sarahzedig

sarah zedig! 🍉🐐

@sarahzedig

a goat on the internet

marxist video essayist, 34, writes @godfeels and @vidrev

oklahoma expat living in seattle

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video essays
youtube.com/c/letstalkaboutstuff
godfeels
archiveofourown.org/series/1475819
patreon
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sarahzedig
@sarahzedig
lexyeevee
@lexyeevee
lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

fox flux DELUXE: a demo

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

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in reply to @lexyeevee's post:

bck356
@bck356

Wow, I really liked this! I liked the narrative conceit that this is just two friends playing together (Even though it may or may not stay that way, given the ending?). I also thought the puzzles were nicely designed, I got about 95% of the hearts (Mostly just skipping when I didn't see the obvious way to get one after a couple of experiments), and I didn't figure out how to get any of the stars (I assume they either rely on later powerups or are simply very tricky puzzles). I thought the level design was overall very good, and I was disappointed to see it was over so quickly.

A few issues I noticed:

I managed to softlock myself on level 3 by dropping a box so it would slide down a slope and through a "Can't carry items past sign", so I couldn't retrieve it. I think I might have dropped it while I was falling so it had momentum to slide? I'm not really sure what happened but it wasn't that big of a deal, I just bailed on the level and tried again.

I also couldn't get the Cattle Prod to do its thing (I assumed it would be an F-key ability like Rubber Lexy's kiss; Starcow Lexy's F-ability was still null in the GUI after I got the Cattle Prod).

Lastly, I managed to brick the game when I abandoned the boss level, seeing no other exits (though that might have been intentional since you said there were no exits lol. I wanted to at least see what the last thing Star Anise sold would do).

Some small game design suggestions:

Let Ballooned Lexy go up faster (maybe with a single, brief upward boost, similar to Wario Land 4) with a tap of the jump button. Even if it causes me to drift incorrectly it would let me experiment with where I'm meant to go.

It took me until basically the end of the game to realize that I probably shouldn't open every single present box as soon as I see it, because I might need the present box for platforming; perhaps make hollow boxes still stand-onable? I could also just not be so greedy for candy, but honestly, given the vibes of this game that seems out of character for Lexy, lol.

Some random things:

Why didn't blowing a kiss at the Crimson Bandit do anything when she showed up on the overworld to taunt me?? I was so disappointed that didn't do anything.

I DID notice a cute animation for Slimy Lexy not being so enthusiastic about walking on lego floor, but Rubber Lexy doesn't care so much. I love those cute details.

I couldn't figure out how to help Purrl; I thought I just needed to absorb and dismiss every slime in the level, but I don't think that was it, even though it seemed like it was working because slimes didn't respawn (which was a little frustrating in and of itself, because I ran out of opportunities to get slimy hearts). Admittedly I could have just missed one.

I hope you finish this!! It's so cool seeing something like this that is such a pure expression of someone's creativity. If nothing else, you got yourself a new fan here.

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lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

Hey, thanks so much! I spent a lot of time trying to find the right approach with the level design, so I'm glad it worked well :) And you're right, the stars are tricky. Though one of them is probably not tricky enough.

I don't think losing the box that way should cause a softlock, though it does make things slightly fiddlier.

The treasures don't actually go into your "inventory" until you complete the level — I guess this is not totally intuitive, but for some treasures it would be very bizarre to have them take effect halfway through a level (and then possibly un-take effect if you bail!). I think one of Cerise's hint signs mentions it, but I don't really know how to convey it any better.

The boss level crash is my bad, oops! I just uploaded a bugfix demo that fixes that and a few other things.

I've been waffling on whether to speed balloon Lexy up — I should probably do it a bit (especially since it makes the level design easier when she can't drift as far horizontally), but I do like the light frustration of just kinda having to drift upwards. That's what it's like for her, too, right?

It's very deliberate that the boxes become unsolid when you open them, but if you didn't even realize that might have an impact, that's good! I tried to teach the player that they will generally not screw themselves by opening the boxes. :) I've even trained myself to basically never stand on top of them while playtesting, so as a general rule they shouldn't ever be required — but also, you shouldn't need me to tell you this, and it sounds like you didn't, so that's good!

You are absolutely right that you should be able to kiss the Crimson Bandit and I have fixed this egregious oversight as well.

You have the right idea about Purrl! It might be that you left one of the two slimes behind all the way back in the beginning. (And don't worry, I have something in mind for getting more slimes; I just didn't think it was necessary for this introductory level. Also it would make Purrl's whole thing not work.)

Thank you again, I hope I finish it too! I have... a lot of stuff in mind, surely enough to fill a game.

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WeirdRomance
@WeirdRomance

This is delightful. The combination of kinkiness and wholesomeness is absolutely perfect. 💙💙💙

I've played three levels so far, so I don't know how long this demo is or how it ends. Could you please let me know if the entirety of this demo is safe for work? I would absolutely love to stream it on Twitch if it is!

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Peek
@Peek

i just started so i'm not that far in and haven't had the chance to fully develop any thoughts but i love the minigame already

however it does feel very weird to be using the arrow keys but have e but the interact button. any chance for a WASD option?

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lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

yeah but also i'm curious what you think interact should be when using arrow keys

the only common thing i can think of is ZX but then my whole hand is hanging off the keyboard?? it seems like a terrible idea i don't know why it caught on

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Peek
@Peek

zx is what i'm used to, but i agree it's terrible. e is a perfectly cromulent choice for an interact button with the keyboard, it just just feels wrong to me to be using e and spacebar to interact and jump, but NOT use wasd for movement. i don't know where to rest my hands because my default is wasd. it just feels weird to use two hands on the keyboard to play because i'm so used to doing movement and all that with one hand. when it's on wasd, all that can be handled by my left hand alone, and since there's not really any mouse involved i could play the whole game one handed

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lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

there are ultimately four face buttons though, and while one of them can be spacebar, it would be... kind of awkward to be trying to do movement and also pressing them one-handed at the same time

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lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

yeah i just mean, most WASD games have you turn with the mouse, so you are using W most of the time and your index finger can do whatever without causing problems. but in a platformer you'd be doing A/D mostly, and you would have some difficulty moving right while also performing another action

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Peek
@Peek

oh yeah, i see what you mean. Typically if I need to do that I'll just shift my index finger off W and onto D so I can use E with my middle finger. I guess it's inevitable that you need to take one finger off a movement key in that case, but I guess the question there is: how often do you need to move and press E simultaneously

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AzaleaThorns
@AzaleaThorns

Watching @weirdromance play the demo was a delight. It has a fun style and a humor I enjoy, and the flirting, though playing around the kinks central to the game, was sweet and comfortable to me (a sex repulsed ace), as was the rest of the demo I saw. It's very refreshing to see a game treat kink not only as something other than a bad thing, but as such a sweet and loving thing. This is a very special project that clearly has love put into it, and I hope to see it progress 💛

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lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

thank you so much! a big anti-inspiration was... having played several platformers where the kink-themed part only happened on failure, which feels really weird when that's the whole draw of the game. i wanted to make something where they were the point, where they were just what happened normally throughout the game and they were fun and helpful and interesting

(i once played a brief adult game demo where i could not even figure out where the adult parts were, because i hadn't realized they only happened when enemies hit you, and the enemies were very easy to dodge...)

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