Dev Diary#1 As any good story goes, the beginning is usually a great place.

The story of how Love is the Way to My Heart began dates back to early 2020. I, Dylan (MODOK123), was playing some games on weightgaming.com when I realized that their selection was very limited in terms of substance and realism. I wanted more than to just plump up a girl; I wanted something to intrigue me, pull me in, keep me there, but also delve into the reality of being in the FA community. This led me to think about creating my own game that would have many options, paths, and be realistic. However, I immediately ran into a barrier: I had zero coding skills! How was I to create an amazing game with zero skill and not enough funds to freely go to coding classes? Well, funny thing, I remembered that people had made games in Microsoft Excel, so I took to the internet to learn how to create a simple game in Excel. That option ended up being too much work. Instead, I began laying out the basis of the game in Excel, a road map if you will, tying in the different paths and working on a basic premise of the game. What program would I use? I didn't think that far ahead; I was in the zone and figured I would come to that decision later. However, I did recall Ren'py, a program used by another for his creation "A Piece of Cake!". I took to the internet again and began watching tutorials, only to discover that the language of coding is not something I was able to pick up very easily. I quickly became overwhelmed by the idea of using Ren'Py. With my failure to grasp Ren'Py, I also began to lose hope of creating a game, but then I remembered another game: "Gaining Perspective". That one uses a program called Twine, so I looked into it and after some fooling around with it and watching a complete basics tutorial series on Youtube I got a simple story going (more of which I will post in the 2nd diary), and was thrilled to see it in action, albeit minimal and without much finesse.

For weeks I played with Twine working on my first story, which at the time had no name, and decided to muster up my courage to create an account on Weightgaming.com to share my demo. It was barely working, but I wanted to get an idea of how the idea fared; to my surprise quite a few people emailed me about the demo and gave their opinions and critique, some seeing the potential. Eventually, I grew embarrassed of the demo and took it down, but kept the project alive on WGF, where I began my journey in the public eye.

Not long after posting, I decided that I needed a team with me, people to help me out. I created 8 girls, spreading far from the original idea of having just one, and I knew I couldn't write that much. As such, I reached out and people offered their assistance. With a group of 5 and a bare-bones Discord server, we set out to create LITWTMH, and now we are here, with over 600 members in the Discord, a Patreon, and a full team working on the project.