fox flux is my video game.
it is my video game. it is my magnum opus, the thing i am letting myself be too ambitious about
i put out a game called "fox flux" for the very first strawberry jam. the idea was pretty simple: i'd played a few "adult" games where the whole gimmick was that you'd get a sex scene if you lost. as if sex and kink were a punishment, or a parallel to violence being inflicted upon you.
why not the opposite? why not have the spicy part drive the game? so i took my favorite tame spicy part — turning into things — and built a game around it. (btw the jam game had some pretty flirty dialogue, but i'm trying to be more lowkey this time around.)
inspired by some old and new classics, i had two rules in my head: one, nothing could seriously hurt you, so there were no game overs. and two, i have sort of a distaste for games where it's just taken for granted that you slaughter forest creatures on sight, so you can't hurt anything else either.
so for example there were spikes, but since you were a rubber fox, you'd harmlessly stick on them. you could turn into slime, and then pass through them. you could turn into glass, and be solid enough to run along top of them. you could turn to stone, and then your weight would smash them.
i squeezed eight levels out of this, increasingly janky as the jam neared its end and i started to run dry on ideas and/or art ability. but i made something sizeable for the first time and that was pretty cool.
anyway that was six years ago. i've been plugging away at it since. a whole lot of things have happened in the meantime, so it's not like this is a game with six years of dev time. like the whole thing with us fleeing our house happened only one year in, and i spent a couple years after that struggling to get back on my feet at all. plus there's stuff like, i've redrawn all the player art twice as my own art ability has improved, and for this game there is a lot, and it just takes me a long time. also there was that thing where i spent a whole summer trying to make a really good system for pushing boxes around, and also it turns out to be really complicated to make a player character who can switch between a bunch of different physics interactions so i did a big experimental refactor to make that work and it broke literally everything. also the ui and cutscenes are all hand-coded, there's no gui game environment here, it's all text files, so some of that has been a little tedious to put together from scratch.
anyway
i have a cool plot idea, i have a bunch of cool game mechanics in mind (some of which even work), and i'm even starting to get the hang of the level design style i wanted out of this
and i'm finally emerging from my little cave to share it so i hope you try it and like it and give me four dollars to keep doing it and things like it
i wanted to write a bunch about what is currently in the game and what i want to put in it later and whatnot, but i've been running at 120% for a week and a half trying to finish this before strawberry jam starts, and i am just fuckin exhausted. but maybe i will make some posts later. this thing has been in the shade for too long and i think it's good
you should download and play it (well, like, if you like platformers and whatnot)
- it has good puzzles! nothing very thinky like baba is you, but the harder ones felt like they had some substance and were satisfying to solve
- it has great mechanic pacing (like portal 2 or celeste)
- there's a cute minigame and well-written characters (they are so adorable)
- the demo has a handful of bugs/exploits but after listing them out, I have concluded that none of them spoil the fun and some add to it
long story short now I'm speedrunning this a little bit (surprising as someone who does not really like speedrunning deterministic games)
"like celeste" isn't something i expected to see said about my game, that's pretty cool
i agree, you should play it
(i'm so excited to make more elaborate levels; i tried to keep the initial ones so tame)
