Iām working on a video game! Like, a serious one.
I wrote the original game (very slightly NSFW) for my own āhornyā game jam, Strawberry Jam (more likely to be NSFW), way back in February 2017.
You play as Lexy, my shameless Floraverse self-insert, who owns an enchanted collar that (among other things) makes her basically indestructible and allows her to easy to transform intoā¦ whatever, given some kind of sensible trigger. And then you do some puzzle-platforming to collect āstrawberry heartsā and gain access to new areas, much of which (surprise!) involves getting turned into things.
For example, this chain-link fence blocks you:
But if you let that green blob in the grass turn you into slime, you can walk right through it.
There are also spikes, which you get stuck on if you land on themā¦ but slime can walk right through them, glass can stand on top of them, and stone outright destroys them. And so on. As a jam game, itās not very expansive, but many of the puzzle elements interact differently with many of the handful of Lexy variants, which provided enough potential to make eight levels.
The jam game was rough, but I really liked the concept and wanted to expand on it. I spent a good chunk of the summer of 2017 on it, but it was a struggle. I was still fairly new to pretty much every aspect of actually creating a game ā Iād only been drawing for two years, Iād sometimes hit big gaps in the design with no idea how to fill them, and I wasnāt yet entirely comfortable with complex physics or shaders. The art in particular was a huge problem; it took me a long time to produce sprites that I was only passably happy with. My spouse Ash is an artist, and weāve made several games together where they produced all the art, but this was my idea and I was determined to draw it myself.
Then 2018 hit, which was a whole entire mess, and I didnāt really touch fox flux at all for over a year. I made a couple of other games with Ash, some finished, some not, and kept drawing intermittently.
I returned to fox flux for the middle of 2019, and decidedā¦ Iām not sure what I decided, exactly. I guess Iād gotten better at all the things that had been difficult for me before, so I set about trying to improve every aspect of the game at once.
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I realized the (many, many) improved sprites Iād drawn in 2017 were not actually very good, and drew a new Lexy design from scratch that absolutely blew me awayā¦ which meant throwing away all the existing art.
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Iād come up with a few new things for Lexy to turn into, each of which altered her behavior pretty significantly, and her code was becoming a spaghetti disaster. So I spent some time completely refactoring actors into bags of components, which I was unsure about until very recently and which ended up breaking pretty much every single object in the game, sometimes in subtle ways.
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I decided to add water, which unraveled into a whole pile of decisions and problems.
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I tried to make consistent or interesting physics for pushing things (e.g. wooden crates), and that became a nightmare. I easily spent weeks on this, trapped in a cycle of finding some edge case that couldnāt be fixed without considerably expanding what I was simulating, struggling to do that expansion while keeping all the basic stuff working, and then finding a new and different edge case.
Did I mention that I tried to do all of these things at the same time, while also trying to nail down the design of a game thatās naturally prone to a combinatoric explosion of interactions?
At a certain point it just felt hopeless. Iād poured easily over a year into this game, and all I had to show for it was a jumbled pile of stuff that didnāt work, strewn about a couple test maps that didnāt even contain any puzzles.
I donāt know what happened, exactly. Iād given up on the heavily-simulated push physics last year, at least, so that wasnāt so much of a concern any more. But I still had a mess. Iād long since written git status
off as unusable.
Until this past month, when I sat down and just started powering through the mess. One by one, I fixed the serious breakages that the component refactor had caused. I dedicated a day or two just to figuring out water physics, put a little more thought into it, and ended up with something that looks and plays quite nicely. I finished redrawing basic Lexy, and even added frames I hadnāt had before.
I think the difference wasā¦ fear. Iād previously hesitated so much, both in the art and the gnarlier code. It was such a struggle to get something working at all that changing it in any way was terrifying ā what if I broke it and couldnāt even get it back to how itād been?
I donāt know how to describe exactly how this felt, and I also donāt know how to explain what changed. It was like a switch flipped. I think it started when I drew new dirt tiles, and it didnāt even take that long, and I loved them. Iāve always had a hard time drawing terrain, and for once I just sat down and did it and it came out well and it looked like mine, like my style, which was a thing I hadnāt even really grasped I have before. After that I just cranked out a mountain of new sprite art, faster and better than anything Iād done before. Like Iād been accumulating XP over the past few years and just now decided to spend it all on levelling up.
Over the past six weeks, I have:
- Redesigned the terrain
- Vastly improved the palette
- Completely finished redrawing Lexy
- Redesigned the HUD
- Mocked up a new dialogue layout
- Drawn a new font
- Drawn and implemented new consistent level entrances
- Animated a treasure chest opening cutscene
- Animated getting a key
- Added a completely new tally at the end of a level
- Added transitions for entering and leaving levels
- Added swimming behavior
- Redrawn the old gecko as a much more visible bananalizard
- Animated the hearts and several other pickups
- Ported the original forest levels to use all the new stuff
- I donāt even know there has been just so much
Just look at the style evolution! God damn.
Hereās that same level from above:
A lot of the last few weeks went towards level transitions, which previouslyā¦ kind of worked. They were always a hasty jam hack that I never liked; there was a quick screen fade when going through a door, there was barely any notion of being āin a levelā vs not, and the game even counted the fucking hearts in a level on the fly the first time you entered it. It was all very silly.
But now (please pardon the occasional frame drops from my screen recorder):
I finally feel like Iām making some real progress. I finally feel like this could be something I take seriously, that it could be a real game, something more than half an hour long. At some point it just became an absolute joy to look at and run around in.
The basic concept is the same, but I want to add some structure to it. The jam game was four single-room levels you could tackle in any order without much guidance, then another set of the same. Which is fine, but doesnāt give me much wiggle room in the design.
In the full game, levels will contain not just hearts, but also a treasure (a la Wario Land 3), some amount of candy (usable at the shop to buy things of some description), and an explicit exit. The overworld will function a bit more like a world map, and though youāll still need to collect N hearts to get to the next zone, there may sometimes be obstacles that can only be overcome by finding the right treasure in a level.
I also intend to give Lexy some active abilities, for example this blown kiss (recorded with older art) that can toggle pink objects between two states:
I even have a plot in mind! The jam game had only a teeny tiny one.
Ash is currently busy with their own game, so I think this is gonna be The Thing I Do for a while. To that end, Iām in the middle of setting up some infrastructure:
Also, I recently created a secret Discord channel on the same server, where I intend to do planning and design work that Iām not ready to make public yet! Spoilers will abound, but if youāre interested and okay with that, you can get in by pledging at least $4 on Patreon and letting me know to give you the role. (I donāt use Patreonās native Discord integration because it does rude things like forcibly rejoin you to the server even if you manually leave.)
Iād like to finish porting the old levels over to new artwork, the new level infrastructure, etc. Itād make for a nice little Patreon demo or something, it gives me a milestone with pretty clear goals, and itāll leave me with at least a small palette of puzzle elements that I know work correctly.
Iād like to write about what Iām doing sometimes on this dang blog. Iāve found that structured writing is really, really, really hard when my head is a mess, and it has been extremely a mess for the last two and a half years (sorry), but jotting down what Iām already doing should be much easier than the more elaborate posts Iāve written, which need research and tooling and whatnot.
I have a good handful of puzzle elements ā some of which even work ā and a bunch of ideas for more, but I havenāt actually tried building levels since I made the original game! Thatās kind of the important part, so Iād love to do some of it now that the dust is finally settling.
I still have some design decisions to make, though theyāre getting trickier since Iāve already decided all the easy stuff. But Iāll save that for the generous folks who give me four dollars, I guess.
So. As I mentioned at the beginning, this game was originally made for a āhornyā game jam. Given that itās mostly platforming, you might be wondering why that is. I already feel like Iām crossing the streams somehow by even mentioning this on this blog, so Iāll try very hard not to get TMI here.
I have a foot in āTFā (transformation) kink circles, and one thing thatās always struck me about that subculture is how much of it is completely non-sexual. You can find no end of artwork of, say, someone being turned into one of those inflatable pooltoys ā where both the artist and the audience are obviously having a good time with itāāāyet with no hint of sexual elements whatsoever. Itās a form of sexuality that doesnāt need to be sexual at all.
I started Strawberry Jam because I wanted to see some adult games that were more creative with their gameplay. Much of the genre consists of otherwise regular games that occasionally show you some explicit artwork, and while thatās a perfectly fine way to design a game, I felt that the medium surely had more potential. It turns out that a non-sexual fantasy kink works wonders as a gameplay element; rather than just giving you a picture, the game takes a concept and has you experience it yourself, even figure out by experimentation how itās altered the way you interact with the world.
This puts me in a slightly awkward position. I do, genuinely and platonically, love these kinds of gameplay themes! I adore changes in how you perceive or interact with a world ā the dark world in Metroid Prime 2, the time reversal in Braid, the ādimensionā swapping in Quantum Conundrum, etc. I think this is a great concept that anyone can have a good time with, and I feel like this game is a love letter to the Wario Land series.
At the same time, I do also appreciate the kink inspiration. Even Lexyās collar was originally conceived as a gimmick I could use for drawing adult artwork. The jam game contains a lot of suggestive dialogue, since Lexy herself also appreciates the kink aspect. And that was a lot of fun to write, and Iām sure it enhanced the experience for other folks with similar leanings.
But this is such a good concept that I want it to be playable as just a regular puzzle-platformer as well. I think it would have fairly broad appeal, and I donāt want to hamstring myself by totally fucking weirding people out when it dawns on them that āoh the dev is kinda Into This huhā. And yet I donāt want to completely sterilize the game, either, becauseā¦ well, ultimately, itās my game and I like the suggestive parts.
This is a tough line to draw, and Iām not yet sure how to do it. Iāve considered just making alternative dialogue that you can opt into when you start the game, but given that Lexy already speaks differently depending on what form sheās in, I have no idea how feasible that is.
I donāt know how to gauge this. Iāve always been up to my armpits in the side of the internet that just posts porn and talks about sexuality casually, whereas Iām dimly aware that most people see sexuality as this completely distinct part of life that you hide in a small box, far away from the eyes of polite society. But maybe Iām overestimating that? Does anyone actually care if the protagonist of a game comments āhey this is hotā about something weird but innocuous?
Or maybe thatās exactly where the line is. I remember Nier: Automata, a game that is all too happy to show off the protagonistās immaculately-rendered ass, which is clearly meant for the enjoyment of both the creator and the players. But nobody comments on it within the game, which makes it seem incidental, somehow. I canāt explain why that is, and it feels slightly dishonest to me.
Am I overthinking this? If youāre not involved in any kind of kink circles and played the original jam game, Iām curious to hear how it read to you. Was it at all uncomfortable, like perhaps the game was expecting you to heavily empathize with a feeling you donāt share at all? Or does putting that feeling on a character, rather than aiming it at the human player, make it something you can easily shrug off? The full game will have more stuff going on, so there should be lots more dialogue that isnāt solely about Lexyās feelings, if that helps.
Hm, I thought I would have more to say here! I have a lot of ideas, but only a handful of them are implemented yet, and I guess itās hard to show what a game will be like before most of it works.
I hope this is enough to whet some appetites, at least! I havenāt been excited like this about anything in far too long.