i'm typing this on my phone so i don't have a screenshot— wait i probably have one in discord somewhere, hang on
*rustling sounds*
alright so here's a gif of a test level from when i was first putting it together. it looks a bit better now i think.
anyway this is DRONE DUNGEON, a doubly fictional retro game about leading little automatons around a board so that they collect all the hearts.
let me rewind slightly.
fox flux is inspired by wario land. wario lands 1 through 4 all had minigames, but 2 is the real standout. (3 just had golf and it fuckin sucked.) 2 had two minigames: a memory/matching one inside levels, and a kinda... 7-segment digit guessing game after levels. they were both very simple and straightforward games, but with just enough wiggle room for strategy.
did i say strategy? sorry, i meant gambling.
the memory match game is very simple: it shows you a target sprite. it flips over eight cards, exactly one of which has the target sprite on it. then it flips them all back facedown and asks you to pick the matching one.
the catch is that you can pay more to make the game easier. at "hard", the cards flip so fast that you only have time to scan them as a whole. but at "easy" you can practically saunter through, looking at them one at a time.
but if you get it wrong, you just lose, and you have to reset the minigame and try again. and you can only spend the coins you've found in the level so far.
the digit game is at the end of each level, and i've always found this one fascinating. the game picks a random digit, represented by a grid of nine facedown panels. you can pay 50 coins apiece to have a random panel flipped face up. at any time you can guess what digit it is, but you only get one guess. if you get it wrong, you have to beat the level again to try again!
and so there is both a puzzle and a gambling aspect to this — you have to know when the digit has been unambiguously identified, but you also have to know what the odds of getting new useful information are. if the expected cost of a clear answer is some 300 coins, maybe it's better to just guess. and of course you can just pay the 450 to reveal every digit every time, but that's two or three levels' worth of coins.
these games have stayed lodged in my head for a long time for being incredibly simple, but also challenging the player in a different way and using gameplay alone to riff on one of the cornerstones of wario land: greed
so i wanted a minigame. not just because wario land has them, but because... i think it helps break things up a little? i think there's a very "jam game" feeling where you have a small set of mechanics and you just extend those out with all the levels you can think of and then the player is doing basically one thing the whole time with no breaks. for some kinds of games that's fine, but i get a distinct sort of unreal feeling when it's a platformer, since that's a space, and the suspension of disbelief starts to break down if existing in the space means traversing the same three obstacles and doing nothing else? you'll notice even the very old mario and wario games try to avoid this by shaking up the tileset, sprinkling in water levels or autoscrollers, dropping in oddball level themes here and there.
and this isn't to like, dunk on anyone else's game or cram games into a particular category. remember, fox flux was a jam game where i stretched out my handful of mechanics, so i very much do want to distinguish it from its roots now, to make it a Full Game whatever that means
but this is a game about puzzles and exploration, not about buying the biggest castle like wario is trying to do. so i wanted something that would give a similar "break from the action" feeling while still challenging the player in a different, relevant, way.
two development developments combined to create the game i ended up with:
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a lot of lexy forms are, unsurprisingly, inspired by TF kink themes. an extremely conspicuous such theme is drone kink, where someone is (or more often, becomes) some kind of robotic critter that simply follows commands.
i had a concept for a lexy drone for a while, where you could place signs and then become a drone and would follow them, but it just didn't work, even in my head. it seemed like you'd traverse the same space twice, once to put all the signs down, and then a second time... watching the game play itself. and if you could already get everywhere to place the signs then what was even the point?
(the idea of signs would be recycled into general road-style signs that lexy always obeys, generally in the form of being blocked or not, so that's nice.)
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i had just gone on a like seven-month sabbatical to make lexy's labyrinth, a chip's challenge emulator. so that was extremely on my mind, and also something i now had considerable experience doing.
here's the kicker: one of the things i have always most loved about chip's challenge is the little contraptions, the machines that run by themselves. one of my most vivid memories of playing it as a kid is a relatively early level whete there's a room full of fireballs, and you have a few blocks available, and you have to place them to lead the fireballs out and into water. (otherwise they will make a chaotic mess and definitely kill you.)
and the first time i did that, it was magical. like a little conveyor belt of all my enemies, only built out of a few blocks that i had placed. it was way more interesting than sokoban puzzles, because it actually did something; it ran on its own and meaningfully changed the state of the level as it did so.
and this brings me to: drone dungeon.
you probably already gathered from the gif, but drone dungeon is a grid-based puzzle game where there is no player. instead, you get to place a restricted set of tiles into an existing level, and then set it running. the little drones will wander around as instructed, but you can't control them directly. they can't die, exactly, but if they run into something solid, they shut down. there's no exit to reach; you win if you get all the hearts, and you lose if you run out of active drones.
the main mechanic is in the form of signs on the ground, which instruct drones where to go when they pass over them. usually that means which way to turn. but there are also some more complex ones, like "turn around when you next hit something".
also, because facing direction is so important (drones simply walk forwards), there are two kinds of push floor — the cc-style force floor which makes an object turn in the direction it's pushed, and the conveyor belt (seen above) which does not.
it's a whole game about contraptions. the game is, itself, one big contraption. the drones are functionally identical to monsters, except that they can pick up the macguffin.
and it makes for a very different kind of puzzle experience, because setting the dungeon running... costs candy, and you can only spend the candy you've found in that level so far. so you have to be able to look ahead at what will happen, but you have as much time to think about that as you like. (i think there's some overlap with more complex baba is you levels, there.)
(incidentally, this creates another massive design space where i could Really Go Too Far And Must Restrain Myself, but i think that makes the dungeons really interesting to design. plus, they are somewhat self-restraining — you can only place the given tiles on empty floor, but you want a lot of empty floor to add some ambiguity, but that adds room for alternative solutions!)
i love this. i don't think there's anything else quite like it. it's got a bunch of features not exposed in the demo, including a bunch of not-yet-used tiles, a built-in dungeon editor, and a button that encodes a level as an ascii string and dumps it on the clipboard. also a few perks to make it easier as the game progresses and the dungeons get harder.
and you get pieces of postcards (little artworks) as rewards for playing the dungeons, as a nod to the wl2 digit guessing game, which gave you pieces of a big treasure map.
(honestly my biggest worry about this concept is that it'll take me ages to draw enough postcards)
