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Don't be hard on yourself - it's not exactly a standard installation process!
I've gotten a fair deal of "sucks but it doesn't work why?" level requests for troubleshooting - your initial post was excellent, detailing the issue and providing enough data to figure out the issue right away. I'd be happy if all the messages I got for my games about elements not working were as thorough.

Yes, that's where the FILES need to go. There shouldn't be any folder named ChikasFireV0201 - if you're seeing one with your unzip software, open it up and extract the files inside of it directly into the game folder. 

If you unzip it to the right place, your operating system / unzip software should ask you "Do you really want to overwrite these twenty-something files?". That's the key - it needs to overwrite some of the baseline FillMeUp stuff or else the ending material never sees it's trigger conditions.

What you did, unzipping so the files are in the game's folder tree but not replacing the original stuff, just confuses the game - there are a lot of places where two copies of the same information exist, and it doesn't know which to go with. That's what your previous error was all about.

For this to work :
- You can't have that second set of files. That'll always throw error messages, even if you do everything else correctly. I'd recommend deleting everything and starting again from scratch.
- When you unzip Chika's Fire, after unzipping Fill Me Up, you have to drop the files such that all of the non-image files land in the /game directory and overwrite existing files.

It looks like you unzipped all the files into a subdirectory in "game" called "ChikasFirev0201". That's going to give you errors - it means there's duplicates of a lot of the *.rpy material now, and Ren'Py doesn't have a system for deconflicting when multiple labels have the same name, that sort of thing. We need to get the 'vanilla' Fill Me Up files overwritten by the Chika's Fire ones, not supplemented by them.

If I'm not mistaken : You can look now you'll see that there's a script.rpy in "game" and in "game/ChikasFirev0201", right? A lot of that kind of doubling-up? That's the issue, if true.

Delete the whole ChikasFirev0201 directory, then try re-extracting the zip such that all the contents 'overlap' with the existing files. So the script.rpy in the zip file overwrites the script.rpy that's in the "game" folder, the screens.rpy in the zip file overwrites the screens.rpy that's in the "game" folder, etc etc.

Yes.

The itch download of Fill Me Up is supposed to be 0.3.0, which isn't compatible with Chika's Fire anyway.

Check the installation instructions above - there's a hypertext link to the Weight Gaming forum where Bobo put his 0.2.0 download link.

Nowhere in ~this~ game...

Try from Germany. I'm getting the Windows and Linux versions fine from Dusseldorf, although the Mac one seems to be lost/inaccessible. Are you using the link labeled in the main/top post, under "December Update"?

Just the Mega one, which is working for me. Maybe it's geographical? I don't know what Mega's restrictions are... if you have a VPN, maybe try downloading from a different country.

Yeah, the Windows/Linux download seems fine but the Mac one gives an error. 

I don't have a copy of the Mac version, no. Sorry.

Any verdict? All good on the Apple?

Thank you for writing that! If CF means people try the amazing Fill Me Up who wouldn't otherwise, it was worth making. I hadn't even considered the possibility that that might happen.

I called it "Chika's Fire", it's over on my page. Essentially just adds a few possible endings to the existing material, so instead of an End Of Content message there's an epilogue.

I have playtested it on Windows and Linux, but it *should* work on Mac too. I think it would work on Android if FMU works for you there, presuming you can finangle getting the files in place in their specific directories.

I imagine a horizontal bar, like when using the pump, but with two small indicators moving towards the center of the screen. A huge green field is centered on and occupies the middle of the bar, and if the player hits the confirmation button while the indicators are over it they manage to get unstuck. Too early, or let the indicators touch in the middle, and they fail. But there's like a second and a half, easily handled.

Of course, those huge green chunks? Easily hit? Is it just your imagination, or are they getting thinner? The timing more precise as your BMI goes up?

Good find. If you want a nearly universal technique, snatch up a hex code viewer and get multiple save files with the fewest changes you can manage between them, with the variable you want to switch being one of those changes. (So, for example, in this game you might want to run the same day exactly the same way except for buying one watermelon in Save A and five in Save B.)  Then compare differences in the save files, keeping an eye out for the specific numerical quantity you were targetting. (IE What your cash was when you saved in both instances.)

This works across a wide, wide array of save file types - jsons, homebrews, rawtext, *.sav, etc etc etc

Bobo, I've been toying around with a fan mod for your game that I'd like to make accessible over on my itch page after it's finished.  Is that cool with you, the idea of randos making expansion packs for your stuff? If not, lemme know, either here or through a DM over on the weight gaming forums.

Thank you for putting out such a good, thought out, consistently evolving game! I hope it's alright that I linked to this on my itch page - yours is one of the best games in their ouvre here on Itch.

How good is this game? My save file is almost 300mb of just text (json data) from how long I've been playing it, that's how good it is. 

99% of the country is now Obese, I'm directly responsible for the top 5 OnlyFats creators, own half of the top 50 list, and pulling in about $400k a day passive income... I'm calling that a win!

I can second this. I've played a few hours since the last posted update 22 days ago without issue, but have been receiving a crash log occasionally starting today (8th of July).
Mine all come immediately after calling someone, and seemed to occur repeatedly (and maybe only?) when calling a girl who worked at my Dizzy's franchise location. I only knew my 3 employees in that town. After going out and meeting someone on the street, then going on a single (error free) date with them that started with me calling them up, the issue seems to have resolved - I can now call my coworkers without issue.

I'll try to capture a screenshot if I see it again.

You're welcome! Again, great story.
You of all people would know, of course, but I had a very different analysis of Nicole's nature, looking back. (Spoilers after the break!)
















Nicole is at least a little manipulative, faking a reason for being there and everything, but she's finding excuses to spend time with an older woman and goes along with everything Ann suggests until the confession is well under way. If Nicole was as submissive as Ann, or even more so, but had accepted it and embraced it and decided to move forward on that path with confidence, how would she have behaved differently? Once Ann reveals her predilections, wouldn't Submissive!Nichole say to herself :

'Well, then I need to change myself to become the kind of person who will dominate her in exactly the way she has implied in order for her to be happy. Since my happiness is predicated on my partner getting what they want and my sacrifices in making that happen, I should sacrifice all notions of how I thought our relationship might play out in order to make her fantasy a reality.'

The visual language of games tells us that her character is designed to be a slightly unhinged, corrupting temptress by way of the red accents, Catherine style hair, aggressive hourglass figure, etc etc... but aside from being a little pushy with the wine, she doesn't do or say anything domineering until Ann reveals that that is what she wants. At which point she becomes that thing.

Nicole is undoubtedly in the Dom role by the end, but she might be there either because that's what she's into OR because she's submitting herself entirely to what Nicole wants. I think the way the beats are staggered and how Nicole acts given what she knows at any given moment that the latter of the two options seems more likely. I know one doesn't usually associate "Assertive" and "Confident" with being a Submissive type, but they're not mutually exclusive, and if one was all of those things they would have acted exactly like Nicole did. Right?

Surprisingly sweet? I don't want to do analysis here in the comments, since it'd be impossible to avoid spoilers / major plot beats, but scanning over the other comments I get the impression that Nichole's, ah, motivations and mindset are ... purer?... than others have interpreted them.  Good job injecting nuance!

The downloadable version is now available. It still needs a browser to play, but no longer requires an internet connection.

You're number one! The first (outside of play testing) to pull it off! YAY!!!
EDIT : Why are you thanking me? If anything I'm the Narrator, Player - your tenacity is why things are the way they are now.

I'm glad you enjoyed it. Thank you so much for letting me know you got there.

It's entirely written by hand.
I briefly considered adding images, but I'm a terrible artist (in visual media) and don't abide by the Fire-And-Forget methods of stable diffusion generated image creation. All the adjustments and inpainting I ended up doing on the "AI" images I put together for "Unstable Frienemies" and "A Unique Diet" put the generation time for most pics in the vicinity of the forty minute mark. That would end up being *substantially* longer time commitments in this case, since each individual image would have narrative supporting event depictions, and the farther you go from "attractive woman at close-to-middle distance stands passively, looking cute" the harder you have to struggle to wring your intent out of most of the models I've used. Assuming even a 50% increase in the amount of time it'd take to gen up each image, and just one per page, which is about as conservative an estimate as I can make, we'd be looking at about three solid 40 hour work weeks of effort for me to add images. It'd be a lot of work.

I also think it would weaken the game. There are a few reasons, but the strongest argument goes something like this : Zella is The Ideal Woman, right? Because we're seeing the narrative through Tiffany-tinted glasses. If I solidify Zella down into a series of concrete images, how can that possibly live up to Tiffany's outlook? Maybe I could do it for something like 5% of the players whose aesthetic predilections matched a particular set of images, but it'd be literally impossible to make a picture of Zella that, across the board for all players, supported the mental model of her that Tiffany has, and that she can perpetuate through emotional and 'conclusional' terminology within the text. Words are the proper medium for this particular story, in a way that images aren't.

Thank you for playing, and for your comment. (I'm going to parse "crap" as a synonym for "stuff" instead of as a qualitative declaration.)

Oooh, I like 12. IMHO it's not the best ending, possibly not even one of the "good" endings, but it's probably the one where Tiffany has the most power/authority in her ongoing relationship with Zella.

There are plans for it.

Thanks Fam! I went through a couple of edit cycles to try to reinforce that difference.

What ending did you get the first time around?

This couldn't have been an easy choice - thank you for making it.

A popular question, that's shown up on the game's entry over on weightgaming dot com too. To quote my response over there :

'That’s the hint for the Broken ending. Did you get that one? It ends with the reply from the publishing house and a pic of Jasmine and Trisha and a third girl doing cheer-leading together.

If not, tell Jasmine to go away after she embarrasses you in the bathroom instead of agreeing to be her pet.'

This is golden.  It amazes me to think you cranked it out for a Jam.

I have a dislike for VNs with magic, but this is perfectly executed for my tastes. A lovable and reasonable competent 'muggle' has a brief window of time to, from a position of total ignorance, investigate how the magic affecting her came about and how to handle/mitigate/deal with it.  It does another thing I love, which is having a short play cycle where failure is the expected result but players can logic (or brute force) out better results by expanding their player-side knowledge. 

Some of the better Daz3d stuff I've seen in the entries of 'this type' of game - pretty good body posturing, facial expressions, scene framing, and you handled the issues with breaking Daz3d's "upper limits" for weight pretty well. Lots of varieties in how things can work out, and some nice branching despite the short runtime. Good characters, well written, no bugs that I found on Linux. (My only complaint is the green-on-orange text being hard to read in places, but that seems to only be a serious issue in the first few scenes.)

Maybe you've bypassed my critical analysis with a freckled auburn-haired protagonist (I'm a sucker for 'em, as my game Unstable Frienemies probably suggests), but I think this is top shelf material. I hope it's okay that I put a link to it on my creator profile page under the "Other people's stuff - Best of Itch" section.

Well, bad news on that front too....

The browser-based Ren'Py utility doesn't play nicely with this game, unfortunately. There's too much of a lag whenever the player clicks for the game to flow anything like what it should, so this is a download-only game I'm afraid.

Oh, it's not an 'even' type of game, it's an odd one. That must be where you got confused.

Unfortunately, no. After some attempts and testing, it's become clear that I'd have to eliminate core gameplay elements to streamline things for the smaller screen, which means re-balancing everything to make a worse game with less player agency.

Additionally, making the options viable for thumbing instead of clicking means rewriting the game from scratch to use imagemap selection instead of Ren'Py's default menu choice selection system. I'm not going to build a scaling omniscreen compatible GUI and rewrite the whole of the code.

It annoys me too when a game on Itch I want to play isn't browser or phone compatible. But, unfortunately for this game, them's the breaks.

Are you a patreon over at weightgaming dot com and haven't bought the Supporter Edition of this? Kick me a DM from your patreon-supporter-tagged account and I'll hook you up with a free copy of the Supporter Edition of Unstable Frienemies.

"Thanks, MTM!"

I want to put emphasis on issues eight and nine above - these stand out as 'bugs' as opposed to 'balance issues'. The later are a more forgivable in a fetish game, but the bugs are a bit glaring and distracting.

13 : Level 19's image is missing.
14 : One of the achievements requires getting to level 50 on something that's capped at level 5 ( 14b : I can get it to level 6, even though the level cap still shows up) (14c : The option to level up portion sizes never grays out, even after capping)

Had fun though! I got to 19 and tripled the weight from there without further results, so I'm assuming that's the endgame.

I wouldn't get my hopes up at this point.  I haven't started and am elbows deep in two other projects ATM.

I have the narrative excuse and the mechanical steps theoretically figured out, though, so maybe it'll still happen. It's the sitting down and coding / proofreading / playtesting that's the issue.

You gave me a (hopefully) clever idea - change the background color when I post an update, so it all 'looks new' to returning players. So thanks for that!

I agree as to the need for a save scheme. Or at least a code for loading back to a particular 'stage'. This one's mostly 'done' because it's functional and the computer I used to program it with all the associated software and dependencies and so forth is a brick now, more than being 'done' because it's in the final state I wanted it to be at.

That's too slow. Can you keep your stomach nearly topped off? Are you working out at all? It's important to keep your energy up enough to do batches of high-efficiency work so you're not broke all the time, but selecting the 'exercise' type option in this type of game can be counterintuitive.

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