Thank you for the imput, I may keep this in mind. What would you say is pregnancy done well vs bad?
To add to the old comment, as of now, the option to be dominant vs enemies has already been added, which I think suits the gameplay.
there is a long list of ways to fuck it up
BAM instant pregnant
offspring instantly vanishes
being pregnant affects nothing
being pregnant makes everything impossible
X cumshots = pregnant
to do it right, the game somehow has to portray it actually meaning something. pregnancy even when it is not wanted is very vulnerable and intimate event. making it treated like any other random status is not good - unless you make ALL statuses deeply convey meaning.
your game is not narrative heavy, so you must use how character moves and behaves to communicate significance. body language, idle animations, affects of mobility or stats, different attack animations, stages of visual progression - these things create immersion of the event. so does interactions with offspring, either positive or negative. perhaps both depending on the species. birth should not be excessively fetishised, but should not be treated like invisible POP instant baby either.
Parasite in City did it okay, not excellent, but okay. VH did it the best in many ways, except it was old jank game.
It is good to also not make it only a bad thing, so having some kind of benefit from it may be a good idea. Mothers carry DNA from the father in real life, so gaining attribute/benefits from father is reasonable game logic. not required, but it is an idea to play with. This could be a reward for being able to survive certain sections of game levels while pregnant, like "Challenge mode" with bonus payoff.
and this is not exclusive of having certain offspring be a threat, like in Parasite in City. If monsters using player to reproduce, that may become escalating threat to player. Both advantages and disadvantages at same time could be useful to give player dilemma of risk/reward behaviors.
But not all aspects must be gameplay, some can just be immersion. like as example, if player has idle animation where she can summon baby to cuddle it, then player has sense of "offspring existing" even though it will disappear back into magic portal when they start moving again. this narrative is consistency to make better immersion of the event. this idea only matters in some possibility of implementations, but it is an example of non tangible immersion.