Zealous Stunt Chef (Updated 7/26)

[Juxtaterrestrial]

In Zealous Stunt Chef (current working name) you are a chef at a hibachi style restaurant with questionable organizational staff. It’s a project I’ve had bouncing around in my head for 2 years.

You are presented with a table full of random ingredients and tools and must kludge together quality food for your customers.

The goal for the project is to create something that is a mix of elements from Infinite Craft and Into The Breach with management components, and of course, bellies. I would consider it being a puzzle game, but also a strategy game, and management game.

The core gameplay elements are already implemented. And the game is structured to handle new characters and food items dynamically.

Core vision for the game

The basic game revolves around preparing food by mixing ingredients to make food to feed to customers to get money.

Each customer has an amount of patience. Every action you take, whether that be swapping or mixing two items, or doing a sick trick drains a small amount of that reserve. And with long production chains for more expensive and filling food the game becomes an exercise in carefully planning your moves.

These type of restaurants are famous for having chefs do tricks to wow the guests. That will be true in Zealous Stunt Chef as well! Mechanically in game the tricks you do will function a lot like weapons and abilities in Into The Breach. The limited use tricks you use will increase the perceived quality of the ingredients and foods you use them on, but just as important, they will let you manipulate the game board to help you make better use of the limited patience of your customers.

I believe, that this core gameplay when fleshed out will be engaging, and interesting to play. But the nice this is I have many planned avenues for expansion on these mechanics.

That’s cool, right?

But what about the belly? The eating? The fat?

Bellies, weight gain, and eating

As the girls eat, their bellies grow.

One of the features I’m very proud to work on is the separation of weight gain and stomach capacity.

If your customers are happy, they will came back for more. If you feed them fattening food, they will gain weight!

But what if you're someone who likes stuffing, not WG?

My goal is that if you choose the right foods, you can over feed your customers, and just have their stomach capacity expand, instead of their waistline. At the same time, if you’re not interested in your customers becoming a black hole of over-consumption, then you can also make your customers gain weight by preparing calorie dense foods and just giving them their check when they’re comfortably full!

You could even run the business reasonably, and not make your customers fat, or garbage disposals. But that’s not what you’re here for, right?

Customer first

Still talking about the vision for the project; how your customers change as you serve them is a massive part of the project. Beyond just weight and stomach capacity, there are many things that will affect how easy or hard it is to satisfy their appetites.

Food has a quality value. Customers want good food! Your tricks will increase the perceived quality of the foods you make. Beyond that customers will have positive and negative preferences, further affecting the perceived quality of the food.

Okay cool?

One of the closely tied concepts with feederism and stuffing and other things are personality traits. The taboo desire. Losing control. Selfishness. Greed.

When a customer gets a lot of food above the quality they expect, their standards rise. If you fail to meet their standards they will be unhappy, and you get less tips. So serving up quality food is a way to gradually increase the difficulty of the game naturally, at your pace. But beyond that, if the customer can become greedy if you spoil them.

Greed will affect a lot of things. They will be less patient, they will expect better food, and they will maybe be less generous when tipping. BUT, on the other hand greedy character want to eat more, and will be happier customers when their whims are satisfied. Greed exists to make things harder, but more rewarding. Also it should be hot.

All the different factors mentioned, and unmentioned should get together to to allow for characters to feel different in mechanical ways, pace difficulty naturally with game mechanics instead of ‘bullet sponge’ difficulty, and give players freedom to mold customers how they like.

Beyond eating and feeding - the future

I have several routes of expansion in mind already

• Back room kitchen where you can affect the random assortment of ingredients you get. Spend earned money to buy higher quality ingredients or new ingredients entirely. Higher staff to pre-proccess some of the ingredients (Flour → dough, saving crucial actions). Buy upgrades to unlock more customer info, or make certain appliance built into your table to save space for more ingredients.
• Dialogue: stave off the customer’s patience by making small talk. Learn their preferences. Encourage personality changes.
• More tricks and upgradable tricks: Spend money to unlock/upgrade tricks. Multi slash may start with a 2 tile length, so spend money to make it 3 tiles, 4, etc
• Group customers. Manage 2, 3, or 4 customers to really challenge your skills, upgrades, and brain. Try to keep all of them happy for a big payout. Or spoil one customer over the others to encourage/reward their greed.

After that, I think the framework of the game is fertile for even further expansion. But lets leave that for the future.

RIGHT NOW

BTS patrons can play this early build right now: https://www.patreon.com/posts/zealous-stunt-133041331

But development has been quick, so I expect to have public build out pretty soon as well.

Game development/writing is the way I make my modest living. It’s a luxury to have the support I do and I’m very thankful for the support I have.

I’d like to keep working on this project. I Will be working on it concurrently with my other project Myre’s Massive Mealtime - development (v0.604 - 6/27 games and words)

But if you like this project, or MMM, and want to see it continue, it’d really help me to have additional funding. Part of the reason I started rapid dev on Zealous Stunt Chef was because my rent and other bills jumped by 200 dollars.

If you can’t afford that: My goal with most of my projects is to release them for free. The patreon is there to fund development. The money goes toward feeding me and my family, and when I can money goes towards hiring artists to contribute to the projects make.

If you can’t afford it, or choose not to, that’s fine! I’d ask that you support me by spreading the word. Talk about the projects. And follow my social media accounts

Join now: https://www.patreon.com/juxtaterrestrial

Follow me on Deviantart: https://www.deviantart.com/juxtaterrestrial
Follow me on Bluesky: @juxtaterrestrial.bsky.social on Bluesky
Follow me on twitter: https://twitter.com/Juxtaterrestria

[K-day2]

I really appreciate the weight gain aspect, I hope it won’t be a too big jump each stage. It looks pretty promising right now.
What are you using for the 3d characters, Daz3D? I’m asking because the character in the gameplay preview looks pretty realistic for Daz as it doesn’t like handling chubby or stuffed characters so much.

[Juxtaterrestrial]

Thanks!

For the weight gain, I want the gain to be pretty granular, but noticeable. Small jumps.

And yeah, I use Daz3D. I have https://www.deviantart.com/heviestate3d to thank as their various fat morphs make up a good portion of the backbone of the body morphs. Besides that I use a daz tool called Ghost Dynamics the further shape fat shapes using collisions with spheres placed inside the body. And lastly, I use a tool called Morph Master that came out in like December? It’s basically black magic. It lets me take the collisions with the spheres in ghost dynamics and save them as a morph, so I can do a different collision. It also lets me save morphs for use with different characters, letting me build up a library of custom shapes. All those together give me a lot of control over fat shape stuff without having to use blender.

Besides that, i put in a lot of effort to use/abuse dforce with clothes to make them look stretched, and tight, and also make them ride up/down. That part is trickily since every clothing asset is different, and cooperates differently. But with that, the way i use it is to have dforce run along an animated sequence where the character goes from small to large. This lets me crudely simulate tight clothes and what not.

And besides even that, I true to not just use 1 character morph or one shape morph. I mix like 2 or 3 minimum to create something that is hopefully less apparent to be a stock character.

A decent example of the results can be found in this image I did where i was working on doing a decent double belly + fupa + tight one piece bathing suit: https://www.deviantart.com/juxtaterrestrial/art/Fat-realization-DAZ-1154602050

Thanks for the feedback and kind words!

[Juxtaterrestrial]

I updated the download because there was half a line of code that prevented sprites from changing in the exported game.

As a result the game now has a new character that i finished exporting the images for last night:

[Juxtaterrestrial]

Two new customers.

[Juxtaterrestrial]

This month so far…
added seasoning and additions (EX Carmel on cookies & diced onions into sauce )
added more foods & recursive food/recipe details window
added more customers and random customer order
added food flavors & customer flavor preferences
added rebalanced costs and prices

Also improved things behind the scenes - corrected mistakes i made when starting that has made further improvement easier.

Obviously all the things are very WIP. This isn’t the polishing time. But i think things are looking and feeling better.

[Juxtaterrestrial]

I put out a second update for Zealous Stunt Chef

Download here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/135029979

Okay okay! Here is the next release! I got caught up in… well a few things. But there is a lot that has changed!

Character stuff

• 4 new characters! (8 total now)
• Characters are given to you in random order
• Character now have preferences (both good and bad). They will tell in in robotic terms the most impactful of the preference towards the food you feed them.
• Rebalanced stomach sizes and patience. My guiding principle is that a plate of spaghetti should make the average person feel decently full. So stomach capacities are set to around that value, with some higher, and some lower.

Food stuff

• Rebalanced a lot of how characters react to foods
• Tip is based on a few things. Mood, how close they are to their desired fullness. With a multiplier for food size and Perceived quality over their expected quality. Currently the only way to get that number higher is with tricks, and flavor preferences. Character’s expected quality does not currently change. Feeding customer food when they are full tanks mood and will ruin your tips.
• Rebalanced food costs. The final cost of a food is based on ingredients used with a multiplier for the kind of food (meal vs appetizer etc). Raw ingredients have a penalty to cost. A side food (like a side of cookies) have a small markup. An appetizer has a slightly larger markup. And a full meal item has the largest markup. Overall it should be a lot easier to make a profit, even if it end up being a small profit.
• Rebalanced food sizes similarly.
• Flavors and tags have been added to most foods! And as mentioned, characters can have positive and negative preferences for them. Flavors typically accumulate through steps so the final food is a mix of all the flavors and tags that went into the creation(for the most part). Currently there is no check for flavor combos so go ahead and drizzle caramel over your pasta lol
• Seasoning and additions have been added. Example of addition is adding minced garlic to pasta sauce. An example of seasoning is drizzling caramel over top of some finished cookies. Both seasonings and additions add to the cost of the final food, but with a penalty. The reason you would do it would be to appeal to the characters preferences. And also some ingredients don’t go into a final food in a super straight forward way Additions also get part of their size added to the final food size. So if you want to make the food more fillings, additions are there to help.
• More foods: caramel, butter, butter_dough, croissant, garlic, garlic_butter, garlic_bread, garlic_bread_bruschetta, garlic_diced, eggs, eggs_fried, eggs_toast, eggs_garlic_toast, batter, onion_rings_battered, onion_rings, cheese_wheel, cheese_shredded, onion_slices, onion_diced, cheese_grater. Onions where in the game before, as was the cheese grater, but just not ever put on the map.
• Balance wise, i set it so that you should get all of the tools, and at least one of all the base ingredients. I extended the map by one column(4 items) so you are a little less limited on how many ingredients you have.

Interface stuff

• Continued refining the interfaces that were present before. Lots of little stuff tightened up
• New interface for food details accessed by the ‘details’ button on the side bar

Lists all the formulas that the food is involved in(excluding seasonings or as an additions). If you click on the icon it will bring you to a page that shows that recipes that food item is used in. The sub menu also keeps track of your path, so you can backtrack with a button next to the x button. You only at max need to hit two x buttons to close out (one for the sub menu, and one for the main details menu for the original food.)

The menu also tells you what tags or flavors the food has tagging along with it. It’s not an elegant display of the info, but it is more info than you had before!

-I removed the button for the meal prep area as there is nothing there yet. Also the ‘menu’ button doesn’t do anything. I have a setting menu in mind for the short term though. As well as a save functionality.

Behind the scenes stuff

• I reworked a lot of the combination code behind the scenes. Was annoying but it was cleaning up stuff and simplifying stuff using the godot knowledge I’ve gained since I first wrote it. So that’s fun! Not very exciting though.
• Mac version- who knows if it works. AFAIK if it does work, it will give you an error because i don’t have an apple dev license thing.

Development roadmap:

I don’t have a specific order of things to get to but i do have things that i want to tackle in the very short term.

• save/load system
• Basic difficulty settings (would add a modifier to a lot of values)
• more foods
• More characters (already have a few in mind). The min number in my head is 10, but eventually 15 or 20? It’s a lot, but i feel like it has to be like that to give a variety of characters, and to avoid feeling like the shops is for just the same 5 people every day.
• Weight gain
• More tricks
• More UI and info presentation work. Like changing the name of a food based on additions, so basic spaghetti can have a better name.
• Some kind of flavor bonus/conflict check?

Download here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/135029979

Join now: https://www.patreon.com/juxtaterrestrial

Follow me on Deviantart: https://www.deviantart.com/juxtaterrestrial
Follow me on Bluesky: @juxtaterrestrial.bsky.social on Bluesky
Follow me on twitter: https://twitter.com/Juxtaterrestria

[Juxtaterrestrial]

I already showed off some images of the other new characters(at their starting weight) but here is the two more from this last update

And above are some examples of when they have very full stomachs.

[Fpiggit]

Can’t wait until weight gain is added, will be watching the project closely until then!

[Juxtaterrestrial]

For sure! I want weight gain in too!

It is a short term goal to include it. The biggest time part of that is the models. But i have a workflow that works for me that means it doesn’t take that long.

I didn’t mention this here(only shared some results in discord), but in the last month i did a bunch of beginner stuff in blender to sculpt custom morphs. SO i should be able to have some fun with different fat shapes than you usually see on 3d models. Usually anyway - some people are already light years ahead of me.