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Everything is Sex - 2D sidescroller game

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K

kiang

Rising Star
Hello all, long time no see as I've been absent from the forum lately..

I hope you don't mind my shameless self-promotion, but I would like to share an indie game that I'm working on. Be advised that it has adult themes (explicit sex, psychological violence, moral questioning, etc).

Something that I inevitably wanted to do was to express the mysteries somehow.. be it with music, literature or other arts. As I learned that games are increasingly more a mainstream form of media, art and communication, I wondered, why not doing a game?

Well, what is the game all about?
Each main level has 3 sublevels. Kind like Super Mario, 1-1, 1-2, etc. So at the first sublevel the player is a recently disembodied spirit that is roaming freely thru the spirit world (level) where it encounters various other spirits that want to harm. So the player cannot touch them and has no way to fight them, completely vulnerable.

What the player has to do is to assemble the archetypes of elemental spirits (from lakes, sun, trees, rocks, etc) to aid the player. If the summoning is done always in one place (eg. sun) you easily called the Archelemental of the sun (fire elemental) but if you do the summoning also in other places (eg. mountains, clouds, etc) you will have a totally different elemental (somehow unpure). And the concept of everything being sex will also play with this (but not only), with our psychology of procuring novelty.

After the summoning is done successfully, stealthily thru the harming spirits, you will enter sublevel two. It is exactly the same level but where you control the summoned spirit and with dragonballish power you fight them all. When the player is hit, he / she / shemale, will lose clothes and that way unleashes an Awakened Form (symbolizing the shedding of the ego, thus more power).

When that is done, the third sublevel starts. Here the player has to unsummon the helping spirit by glorifying it, by having sex.

I expect to release this game as episodic parts. Between the main levels I plan to work on small animations to tell the story, small cutscenes. But before this main project, a prelude to it will come out first. A fighting / sex game, Archelementals of Eiss.

Intro opening cutscene
 
Don't take it the wrong way, but video games, being an art form, require just as much expertise as music to express yourself properly. What you've described and shown don't quite translate into "shedding of ego" or "higher mysteries" for me, and seem altogether rather hamfisted.

If you take a suggestion, if you want to make a game about sexual mysteries without putting people off or making an immature joke out of the theme, go abstract. Drop the sharpie-drawn anime furries losing clothes on being hit, and look into microbiology or chemistry for inspiration. Think "alchemical conjunction", not "saturday night softcore action fantasy hentai".

Also, I recommend watching the "Game Maker's Toolkit" videos on youtube, which are a good introduction to expressing concepts in video games as an art form - through the native language of gameplay. It's something few big name games do, and yet something you absolutely have to master if you want to do games as an 'art form' to any degree of seriousness.
 
Hello PsyDuck, I couldn't agree more with you!

What you describe is exactly what I'm aiming for. Although the game looks 'cute' and anime-ish it will have other tones to it. The cutscenes I intent to do will have themes that you referenced. Evolution of life, primitive soup, nuclear fusion on stars, the big bang itself.. I as a science educator and guide at a natural history museum am very interested in trying to put this in the game.

So why this anime-ish look and not a stylized artsy thing? Because I don't want to preach to the choir, so to speak. For this game, I would like it to easily capture people off guard, that seek sex just for the thrill but then, maybe get some insights besides anything else (could be a sex education thing). I try to see this game kind like the movie 'Enter the Void'. Colorful and action packet at the beginning..

Thank you for the comment :)
 
So I've been playing around with what I got already (characters and stuff) and by arranging the animations I decided to make a little tech demo. You can try it out at http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/688392.

How to play the game? Keep on punching and kicking or just let the symbols fall on you. This is a very simple arcade game. How you play the game will determine how the character transforms. There are 3 different basic forms and the combination of those, which gives way to many possibilities.

Consider this more like a template for my main project.
 
As mentioned before, prior to making my main project I'm doing a side project called Archelementals of Eiss to build the game universe that I intend on doing. And also to build my skills in programming, illustration, game design and so forth.

It is a beat'em up kind of game where the premise is the merging of the phenomenological with the parallel confabulation of the human mind. The player assumes one of the archelementals to blend with one other. Those archelementals represent the archtypes of Nature, nature of Men and nature of the Universe.

With each confrontation the game tries to show certain philosophical principals inspired mainly in taoism.

So now I'm working on making the intro cutscene. I want it to be surrealistic and kind like the storytelling used in the cartoon show Samurai Jack.

I post here the script for the intro. What do you think of it?

If you want to visit the original post on my patreon site go here.

______________________________________________________________________


There once was a time when the Universe, plants and animals, man and gods, were the same.

Fire was the first blacksmith, with immense explosive strength he forged the earth creating mountains and valleys.

Together, Fire and Earth created diversity in the flowing rivers of lava.

Fire developed injuries by holding the meteorites and hurling them down on Earth.

Trauma and cuts, and bubbly wounds on his hands raised with water inside.

But he didn't knew how to heal his injuries nor how to hold steady the sculptured continents.

Because of the dedicated work of Fire, his bubbles burst open and water broke free from his wounds.

When Water released her braids, her hair became the rain and from the falling rain, the wind appeared.

With the help of Wind, Water extinguished the fire and saved the mountains.





After many years, the 4 elemental spirits created plants and animals. And from these lifeforms sprouted reason.

Reason didn't asked to be born and making no sense of it all, Reason looked around confused.

Disgusted, she never again permitted to be cheated.





So she created spurious spirits one of which is called religion with all its dogmas. The world was flat and we all were children of Adam and Eve.

And the other one is called science to investigate and experiment the essence of the Universe.

Like in religion, that makes us believe in dogmatic terms, the same way science makes us believe that everything can be explained but in logical terms.

Both with the same fervor to ascertain what is behind the curtain of reality.

Religion and science, both took us the capacity of accepting the logical and illogical at the same time.

Science likes to explains through physics and chemistry just what is happening inside our heads as well exterior phenomena, but considering all this, it shouldn't invalidate to see the world as animic, and this being as truthful as the molecules that connect with our neurological synapses.

In the other hand, religion tends to establish bureaucratic institutions that shun the subjective experience of the abstract, instead there is concretion of the insights of past mystics into dogmas.





Then Albert Einstein gave us the theory of relativity.

It turned out that time and space are not absolute, and here and now might be just illusions.

Logic became a shaky business, mainly in quantum mechanics.





And here we are now at present day feeling the necessity to look back to our 200000 years of human history in which our ancestors asked themselves the same questions and although using different methods found their answers.

Here we are not so certain as before. A little scared, but more curious.





Who knows if the molecules aren't the physical manifestation of energy with faces.

Yes with faces, how else would you like to converse with it?

Maybe a laughing face in the case of an entity with physical manifestation as dopamine.

Who knows if the clouds aren't the physical manifestation of spirits, mainly feminine and with wings. Yes with wings, how else could they fly?

This is what the true mystics do, with plenitude and integrity, they embrace the paradox of logic and illogic at the same time.





Accomplished by ascetics, by hermits, mages, yogis, healers, shamans, warlords, peacekeepers and sometimes the common man.

Although most of the time, the common man doesn't recognize it, because they too are transparent to the universe, conveying the memory of Nature that will be, into the present.





It is the true mystic that believes in the practice on what humans have agreed to call imagination, in what must be the invocation of spirits, though no one knows what they are in the power of creating magical illusion, in the visions of truth in the depths of the mind.

The truth that surges from our ever shifting minds where its borders eventually flow into one another.





These mystics invoke the spirits for different tasks, be it to help others, be it for divination, to attain illumination, to be a guide to other worlds or for metempsychosis ecstasy to reset the own self.

These nature spirits, autonomous or not from our own anthropospheric dimension, a placebo or the true truth, the mystic would perceive the nature spirits as good or bad according to his own solipsistic nature. As a psychopomp for the biggest mystery of life that is death, and as a conveyor for the biggest mystery of death that is life.





The perceived world is based on the duality of being, divided into two overarching categories, those ever conflicting as benevolent and malevolent. Only reaching absolute equilibrium in a state of nonduality. The embracing of the paradox leads to the conservation of eternity.

Therefore the embracer acknowledges on being infinite and so is the great spirit, the only immortal soul.

The mystics have searched in vain the defining lines of themselves, and all they discovered was the confines of everything.





Each one of these confrontations is a short story of these nature spirits that came forth through the conscious calling of the shaman, the hermit, the mage or unknowingly, the common man when performing the simple everyday shores.





Take union in love and hate, from yin and yang to Tao, from manichaen morality to Giordano Bruno's void, from the conceptual understanding of light as a particle and a wave to it's experiential alacrity.

These are the short stories of those spirits that inhabit the noumenon concealed by every known phenomenon.

The medium of manifest change, is the Archelemental.
 
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