Truck Quest: The cutting edge of 201X

When Donald and I started working on Truck Quest, we needed a design for Samson, the eccentric loner who actively opposed surveillance capitalism. It was 2018, more than 10 years since Anonymous made headlines for opposing the Church of Scientology. “Mr. Robot” had also been around for almost half a decade, which gave us some ideas about what Samson would look like and who he would be connected to.

  

Although the Guy Fawkes mask was an obvious idea, it wasn’t a good fit for our paranoid activist. There’s no way his efforts to undermine exploitative globalization would use a mass produced commodity that generated revenue for a major entertainment conglomerate! Samson might have had some unusual opinions about how society should work, but he wasn’t an idiot.

Instead, we looked at some of 2018’s cutting-edge solutions for remaining unrecognized: 

• Anti-identification glasses. Abstract patterns printed on cheap plastic frames. 
• Extreme makeup. People were providing advice in YouTube tutorials. 
• Custom software filters. (This was the least interesting solution, from an artwork perspective.) 
• Hyperface clothing. For overwhelming systems with too many false positives.  

Samson ended up with several different disguises to remain incognito.

Robust Action: A Thursday in Space Retrospective

“Single actions can be moves in many games at once.”

That’s John Padgett and Christopher Ansell describing robust action, the mechanism that the Medici family used to retain power in 15th century Venice. (Xavier Marquez also writes that robust action was how Francisco Franco managed adversarial factions in the 20th century.) 

TL,DR: When there’s more than one reason to do something, it’s more likely to get done. That’s true whether you’re manipulating political rivals or giving time and attention to the ideas in your own unruly brain. 

It’s why Donald and I participated in the 2023 Neo-Twiny Jam.

Why we did it

Our goals were: 

• Publish a game in 2023
• Develop mechanics that could be implemented elsewhere
• Apply novel constraints to inspire creativity
• Reach a larger audience through the game jam community

Making a public commitment to the game jam held us accountable. Participation was also linked with donations to an anti-hate group, which was a nice bonus.

How we did it

The jam’s 500-word limit was around the length of an in-depth blog post. That gave us room for an introduction, a conclusion, and 3 to 5 decision points that could be 70 to 100 words each, depending on how many choices we provided. 

We wanted the experience to feel like being an Amazon driver in space, and Donald’s artwork did a lot of the heavy lifting to reduce wordcount. He spent time googling images of tug boat galleys for reference, working to establish the cramped environment of the ship along with its worn and threadbare equipment

This was the first time our projects used Clip Studio Paint, and the short time frame forced Donald to learn the program quickly. The claustrophobic reference images started getting to him, but the end result constrains the player within a cramped world. 

Following Emily Short’s recommendation for writing the through line first, we put together a linear story that had 5 choices. Then we broke up the story to present the first 4 choices in any order — the Good Place approach of “taking something great and ruining it a little so you can have more of it” — which made each playthrough a bit different. 

We used one MS Word document to track the wordcount in our display text, and a separate Word document held design notes and lists of things to do. As we got closer to the game’s release date, we did more coordinating via Discord messages. Not very sophisticated, but everyone has their own approach.

Thursday in Space involved more CSS work than our previous games. The sidebar uses Terminal with Scan Lines code created by Patrick Himes, and custom work was done for the borders and rounded edges on the buttons at the end of every passage. Code randomly set each button’s destination passage by using pluck to pull from an array of the unread passages. When every passage was removed, the button sent players to the final choice. 

There were 24 different ways to get through the story, which meant that we had to rein in combinatorial explosion by making some choices less meaningful than others. The random order also made it more difficult to test things properly. (Some players have reported that the stowaway doesn’t behave consistently, which is a bug I haven’t been able to fix.)

How it turned out

We accomplished a decent number of our goals.

• Publish a game in 2023

A clear win, in line with the eternally relevant gamedev advice of making and releasing lots of small games to develop your skills. 

• Develop mechanics that could be implemented elsewhere

Another win, using CodePen and experimenting with new ways for storylets to work together.

• Apply novel constraints to inspire creativity

On the one hand, the Neo-Twiny jam gave us the focus that we needed to accomplish the first two goals. On the other hand, some of the choices in this story felt less meaningful than others, which the audience noticed. 

• Reach a larger audience through the game jam community

This didn’t go so well. Sorting the jam entries by popularity puts Thursday in Space in the bottom 20% of entrants. 

Consolation prize: We realized that we could re-use assets from Project Arcmor, our game from 2021, and then we linked to it as an easter egg inside Thursday, in space. 

Game design documents: Plans come in many forms

When I was creating my first games, I didn’t think I needed to bother with design documents. 

Eventually, I realized that I was creating them anyway. I left notes for myself in various formats:

• Comments in the code itself. It’s right there, which makes it easier to reference, but it gets distracting. The other problem is that it gets tricky to clean up comments later (unless you’re okay with distributing exasperated rants about your buggy, poorly implemented code).
• Plans written on paper. Working in a space outside the game’s systems — especially outside of the computer — helps for visualizing problems in new ways. The tough part is maintaining the discipline necessary to convert those solutions back into digital formats.
• Digital files. Donald and I have been doing more with Google Drive documents, and digital records are useful for copying and pasting ideas between plans and projects. The risk is that “the map is not the terrain”: It’s easy to waste time perfecting the design document instead of developing the game. 

Each format has its own strengths, which is why the broader concept of “what a Game Design Document should look like” ends up being such an amorphous glob. I have found many perspectives online:

• What should a Game Design Document consist of and why should I write one? Thomas Steffen asks and answers this question, asserting that “Builders don’t just build, they make blueprints and follow measurements.” He also notes that the document will need to be flexible enough to accommodate changes and iterations during production. 
  
  
• How To: Write a Game Design Document is the full Game Developer treatment from Danielle Riendeau, discussing common elements and providing examples (design documents from Grim Fandango and Deus Ex).
  
  
• Creating a Game Design Document is Brenda Romero sharing her thinking. She writes, “There are sometimes multiple ways to do something right in the game industry.”
  
  
• Common game design documents is a collection of archetypes put together by Max Nichols. He dismisses the idea of a monolithic, contains-every-detail-you-need design document as “a tidy fantasy.” Instead, he lists different ways that teams can communicate necessary information.
  
  
• Game Design Document template for independent developers was created by Jason Bakker. I liked his advice to “Be thorough, but don't be absolute. Remember that everything must be allowed to change and evolve over the course of the project, and the design document is a general description more than a blueprint.” 

There are also documents online for Grand Theft Auto, Diablo, Doom, and Monaco. 

Ultimately, the game design document ends up taking on whatever form is most useful for the team that needs to use it. (Game design is all about testing and experimentation, which includes experimenting with the tools you use to make it easier.)

Learn to Test

I used to think it was silly when shows had futuristic computers narrate what they were doing. 

You know, those little stream-of-consciousness declarations, like “scanning the area for life forms” or “initiating self-destruct sequence”? They seemed like cheap writing trying show the audience that things were happening.

Now that I have more programming experience, it makes more sense.

My early coding efforts — in Twine, so we aren’t even talking about something complicated — were nightmares of frustration filled with obscure error messages and opaque syntax warnings. Early versions of the SugarCube documentation didn’t make a lot of sense to me, and it was slow going trying to sift through Q&A pages for answers.¹

It was easier to loiter in the Interactive Fiction Community Forum, where I found Linus Åkesson² sharing a useful metaphor about building bridges. It's okay to start with something feeble, because you can build on it through a gradual process of refinement and evolution. 

As I beat various projects into shape — leaning on the bridge metaphor and applying McDonald’s Theory — I learned the four possible states in which code exists:

My coding efforts are still full of errors and janky syntax, but now it’s easier to find and fix the problems. If my projects need less development time, it’s not because I’m faster at coding. It’s because I’m faster at identifying where things failed. I have become better at testing. 

These improvements came from using more comments in the code and indicators that explain what's going on. When it's easier to see where things are failing, it's easier to identify where you should fix them. 

In that context, it makes more sense to have the computer announce that it’s scanning for lifeforms or initiating a self-destruct sequence.

1. I should note that Twinery.org is much more user friendly in the present day.

2. You may recognize his name from the “8-bit Baroque Metal” performance that recently took certain corners of the internet by storm.³

3. That wasn’t an intentional pun, but it works. SORRY I’M NOT SORRY.

Blaugust: Retreating into the Future

I’m joining Blaugust this year because the internet of the future looks like a return to the internet of the past. An article in The Verge exaggerates the current situation, but not by much:

Twitter is being abandoned to bots and blue ticks. There’s the junkification of Amazon and the enshittification of TikTok. Layoffs are gutting online media. A job posting looking for an “AI editor” expects “output of 200 to 250 articles per week.” ChatGPT is being used to generate whole spam sites. Etsy is flooded with “AI-generated junk.” 

Elsewhere in The Verge, James Vincent has drawn parallels between auto-generated text and geofoam, a synthetic material stuffed into “the empty spaces that progress leaves behind.” Generative text has made it increasingly difficult to connect with people and websites that share useful information; the internet’s largest platforms have become hollow exercises in mass-produced content for monetizing web traffic. 

This decline of great powers has played out elsewhere in literature and history. Eleanor Janega sees parallels with the collapse of Twitter and the cascading failures of the Roman Empire:

In reality the “fall” wasn’t because outside forces wanted to destroy Rome – they just wanted to control it. There was a slow and steady degradation of the services that the Empire could offer, and people began to respond to this with smaller and localised communities.

Online, a shift towards smaller, more localized communities looks like a return to internet communities of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s: webrings and niche resource pages curated by passionate individuals. In the Fediverse, people are being encouraged to post more on their personal websites:

I found Blaugust, the Festival of Blogging, through my Mastodon account. The festival promotes a similar idea, encouraging people to publish more blog posts on their own sites during the month of August, and I’m hoping that it can help me overcome some of blogging’s emotional obstacles. 

(In addition to getting the idea of emotional obstacles from Tracy Durnell, I have also been thinking about her point that blog posts don’t have to be long. Both of those concepts have helped me address some of my own concerns about publishing material that doesn’t feel like it’s “good enough.”)

Game Exploration Done Well

(Image credit: Pixabay PIX 1861)

A while back, Overthinking It discussed how players enjoy exploration and discovery in video games. The argument was that a discovery is something players learn or find. A good discovery provides a thrilling sense of accomplishment, but these discoveries are only made through the process of exploration.

From a design perspective, it’s not enough for your games to have discoveries that entertain players; the players need to enjoy — or at least tolerate — the exploration that leads to those discoveries.

Forgotten Tavern tried to apply this concept with discoverable equipment upgrades. As the story progressed, scene descriptions changed over time to encourage exploration and lead players to better equipment. (Feedback suggested that the discoveries were appreciated, but the exploration mechanics could have been improved.)

The Ultima series gives better examples of a well-executed exploration/discovery process. Jimmy Maher at The Digital Antiquarian explains: 

“The gratification that comes when another piece of the puzzle falls into place is considerable. Ultima has always been better at delivering that thrill of exploration than just about any other CRPG. [….]Ferreting out these secrets and hidden mechanics contributes to another thing Ultima always does well: making you feel smart.”

Maher calls it “exploration,” but finding secrets and hidden mechanics sounds more like “discovery.” This difference is noted in Andrew Plotkin’s comment on a post about Ultima IV:

“It was an exercise in detail-oriented patience. You *can* see that extra pixel if you look for it *every time*, and if you don’t — well, you’re playing the wrong game. Similarly, every NPC has something to tell you, and you plumb their stupid conversation keywords until you find it. If you haven’t seen the other side of a lake or mountain range, you’re not done with it.”

The Ultima games were designed to support exploration that led to interesting discoveries. These dynamics are also seen in a more recent game, Fit for a King. It has graphics that are clearly influenced by earlier entries in the Ultima series:

(Image via Kitfox Games)

But I was delighted to learn that the similarities are more than visual. Fit for a King has 26 royal commands that are used to unearth buried treasure, yell secret phrases, and discover hidden details throughout your kingdom.

The game is described a non-linear sandbox, but Fit for a King has more structure than its description suggests: you are trying to find new ways to impress your rival before the big summit at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. It’s fun to explore the world, but it’s also rewarding to discover new and extravagant treasures that accomplish your goal.

The writing easily switches between serious and silly, depending on the circumstances. It's also brief and snarky, providing just enough detail to support the narrative.

After the preparations are ready, the player enjoys a brief exchange with their rival at the summit, and then an epilogue describes how various characters fared. That’s where you learn that the royal commands weren’t just cosmetic affordances — different characters will get married, wage war, and find lasting fame based on the player’s previous actions.

A final message encourages the player to go back and explore some more, which turns out to be a good idea. Fit for a King offers enough discoveries to support multiple playthroughs. 

TRUCK QUEST

I'm a little late with this announcement, but Donald Conrad and I made a game:


We entered it into the 2019 Interactive Fiction Competition.

Give it a try!

You can drive some trucks, borrow some money, and thwart some jerks who are up to no good. (And after that, don't forget to rate it on itch.io.)

Virals, Then and Now

From 2013:

I'd guess we have 12-18 months until the population develops herd immunity to 'viral' headlines. http://t.co/x2GLKF6K8i

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) December 7, 2013

The timetable was off, but the idea remains valid. A gimmick that is overused will become ineffective. From a 2019 study:

We took a nationally representative sample of 2,102 British adults, and undertook an experimental evaluation of some of marketers’ most commonly used tactics. [....]

Two thirds of the British public (65 percent) interpreted examples of scarcity and social proof claims used by hotel booking websites as sales pressure. Half said they were likely to distrust the company as a result of seeing them (49 percent). Just one in six (16 percent) said they believed the claims.

The results surprised us. We had expected there to be cynicism among a subgroup—perhaps people who booked hotels regularly, for example. The verbatim commentary from participants showed people see scarcity and social proof claims frequently online, most commonly in the travel, retail, and fashion sectors.

And this entire thread is worth reading:

Once something hits ~100 replies, you never want to look at or think about it again. Everyone something *can* say has been said. By day two of that notification tab being flooded with RTs you just feel you're being punished for having been half-clever for a moment.

— mcc (@mcclure111) June 26, 2019

Part of Twitter's problems stem from the fact that huge numbers of automated programs, and humans who act like them, are busy trying to generate social proof on behalf of their patrons. Even when the humans start seeing through it, the algorithms are still being refined to encourage it.

Interactive Fiction: Forgotten Tavern

It's another game!

 

Discerning critics have described it as "An odd experience. A sort of mash-up of IF, a dungeon grinder, a world-building strategy game, a roguelike game and one of those games you play on your phone where you have to make burgers or hotdogs to order.

Sort of." You should give it a try!

Interactive Fiction: Pushing Loyal People

It's a game!



And it's a game that you can actually win, but some people don't seem to have what it takes.

Maybe it's their loss? It might also be poor design choices.