Dev Diary#2 The origin of Love is the Way to My heart is a complex, yet simple one. It all started from wanting to create a fat fetish game that has more substance to it than "make a girl fat, the end".

The beginning was to be a semi-linear interactive fiction, in which the player is ‘on rails’, and presented with choices at different parts of their journey, and on their journey they would meet Kelsey, a chubby blonde working at Costco. As I was fleshing out the storyline, I realized that there will be some who don't like blondes, so I started to incorporate a means of meeting another girl by seeking help from a different employee at Costco: a brunette. I came to the conclusion that my ‘on rails’ interactive fiction wouldn't be all that great if this was the way I was going; as such, I began brainstorming and came up with a complete cast of 8 girls: Kelsey, Nicole, Jade, Audrey, Lola, Samantha, Miranda, and Amanda. I pulled reference photos from the internet to help me visualize who these characters are, and by analyzing the photos I derived a personality for each one. I now moved to a more CYOA-style of gameplay, where the player would wake up in their house and go through the day making decisions, and so I coded that into the Twine build, labeled "Twine Story". After getting a very rough draft done, I decided to create a name; I looked on the internet for some cover art for the background and came across a title card that was most likely to be used as a print to hang up. It was the phrase ‘LOVE is the way to my heart!’ with the word ‘LOVE’ made up of eating utensils and the ‘O’ being a plate. I fell in love with the image and promptly named my creation after it.

As I mentioned in the previous diary, I had released LITWTMH on Weightgaming.com as a pre- demo, a super basic concept just to receive feedback. Since then, the game has grown tremendously, as you can see, and with that, a lot of story and world-building had to be done in order to really flesh out the game. I wanted a relatable game that could very well be plausible in real life, but based in a fictional city somewhere in the USA. I wanted it to have all 4 seasons, to be a lakeside city that was semi-buried in the woods, somewhat isolated so as to give it that small-town feeling. Looking at the map of the USA, I quickly found that I know very little of other regions outside of my own - the Midwest, and decided to create "Showney Town" in the Midwest. I haven't specified where, nor do I want to, but know that Showney Town is in the Midwest next to a land-locked lake, surrounded by forest. I wanted it to be big enough to house multiple buildings and job opportunities, but small enough to believe one could cross these girls' paths. I also needed our main character to be one who had a job where they could cross the paths of these girls, in addition to having a good income and having some handyman aspects to them. Since I’m an engineer and know that engineers make good money, as well as being quite intelligent/creative, it only made sense to make the main character an engineer.

I now had a city, a main character, and 8 love interests; but as I acquired a team and had no means of paying them, I offered the then small crew a chance to submit their dream girl to me to add into the story, with some criteria to meet and uphold to, of course. Thus 6 more were created: Janine, Elizabeth, Brayden, Abigail, Tina, and Annaisha, offering a more varied cast in terms of ethnicity, jobs, likes, interests, starting weights, and personalities.

Today, the project has been going off these established pieces of the lore.