m out.

Have a nice day.

[Kurikinton]

I want to share my progress and a little about me. I think the idea of this topic is nice, so I decided to take the chance.

But first, I’ll talk about myself.

Who am I and how I got here?

Well, I was in the start of my career as a computer science engineer (or whatever is called in english). I was thinking that I could learn something related to videogames, but was far from it and I was getting not only bored, but I felt like I was “wasting my life” since I haven’t done much outside of playing videogames as a hobbie and I genuinly wanted to learn stuff related to videogames, it was also the moment where I decided to search more for fetish stuff or content, since while I like fat stuff, I don’t actively search or look for it.

I don’t remember when, but one day while I was looking for Sims related stuff (as I like that series of games) I stumble upon this site and was surprised to see a website that is about fat games. At first, I just wanted to find the Sims mods I liked and never come back, but I was really intrigued and interested in playing some of the games here. While I noticed that many where done in RPG maker (and the dubious reputation it has), I said to myself “fuck it, I want to try something different and to see what type of content these games had” and I picked from the ones I saw “Project F.A.T.” from Nicksav. While, let’s be honest, that game is very jank, doesn’t have the best artwork and the final part looks very rushed, it was still a fun game to play and the sprite of the characters when they get fatter was great. Then I played some more, such as Axugaem and Some bullshit and I was amazed, because they were fun and enjoyable, something I really haven’t had in quite a while since the current game industry hasn’t been for me. What I value the most on a game is that it should be fun to play.

After some time thinking, I felt inspired and wanted to take the opportunity to start working on something as a side project so that I would have something to do in my free time other than playing games and to remove that feeling of “wasting my life”. If the game devs that shared their games here could achieve something like that, then I a can. However, my first idea wasn’t an rpg.

A dream of mine is to make a fighting game in fact, but the amount of time, effort and skills needed for it were overwhelming and I’m more of a programmer, so I discarded that. The other option was an RPG and RPG maker sounded like a good option. But I also have another reason to choose to make an RPG.

I hate rpgs

In all of my life, rpgs are the genre I often dislike because on one part, the grind gets very tedious and the story and sense of scale quickly goes off the rail (like the joke of you start facing a bandit and by the end you kill god). While I played many rpgs that are good and fun, there are also many that aren’t for me (my personal worst experience was FFIV).

But, I thought that it could be a way to challenge myself, to make an RPG game and a fetish one. So I went and bought RPG maker MZ and started planning. The first things I made was the protagonist of the story (Reiko the slime girl) and the WG mechanic (because I wanted first to have that mechanic working or it wouldn’t make sense to work on a fetish game without it). Then I started planning and designing how the story would be, the world, etcetera.

At first, it was daunting and stressful, because I’m very disorganized and I’m shit at drawing anything, so I spoke with Razorm2nded, who I’ve met in college and since we shared similar interests, I asked for their help, and yeah, while it doesn’t look great, the art they’ve done is nice for this project and has helped them in many ways. This game is for fun and to have fun, something I myself forget because sometimes I get obsessed with the idea of making the “best game ever that can be at the same level of the others” and my self-criticism becomes depression. I often criticize myself for pretty much anything “because this needs to be good or else it sucks”, when I realized for example that I was making the game in spanish than in english (to later share it in a mostly english-speaking website), I felt awful for such mistake.

What am I doing now?

I’m still working on my game, but at a slower pace for many reasons. I’ll share some of the current progress in the topic of my game. I’ve been having a hard time finding assets that could fit the next chapter I’m making, so we (Razor and I) are thinking on making our own, which is likely to be case. It’s gets depressive very quickly when I see that I can’t seem to progress, but I can’t let that getting to me.

I’m fully aware what has happened in this site, but regardless, I’ll still be working on my game.