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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.

1,2,5

Testing is ongoing. There are some issues with button sizes and sensitivity that make the current version insufferable on a phone - I'm experimenting with workarounds.
Thank you for letting me know you want it though. It's impossible to gauge interest without this kind of comment.

Update : It's not looking good.

Second Update : I'm giving up. To make it Android-compatible I'd have to reduce the number of available options in play, which means rebalancing everything, simplifying an already simplified game (the original version had both prestige and mid-'level' researchable upgrades with emergent synergies), starting over on all the playtesting... it'd be easier to make a new game from scratch at this point. I may still be able to eek out a browser-exclusive version that automates the clicking a little to compensate for the browser-parser delay, in which case that should be playable in a phone browser...hopefully.

You might want to check the weightgaming dot com wiki, it's doing a pretty good job tracking on weight-gain games, listed or otherwise.

It probably has something to do with Itch's recent change in how they list games with adult content, if I had to guess. Glad you found it anyway, though!

Aww.
May I suggest being real supportive, then saving at the beginning of the last Part? The endings are decided by (mild spoilers follow!)














1 - How many times you've upset Mary-Lynn slices the pie between possible Jerk / Average / Good Boyfriend endings, all-but-two-of-which occur during the Part that starts with the swimsuit discussion.

2 - The choices in that last part determine the ending from the list of Jerk/Average/Good endings available.

So be patient and supportive, then save at the beginning of the swimsuit discussion. If you can't intuit how the hint from the gallery applies, you can still do a little brute-force work to get it.

I'm either misreading the 'gets more complicated' bit or I disagree with that part specifically (although the rest of the post details the issue I came to point out, thank you for posting it feli5000!)

I have an 'original care assistant' who became a tenant, then reduced back to the general population. She flips to the level where she'll sometimes want to go out, sometimes want to stay home.  She visits 'Your Place' normally, but at other locations the green option to engage with her no longer does anything, forcing the player to 'stand her up'.  She rapidly hit the checks to be fully immobile, but at that point couldn't be visited at her house anymore (again, the green button issue).


Bug reports always look hostile to me, so I just want to reiterate that I think this game might be top-three material in this fetish space on itch.

Exactly what I was hoping for! Totally my fault for not noticing it earlier - I've been trained by so many games that drop all your progress when you visit the main menu to never touch the thing in the middle of a game.

A solid entry in the genre.  If I had to identify a need, I'd like an import/export option (save game as text string - I bop between computers a lot, being able to xfer saves is nice) but that's me being picky.
Fun to play, good longer-than-immediate-gratification-but-still-rewarding gameplay loop, nice use of colored text to warn click-pattern-players to slow down when something significant happens, a nice range of 'personality types', a felt power-creep as the MC gets more competent... just a real solid entry. Well done!

Fair criticism!
I tried to write it closer to "biting your tongue" than being dishonest, but there's certainly room to argue that I'm splitting hairs with that distinction.

Glad you enjoyed it! 'Fun little diversion' was what I was aiming for with this one.

I spent longer than I want to say trying to get a half decent image of Trisha with a kind of "Chubby WWF Wrestler" build hauling a kicking and screaming Jasmine who has been tossed over her shoulders.  It didn't work out.  I may try again later, but it was seriously cutting into my next-project time.

This is a new one by me - I get my default mouse (as do at least some others, since I've gotten comments about late game play from people who have made it all the way through.)  I guess I'd start troubleshooting by asking for your OS.  Dumb question, but you don't have your mouse pointer set to a flat black icon, do you?

I originally learned how to program in Ren'Py by 'finishing' a partial game, adding a bunch of content for the quasi-romance branch and a few different endings. If you're really into your idea, I left the code for Unstable Frienemies in plaintext so that it could be played with and tinkered for homebrews (or some light cheating) as the player / end-user desires.
You can even make modifications with baseline text editors - "notepad" suffices - you don't need the (free) Ren'Py utility to modify an existing game like this one. Maybe you would like to try your hand at making a branch of the game you'd like to see?

IRL, would you get swole working out a ton and eating ~nothing~, or working out regularly and eating ~the right things~?