Interview with Fox Knight & Shadow Fox! Insights on Jammer and Death Orchestra!

Hello everyone, FGG here with another update from the team. Today’s Devlog is a little special, we’ve got an interview with BOTH of the main developers of FGG’s two games--Jammer and Death Orchestra--to dive into the history of Fox God Games and just to get to know a little bit more about the team. I, Shadow Fox, wrote up a few questions for my teammate Fox Knight, and decided maybe I could also take a stab at answering some questions to shed more light on the team and what the vision is. So without further delay, here’s the interview so you can learn more about us!

How did Fox God Games get started? What was the initial goal of the team?

Fox Knight - Fox God Games began as an idea that I had after graduating from a coding boot camp I attended. I was working with David Johansson and we just started to discuss our gaming habits and started to slowly formulate the idea of making our own games, and that’s how Fox God Games was born. 

The initial goal of the team was to create an RPG based on the lore of a certain band that I won’t mention yet and to generally make games that we would want to play ourselves.

Shadow Fox - My involvement was a bit less direct, I would say! Several years ago I had been discussing some indie game ideas with a few former coworkers and friends as well. Along the way I needed to form a team and reached out to Fox Knight, asking if he was interested, and he introduced me to David as well, and the three of us began to meet often to kick around ideas. Things didn’t really take off yet and I also became busy with other commitments--but I still had valuable indie experience in the past--so I was really there as more of a “mentor” role, thus the name Shadow Fox, because I was mostly in the shadows.

Back then my involvement was mainly indie experience, game design, and nothing more. As time went on, things were changing, and somewhere in there Fox God Games was born. Eventually I found myself getting more involved. Then my commitments freed up, so I dedicated my full time to Fox God Games and that’s where the ball really started rolling, I think.

Who is on the team? Who does what?

Fox Knight - Currently there are only two members on the team. That would be me (Fox Knight) and Shadow Fox. I am mainly responsible for coding the game and Shadow Fox is mainly responsible for design.

Shadow Fox - Just to add on and clarify, my role has actually become more of an art role, simply by necessity. I’ve always made art, my entire life, but I’ve always had a difficult relationship with art. I was told not to say “I don’t like art”, and it’s not true because I really do appreciate art, but I think right now my mindset is more about using art as a tool to get the vision and experience that I want. Both games, especially Death Orchestra, really have their own style that I crafted from several retro influences and they both took a ton of time and effort, but I would hardly consider myself the “artist” of the team. Because of their smaller scope, it’s difficult for me to add so much “game design” into the games themselves, so I can when I can, but I believe designing the vision and experience is mostly where my focus is at the moment, just because we need it to make the games we do.

I would also like to add that we’ve recently invited our musician, and a friend of mine, to be our third member of the team which he happily accepted. And while he hasn’t directly got into coding or design (though he made the Death Orchestra logo!) I will say that he was able to supply music early on in development. Honestly, having those songs play in the background as I made art and designed the games really helped influence everything and make it all feel like one combined experience, so he’s really been a big part of both FGG games in terms of style and execution.

What’s the intent of making small games? Will they always be smaller, or is there a larger scope game in the talks?

Fox Knight - The intent of making small games for now is to create credibility for the studio and to show what we are capable of. In one of our discussions Shadow Fox mentioned that we are slowly progressing from the Atari era to the more modern era and I think that is a great analogy of what we are currently doing! No, our games won’t always be small and there is a much larger scope game being planned. What it is will be announced in the future but to give you a hint, the games we are making are us pretty much testing out the systems that could be implemented into that much larger scope game.

Shadow Fox -  Designers always want to do more, haha. Of course I would love to make a game on the scale of Elden Ring or whatever, right? Who wouldn’t? I think one of the most important lessons I’ve learned in my career so far is that knowing how many resources you have and using them to the fullest is the key to getting games done. We have two people, and we really do spend as much time as we can making these games, so there’s only so much we can do in a short amount of time. I’ve tried doing the several-year-long development process with a small team and it’s nearly an impossible task, really. Going small scope, building and growing and learning as we go, I really think that’s the best path we can take for now with what we have.

How did Jammer feel and what did it mean to you and Fox God Games?

Fox Knight - Jammer is special to Fox God Games. It is our very first release and I would like to personally thank those who simply showed interest by viewing the page and a huge thank you to those who actually hit the play button. Jammer is really only the beginning and was meant to show what Fox God Games is capable of doing.

Shadow Fox - I’ve tried for so long to “make my own game” and I never could because (as seen above) I was always too ambitious. But Jammer was, like, “I have this really small idea and it will work if we can just do these few things.” And it worked, so quickly. And I finally have an indie game to my name. I don’t know. I honestly don’t think the reality of the situation has kicked in yet, but it was an incredible feeling to have a game out that I was proud of. Seeing people visit the page, play it--I can’t describe the feeling. Life goal achieved.

Switching to Death Orchestra, what was different about the development of this game to Jammer?

Fox Knight - With Death Orchestra, we decided to implement what we learned during the development of Jammer into creating Death Orchestra. As a small team of two it was pretty awesome to see the progress we made compared to how we approached development with Jammer. With Death Orchestra I felt like we were more organized and more confident that we can actually make this studio and team work as a whole.

Shadow Fox - Confidence. For sure. See, Jammer had been an idea from its conception. We knew what we wanted, what it would be called, what the logo looked like, what the first song was. It was meant to be this small thing, and when I thought of it, it was practically complete. Death Orchestra was vastly different in that sense. We came off the high of releasing our first game, and we went in basically saying “We want to make something that plays kind of like Zelda ALTTP” and it had the working title Goblin Rush. That’s really all we had to start with.

So the character, the music, the style, the writing, all of it was forming as we developed the game. There was a lot less certainty on “what” we were making, but very confident on “how” we were going to make it--in a way the total opposite of Jammer.

Pivoting over to sort of a postmortem question, what was the overall outlook of Death Orchestra's development? What went well, what went wrong, what went to plan, what got scrapped?

Fox Knight - I think the overall development of Death Orchestra was really smooth. We took a shorter time to release Death Orchestra compared to Jammer. I think the collaboration between me and Shadow Fox is working really well. Most of the intended features went according to plan, there are a few things that I wouldn’t say were scrapped. I would maybe say punted to a possible future update, like touch screen support for those playing on their phones browser as well as controller support.

Shadow Fox - To Fox Knight’s point, yeah, we just worked very well together. Everything went well. We got better UX flows, better UI and art, more to work with everywhere, and overall I think we even really got in more features than we had planned to. Honestly I think it surpassed both of our expectations. It also only took 16 days to complete! As mentioned, the only things that didn’t make the final build were essentially things that were built on a different Unity system, something we plan to reconsider for our next project. Overall though, Death Orchestra’s development was incredible, and I hope every game goes that well honestly!

Lastly, going back to the vision and goal of the team, what should we all expect to see from Fox God Games in the future?

Fox Knight - The goal of the team would be to always make games that we ourselves would love to play. With that note I know for a fact that me, Shadow Fox and even David are avid RPG fans. So in the future, hopefully you all would be able to see and experience an RPG that we created as a studio, maybe based on the lore of a certain metal band 😀

Shadow Fox - Well, the goal is definitely making the metal band game one day, haha. But as we get more confident and experienced I think we’ll start to see a lot more growth in areas like unique gameplay or “something new.” As Fox Knight said earlier, I really do see us evolving through our own game history progression--does it mean we’ll hit PS5 or even PS2 quality games eventually? Well, if we can find the team and the resources, we’ll do the best with what we have! I don’t think we have any plans to stop, though, or to do anything that we wouldn’t be proud of putting out. So expect things we’re proud of, things we love, and things we have always wanted to experience in games.

Thanks for reading our interview! We hope it gives a better insight on the team and what we’re all about. Stay tuned for more updates from the team! We’ve got information, hints, and of course behind the scenes looks of how both Death Orchestra and Jammer were developed.

Keep an eye out for Devlog updates on both game pages, here on itch.io!