I’m T.F. Wright, and I’ve been creating transformation games and writing transformation stories for the past 8 years. I love transformations of just about every kind: weight gain, muscle growth, gender change, personality change, anthro/furry, age progression/regression… I’ve written about all of these and more.
Of course, I’m not the only one. I’m happy to say we’re living in a golden age for transformation games. There are mainstream games, indie games, mods, interactive stories and more that feature tons of transformations. It’s also never been easier for authors and developers to create and distribute their own creations. And TF Gamer is here to make sure you don’t miss out on any of it.
TF Gamer will be your portal to the transformation world. My team and I will review games, mods, and stories to serve you up the best of the best. We’ll pore through Patreon and Kickstarter to find the upcoming projects than are worthy of your financial support. We’ll provide tips on writing, art, voice acting, marketing, crowdfunding, and more, giving you the confidence and the skills to create your own projects.
Who am I, and Why do I Love Transformations?
I was the co-creator of the transformation visual novel The Pirate’s Fate, and before that, I wrote dozens of transformation ebooks on Amazon. Right now I’m working on a new visual novel, Wicked Willow.
I first became interested in transformation stories when I was a kid. I loved the ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books that included transformations. When I was a teenager, I started writing short transformation stories online. And after working in politics for a while, I finally made the jump to turning my hobby into a full-time gig. It’s thrilling, fulfilling, and sometimes a bit stressful, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Why do I find transformations so amazing? In the movie ‘Being John Malkovich,’ the lead characters write a newspaper ad which reads: ‘Ever wanted to be someone else? Now you can.’ That line really stuck with me, because I think just about everyone has had that thought at some point.
One thrilling element of transformations is being the kind of person you always wanted to be and free to do what you’ve always yearned for. That might be having a different gender, age, body type, personality, sexuality, or level of sexual inhibitions. All of these are fun to me.
But transformations aren’t always about you. Sometimes you’d like for the object of your desire to transform. I happen to enjoy this in two ways. I love ‘non-mainstream’ forms of beauty, with transformations like age progression, weight gain, female muscle growth, and human to anthro. and I also like playing with gender roles, with a good gender bender or age/strength transfer changing the power dynamics between a couple (like I did with the couple in my ebook From Zero to Xena.)
But that’s just my tastes, and I know from years of doing commissions that there’s lots of other perspectives out there. Some people really like transformations as a punishment, a kind of ‘Karma’s revenge.’ An example of this would be a popular but mean cheerleader transformed into an overweight, unhappy nerd, or a chauvinist playboy being turned into a slutty bimbo. Others love the darkness of embracing corruption or the whimsy of a deity-like character transforming random strangers at will.
We’re going to have a diverse team at T.F. Gamer, so that not only will be a wide variety of transformations covered, but we’ll also be able to cover different perspectives on what makes them great. If you like weight gain as a punishment, you might like different content compared to those who like it as a reward. We’ll do our best to have something for everyone, and allow you to find the games and stories that best suit your tastes, whatever they might be.
TF Games vs. TF Stories, TF Comics, TF Captions, and More
I love transformation content of nearly every kind, and we’ll discuss lots of different kinds of material here at TF gamer, not games exclusively. But I’ve chosen to make TF games main focus of my career and this site. So what makes TF games so great? Spoiler art: there’s quite a few reasons.
Choices
Games and text adventures often allow you to choose the direction of the narrative. This might mean having a greater sense of investment in the story and a responsibility for the outcome. It also might mean you are directing the plot towards specific transformations of your choosing.
TF Ebooks can attempt to provide readers with choices, but only to a degree. For example, in my ebook The Transformation Mall, I created a series of interwoven but stand-alone chapters that could be read in any order. This allowed the reader to only read about the transformations that they were interested in. If I had that idea today, I would want the mall to be the location of a game, where the player can decide which shops to visit.
Replay Value
Whether it’s a story game with choices or an RPG with different classes, games allow for replay value in the way that a story or comic simply can’t. By nature, some of the content is hidden away, an incentive if we are willing to work hard to find it. And sometimes the non-transformative gameplay elements can be fun and worth replaying in their own right.
Combining Different Mediums
TF games can include art, music, writing, voice acting, engaging gameplay, and more, creating an immersive experience that can be enjoyed on multiple levels. It often also features the combined works of several talented people.
Ownership of a New World
One benefit to the creators of transformation games is that they can bring to life an entire fictional world for people to play in. TF captions can be fun, but often they are only repurposed pictures from some other context, and they can’t be monetized or published, limiting what a creator can do with them. TF fanfiction can face similar hurdles.
What Kinds of Games Include Transformations?
There are quite a few mainstream games that include transformations as a mechanic. The fighting game series Bloody Roar, for example, featured human characters that could transform into anthropic beasts to execute powerful attacks. And there’s plenty of RPGs, like Skyrim, Diablo, and Baldur’s gate which include transformations as spells – though, unfortunately, transformations aren’t a major part of the gameplay experience.
To help fix that, there’s a ton of mods out there. Just in Skryim, for example, has mods for everything from BBW armor to muscle sliders, to a quest to turn a young witch into a Hagraven. For more, see our top 10 transformation mods.
One of the best mainstream games is The Wolf Among Us, which explores the transformation as a major story element and delves into the transformation experience thoroughly. (sadly, the sequel was cancelled.)
If you’re hungry for games that have a more transformations and more adult content, you’re going to want indie games. Anthro/furry visual novels, like The Pirate’s Fate and Changeling, include a very wide variety of transformations (Pirate’s Fate had over 35.)
And there’s a lot of interesting transformative text adventures, too. Games like The Merging, Corruption of Champions and The Underworld allow for lots of in-depth exploration of transformations. Without the need for as much art, the story can be longer and the choices can be more interactive.
Lastly there are also tabletop RPGs that are transformation focused, such as Werewolf the Apocalypse or Accursed, where you play as a cursed monster who can try to redeem themselves or allow themselves to become even further corrupted and transformed.
What Makes a Great Transformation Game?
Transformation games can be difficult to access fairly. More mainstream reviewers and curators might not be the intended audience for the game (The Pirate’s Fate ran into that problem a couple of times.) I’ll use my perspective as an author and designer to bring you insights into the game, as well as my view on what’s working and what’s not. Here are some of the criterion I’ll be using to evaluate games.
Transformation Tags
First, we want to provide a summary of the types of transformations in the game, how far they go, what gender and sexuality the characters are, and what tone they use (see above.) This is a simply a description, nobody’s going to judge one type of transformation or interest as superior to another.
Transformation Impact
Do the transformations in this game entertain and inspire? Are they explored in a satisfying way? Are they an essential part of the game’s experience? Or are the transformations merely a new coat of paint on an otherwise unrelated gameplay experience?
A great example of a game doing this well is the free tg tf game The Company, in which your character’s various transformations completely change the story experience, and manages to incorporate fetish-y subjects (like extreme breast expansion and bimbo tf) into fairly serious, well developed plot arcs.
Writing and Story
Is there an interesting story, with well developed characters we learn to love? Are the transformations a part of the story? Is the dialogue snappy and entertaining? Are there interesting plot twists? Or is the story simply a forgettable blur in between fun pictures?
The VN Escape from the Princess, although light in tone, still managed to create lovable characters. And although I wouldn’t call it either a transformation game, Doki Doki Literature Club and Undertale both managed to earn emotional reactions from their audience in different ways.
Gameplay
If this is a story game, how are the choices structured? What about replayability? No two games handle these questions more differently than Life is Strange and Detroit Become Human.
A game like Life is Strange has amazing characters and a great mechanic which compliments the storytelling, but the choices aren’t really interactive. Regardless of what you choose, most of the story is linear, with only one meaningful decision to be made at the very end. This also means that the game’s replay value is basically non-existent.
Detroit: Become Human takes the opposite approach. Every choice changes the story in radical ways. Not only can each chapter in the story develop differently, but choices carry over from chapter to chapter to create thousands of permeations in the narrative. The value of replay is incredibly high, although my investment in the characters was a bit less.
I would love to make a project that used a similar system to Detroit, but unfortunately, the complexity is so great that it would be nearly impossible to do at the indie level.
This is actually a problem with a lot of story games: as a story becomes more interactive, the complexity of managing the narrative can increase exponentially. For Wicked Willow, I created an entirely new system which I hope is the best of both worlds. I recorded a video on my design philosophy and the types of dilemmas creators tend to fall into.
Many story based games also incorporate puzzles or minigames, and some include an RPG experience. The text adventure tf game Corruption of Champions does a fine job combining the RPG aspects with the story, as ‘managing’ your level of corruption stats is a key element in both the gameplay and the transformations.
Art, Visuals, Music, and Voice
Does the game look good? What about the interface, backgrounds, and cutscenes? Is the music an original score, or an overused public domain score? Does the voice acting bring the characters to life, or is it an annoyance that you have to mute?
Value for Money (and Time)
Is this a free game, a freemium game with certain content available through microtransactions, a game you can buy, or a subscription service? The type of model is important to consider, but the more important question, but even more important is considering if the overall quality of the experience worth your money. Is the game currently in a finished and playable state? If the game is completely free, is it worth investing your time? Time is a precious resource and we don’t want to waste yours.
Other Genres at TF Gamer
I mentioned above that my goal is for TF Gamer to have something for everyone. Inclusivity is more important that purity. And that means we’re going to also cover genres that don’t always include a transformation.
Giantess TF is a great example. A woman can certainly transform into a giantess, in a transformation which is sometimes called Macro (I’ve written a couple of Macro stories myself.) But a giantess game or story doesn’t have to have a transformation – the character could start off as a giant. I think it can be fun either way, and we won’t gatekeep anyone.
Monster Girl is another great example. I’m a huge fan of monster girl transformations, probably because Shrek was such a seminal work in my own development as a creator, and Princess Fiona as an Ogre is just gorgeous. But if there’s an amazing game about monster girls, I’m not going to require that the character starts out as a human to cover it.
Vore (also known as consumption) is another interesting genre which lends itself to games quite well, and it is sometimes combined with either Monster or Giantess. By itself, Vore isn’t a transformation, but Vore games are something we’ll chat about. I’ve written a vore book before, The Naga Binge, and many years ago I designed an expansion for a vore-themed card game called Cartovore.
There’s still other genres I’m happy to take a look at. For example, does hypnosis count as mental transformation? In general, I’d like to lean on the side of including as much content as possible, as long as there’s people who’d like to read it.
How to make Transformation Games
There’s a lot of pitfalls in creating games. I’m primarily a writer (I was also the coder for The Pirate’s Fate,) and so I know how challenging game creation can be. I’ll go more into this process in later posts, but for now, here is a brief overview of each step you need to take to create a game.
Grow Your Audience
If you’d like her game to be seen by people, you probably need an audience. And the best way to get one is to build it. There are a number of ways to do this – I posted short stories (for free) on various forums to build up my profile before launching my own site in 2011. If you’re an artist, you can use your artwork to build an audience. And, of course, if your project is great, TF Gamer can help you get the word out, too.
Building or Joining a Team
If you’re just starting out, it is probably easier to join a team than start one yourself. If you have a specific skill – creating backgrounds, doing voice acting, graphic design, etc – you will likely to be able to help someone else and get valuable experience in the process. We’ll teach you the best places to look to find your team. You can also become active in a popular Discord group (here’s a link to our Discord, by the way).
Limiting Scope
The Pirate’s Fate took far more effort than I anticipated because of promises to custom backers and our own inflated sense of scope. You can always make a project bigger, but it’s harder to pare things back. Especially on your first project, try to have modest goals.
Crowdfunding
I’ve launched 5 successful crowdfunding campaigns and consulted on two others, and managed a successful Patreon. I’ll share detailed information on crowdfunding tactics later, such as which platform to pick and how to spread the word.
What do You want to See?
This kind of site can’t exist without the support and engagement of our audience. So let me know what you’re most interested in seeing, including types of content I did not mention here, and I’ll try to make it happen. Also, I’d love to know, what is your favorite transformation game, and why? I’ll see you in the comments.
