Fruit Salad Theory is the tip of Ashe Thurman’s fantasy iceberg
The Queer Games Bundle is a collection of nearly 600 items by LGBTQ+ creators and teams, nearly 400 of which are independent video games, all sold for just $60. I’m talking with creators from the bundle about their games and their making habits. Visit the bundle and consider buying it.
Ashe Thurman is the owner of Pixels and Pins Studio. Their game Fruit Salad Theory is a visual novel about a climactic evening at a political banquet. People of all different species mingle and hint at some of the deep politics and connections of the world.
How long have you been making games?
I put out my first game in March of 2017. So…5 years!
What tools do you like to use?
For art and GUI, I use a combination of Clip Studio Paint, Photoshop, Illustrator, and, sometimes, Sketchup. I’d like to get more into Blender, maybe. I learned 3D modeling on totally different software, though, so I’ve found learning Blender to be just weird enough to make me lazy on learning it.
The engine I use is Ren’py, which is a Python based engine specifically for visual novels. For narrative outlining, I use a browser-based software called draw.io, and for the actual text implementation itself, I use Notepad++.
Audio processing is done with Adobe Audition, and I make liberal use of a number of free sound effects sites to make and remix sound effects as needed. The few times I’ve made my own music instead of purchasing/licensing it I use LMMS (which is an opensource music creature software! It’s great).
What themes or genres do you like to explore?
I find myself including a lot of trauma related themes, for some reason, and it’s not really on purpose. It just sort of sneaks in. I actively like to explore the nuances of romantic relationships, mental health, and communication. How we interact with each other as people. And since I work in fantasy with a lot of non-humans, I like to play around with perceptions of gender and how that correlates in species that don’t have the same dimorphism as we do, that might experience gender differently. And I like to create worlds that normalize the full spectrum of gender and sexual identity to try to paint a picture of what I think that could look like.
“But what does leading a country into recovery actually look like? This regent in this country, then, is the exploration of how you undo tyranny.”
What are your favorite and least favorite aspects of making games?
I love creating. I loving making and having made something and being like “here world, take it.” I’m TERRIBLE at marketing. Even for the genre/format I work in, I feel like I’m a little outside the norm, so I really struggle to find that perfect audience. That’s probably the most difficult part, not knowing how to find the people that will connect with the thing you’ve made.
Is there a game that has affected you recently?
Well, I recently replayed Mass Effect via the legendary edition, and that will literally always make me cry. But as far as new games, I think probably Hades really hit me the hardest lately. I’m a big Supergiant fan, already, but it was such an excellent blend of gameplay and performance and story that I was really just floored. A really excellent game.
Fruit Salad Theory is a fully voice acted visual novel. How did you decide to include the voices?
I’m a professional voice actor. And between my other projects that have included voice and doing voice direction for other studios, I am no stranger to the intricacies of dealing in audio (though I’m in no way shape or form an audio engineer; those people are amazing). My other projects I had relied on volunteer labor because they were all not for profit passion projects, and I had just really wanted to do something where I could put together a cast and actually pay them. Just because it’s fun. It’s a lot of work, but the result is amazing.
So I had just been sort of tucking money aside for awhile to hopefully be able to do a larger production eventually. Then the Queer Bundle came around last year, and I was involved. We ended up raising so much money that I had not anticipated. I wasn’t relying on it, so it wasn’t earmarked. And that allowed me to directly fund some voice acting at a sensible indie rate (though I wish I could have gone a little higher). So right from the get, Fruit Salad was designed with voice acting in mind.
All the accent work and the character design was intended to cast as wide a net as possible in regards to race and gender diversity. There are definitely places where I think I could have still improved, but that was a major goal at the development stage. I also wanted an excuse to do some acting, myself, so I cast myself as Gingerbread the goblin debutante. Always a fun time.
For these next set of questions I have to say, right off the bat, that Fruit Salad Theory is part of an already HUGE interconnected lore that I’ve been working in and on for literally twenty years at this point. Seven of the eleven games I’ve developed are part of the same universe as well as an audiodrama, three short stories that have appeared in magazines, another independently published short story collection, and some serialized fiction I’m hoping to start putting out later this summer. Like…it’s big. So a lot of questions about that specific game tie into the larger lore considerably.
There is invented language in the game, right? Where did that come from?
There are a couple of different invented languages mentioned in the game that are basically just part of the bigger lore of the universe. This particular night that the games takes place during is a royal ball in a kingdom that attracts a fair amount of immigration at this stage of its history. So between diasporic staff and foreign dignitaries, there’s just going to be people bringing in different languages because that’s how the real world works.
And I hand wave away a little bit by having them all speak a major trade language to each other, but there’s still going to be places where things don’t cross over perfectly. And I actually built a whole game (Hart Connection, 18+ yaoi) around language and communication because some of the characters don’t speak the same languages to same proficiency. So it’s not really a super new thing for me, and it’s kind of a natural consequence of thoughtful fantasy world-building.
Have I actually constructed the languages, yet. No, because conlang scares me. But I have multiple maps and notebooks on what languages are spoken where by whom, how they spread, and sort of what they sound like.
There was additional consideration for how the non-human characters handle sounds with different laryngal and jaw constructions. The two pangolin-people (trenglates) I initially wanted to struggle with “m” sounds and replace all of them with “n,” but it sounded weird when we actually did it in recording session. There’s still a little bit of it in saying Mbiru’s name (Haddox says Ndiru), but we pulled it back when we got in there.
If you listen to Chiccory, though, who is the winged-bear person (pherax), I worked with the actor Cal Joyal to take out all “w” sounds and replace with “v” because snout construction felt like it would have problems with that sound. It was a lot of fun to try something weird like that, and he was a real sport.
“I like to create worlds that normalize the full spectrum of gender and sexual identity to try to paint a picture of what I think that could look like.”
I like the mixing of the magic with ideas of electricity. How did you develop that?
So in The Lore (TM) the magic system (how the magic works) is based on the properties of waveforms and energy conversion. Magic is a energy that moves as a wave through the environment, and when you manipulate its properties (frequency, amplitude etc), it transforms into a different kind of energy (thermal, sonic etc). As a note, yes this theoretically includes ionizing and nuclear energy, but in-canon, they’re still working it out. And there’s a lot more technical shenanigans about what a full magic-energy vs native-energy system looks like and what advantages and disadvantages it has in different magic density levels and how that plays into energy conservation and all that deep lore. But ostensibly magic and electricity can work together because magic can become electricity.
The politics of this kingdom seem really elaborate. What inspired you in making the system?
The country this games takes place in, Illuria, is ruled by Queen Clover (that’s her regent name). It’s one of the more politically important countries to the larger setting, so I’ve worked on it the most. Clover and her ascension have this extremely complex backstory. Illuria’s a parliamentary monarchy with a very strong division of powers between the two sides. And previous to Clover, the country was ruled by a series of very short-lived regents (assassinations of various sorts were pretty en vogue for awhile) who were terrible in various ways. The one right before Clover, King Quartz, was particularly bad. He was responsible for something called The Displacement which is actually mentioned in another game, and really just did some heinous shit.
So Clover is the first “good Queen” who overthrew (sort of) the “evil King.” This is a really really common narrative element in epic, politically-driven fantasy. The secret prince, etc etc. But then the story usually ends with the “good regent” in power and everyone lives happily ever after. But what does leading a country into recovery actually look like? This regent in this country, then, is the exploration of how you undo tyranny. How you address all the evils that your predecessors did in a meaningful way. What does healing a country really look like? And Fruit Salad Theory doesn’t go nearly as deep into those specific concepts, but rather just sort of hints at what’s going on under the surface. It’s a snapshot of a country in flux.
I liked the power of magic synesthesia! What would you like to “see” in that way if you could?
In another game that I ended up icing and a manuscript I’m still working on, I also talk about magic sometimes having a smell for some people. So there are definitely some in-canon ways different people experience magic at a sensory level.
So extrapolating that to the real world, I want to know what my cats are thinking. I want to be able to see their mood in a limited capacity. Because I have one who has anxiety and I’d like to know when she’s going to have a panic attack before she pees on the bed.
