Aesthetic affordances
There are a few aesthetic goals at play in Fiximupim! One primary goal is Fantasy: as a dating simulator, it is fun to live out the experience of a God-sent cupid who is dating and fixing men. There’s also some Discovery involved in there: how will the different men react to specific dates we take them on? And lastly, to a lesser extent, there’s a bit of a Challenge goal involved, since the player needs to figure out which dates to select to get their man’s stats up to par.
What I learned
I hadn’t realized that the game would resonate with people so much! People had a lot of fun playtesting the game, even when it was buggy. Players quickly understood the message of the game, which seeks to shed light on the kind of emotional labor expected of women in relationships with men. And I was surprised how much men liked playing the game! During our final playtest of the game, I ended up in a few interesting conversations with players about the idea of “fixing” a romantic partner (and also what it feels like to have a partner who is trying to “fix” you). So although it is a silly dating sim, I would also buy that it’s a serious game!
Ecosystem and mechanics
As of right now, the mechanics are relatively simple. When you choose a specific date activity, it can have one of three outcomes, based on a man’s prior stats. The date activity can raise or lower any number of stats for a man—and sometimes it is good to lower his stats because it’s possible to be too sexy, or too kind, or too confident! We gave a lot of thought to how a partner’s statistics would be impacted by specific events (and which statistics would matter in determining the outcome of an activity). That said, I would be interested to implement a new layer of the system (a new set of components, and relationships between those components and existing ones).
Going forward
Since I am on the Fiximupim team for P4, I would be curious to reexamine the system behind the game! I’m sure there’s an extra set of components we can incorporate. I guess the system is significantly simplified by the fact that we are cupid and not a human, but there is more to explore there! Maybe we can lean more into the fact that we are non-human. I would also love for the game to represent more kinds of relationships and people. Anyone can need fixing!:D
