itch.io

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

I have a distaste 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~?

Yup. Could happen. Maybe for the one year anniversary?

But maybe not.

Anyway, glad you're still coming back to this after a couple of months! It's nice to know it has some sticking power.

I think you got your question answered over on "the other forum", but try making different conversational choices during the final 'cutscene'.

I can see the appeal. Unfortunately (spoilers after the break):

Jasmine and Trisha both have fatal flaws. Jasmine's is that she is evil incarnate - everything she says or does is to hoist herself above others. People are just tools for that purpose, and words are just tools for manipulating people.  Trisha's is that she falls into patterns / ruts and stays in them. That's why after the first three days of gameplay she's all but locked into a path, with it only possible during the second 'week' to force herself onto another one before becoming locked-in for the rest of the game. It's also why Jasmine was able to circumvent her and steal the squad from her in high school, and why she's settled into a barely-viable manner of employment.

With that in mind, Trisha isn't capable of the prolonged narcissistic nigh-on-Luciferian depths of apathy-enabled subjugation-of-others that Jasmine is.  That's why her equivalent ending features Trisha either cutting Jasmine out of her life or taking reasonably good care of her even as Jasmine becomes more and more degraded - Trisha is a better person, and that raises the floor on how bad she can be.

Falling out of her rut and becoming super healthy while overcoming her arch enemy would, if anything, make Trisha a better person. So, no, I won't be making the ending you suggested. If it makes you feel better, Jasmine-by-another-name is a main player in the possibly upcoming post-apocalyptic game I'm sketching out, so you might get to see her get hers in new ways if that ever comes to fruition.

Just uploaded v1.0.1... It's 90% just fixing that one bug.

Just pushed one, although it only fixes the one remaining bug I've been notified of and a small handful of typos.

I'm extremely unlikely to implement a whole 'nother developmental pathway, with all that entails... but your request was reasonable, so here's a consolation prize :

Aohur fvb mvy fvby xbhspaf jvuaypibapvu.

The game keeps track of what endings you've seen.  From the second cycle onwards, you'll get a hint about how to find a new ending when you finish the game.

Eight.

There are a few images that didn't end up getting used or deleted.  As a rule of thumb, if the image name looks like a file hash, or the letter suffix is "d" or later, it didn't get shuffled into the in-play mix.  There's at least two in the "S" subfolder too, and I *think* a few Jasmines that didn't make it into the game.









The coke is as you discovered - almost an extra day of energy, if desired, or enough cash to get the fast food ending / not worry about working.  Some folks had a hard time juggling Energy re : the diet requirements and the work outs and the work to afford food and rent, on the Frienemies path, so it's a bit of an alternate pathway for the Frienemies or Burger Queen routes.

The doors do not open.

You get 'wg points' for the crippling hunger, super expensive 'starving to death' cutscene. I ~think~ you could still pull it off if you did some other activities that fake as protein intake - walks in the park, for example, add a +1 to the hidden Protein counter, so you could theoretically go the fit route without manually eating anything if you did enough of that kind of thing.

Try a gym-heavy run while eating protein. Chicken and eggs are safe bets.  There's no 'fat gain' from things like the early salads or cucumbers either, so don't feel like you have to starve Trisha to get swole.

There are eight in total, but if you went "both ways" at the end of sub and dom then you've seen them all.

There are four endings where you "beat Jasmine", for some measure of the phrase, and one that might be considered a tie depending on how you look at it.  SPOILERS BELOW:












None of the ways to defeat Jasmine involve playing the game the way she wants you to, or playing the 'intuitive' way a game in this fetishspace would go.

That would be a weird bug (although the nature of bugs is that they do weird things) since the only time the game checks persistent data (ie variables that were not created during the particular game instance in progress) is at the very end of a run.
SPOILERS FOLLOW

Seeing your answer to IlLuco27's question below, though, I suspect it's because you're not prioritizing high protein foods.  You can only get on the super-fit arc if you hit the gym regularly and take in a certain amount of protein as well - it's not just how much you eat, but what you eat, that matters.  Does it put you on the fat arc if you visit the gym, avoid high-carb / high-sugar food, AND each protein rich (burgers, chicken, eggs) stuff?

Glad you enjoyed it. Thanks for the review and the suggestion.  I'm calling a wrap on this game (although there's still at least one minor bug fix pending for something that only crops up under very specific circumstances), but I'm glad I was able to leave you wanting a little more while still being relatively satisfied!

I understand the desire, but if I put together a step-by-step guide then I'll never learn where I've failed to adequately signpost in-game.  Instead of getting targeted questions I'll be outsourcing what should be in the game into an external document, and all my future work will be made without the insights that having people ask me about accidentally-nebulous elements of this game would grant me.  Help me out - where's the difficulty you're having?