Hey all, I’ve been lurking around the site for a long time now and in my sleep I got visited by an idea for a wholesome little game.
You play as a girl living with her mother. Moving a 2d character through a 3d environment where you go around the house and eat the snacks and meals your mother has left lying around while she is going around the house. If she spots you, she’s going to come in your direction and you can hide if you want either by getting out of sight and staying away for long enough by getting in a different room for example and closing the door behind you, crouching behind objects or hiding under places like the table in the dining room. As you get heavier you get slower and eventually lose the ability to crouch and then run (or maybe not, so we could have some moments where we can see the player embarrass themselves trying to speed-waddle away from their mother or struggle to stay crouched, hiding red-faced from their parent). If your mother catches you, the two of you hug and get a wholesome ending where the two of you are spending time together and you get a splash art of that memory to go into an album where you can look back on the endings you’ve collected. Occasionally, your mother will stop by to snack on something, which will increase her own weight after a certain point, slowing her down and making it easier for you to get away from her. Whenever she loses sight of you near some food, she’ll stop in place and scan for you again. In those events, the chance for her to snack on something increases. My suggestion for the endings is to have a different ending depending on your and your mother’s weight, meaning that if your mother is chubby and you’re still skinny you’ll get a different memory from when the reverse is true. I think that’s a good way to add replayability to this simple game. If immobility is added into the game, my idea is that if your parent goes immobile before you, you can freely interact with them and hug them whenever you feel like it, ending the run. And if you get immobile too, the run ends automatically a few seconds after, giving you a memory of the two of you immobile.
Potentially, you can make it so that you can add other family members to the house for flavor and difficulty, adding different memories for each family member, maybe even adding a family pet as an extra to go around the house and participate in the family photos (maybe even fatten it up too, though I’m personally not too much into fattening up your pets irl or fictionally). As an extra, maybe getting caught by multiple family members at the same time can give you a unique group photo, though to reduce the grind maybe there would be only a few different photo variations per group which change depending on the player’s weight (Though, maybe these group memories can be implemented by making the background and characters separate as well as reducing the pose variations between different weight stages, letting you keep the variety of seeing how a photo would look with each family member at a different size, though those can be extra. For example, you can have the main photo and then when you open it in the album, have the option to see how it would look if you or your family member was a different size).
And for further customization, maybe you could choose who you’re controlling for ultimate freedom. As an idea, playing as the mother/father could be sort of a free roam mode where you can interact with the things around the house and your children/husband/wife, giving you some flavor text depending on your weight. While you play as the parent, you can freely eat the food around the house and even feed the other family members who’ll be going about their day, be it working, lounging around in shared spaces or relaxing in their rooms. The way you complete your run when playing as the parent is to just walk up to someone and hug them. Or, walk over to the front door, past the house’s front yard and leave with different flavor options to go to various place i.e. to work, for groceries, for a walk somewhere, etc.
To help with the grind, maybe after getting around 5 different endings, you unlock new game+ where you can set the starting weight of your family member and yourself so you can get the memories you want more easily.
I hope you like this idea and someone finds it inspiring! I myself lack the coding and art skills to bring this idea to fruition, though I might pick it up eventually and get on with it someday, due to the nature of my work and uni. Anyway, have a good day/night everyone!
Edit: Feel free to use this idea to build your own game. No need for credit but it’d be appreciated.