Saturday, September 20, 2014

Creatures Such as We


Two people sitting close together, in space suits on the moon, looking off into the stars. Note: This post deals with my game Creatures Such as We. As such, it will contain spoilers.

Main Page: Creatures Such as We
Play or Download: Here

Creatures Such as We was a bunch of fun to design and write. Just a fun opportunity to focus on interpersonal relationships with and a philosophical examination of video games as art, all wrapped up in a semi sci-fi exterior of being a moon tour guide. And then the paralleled storytelling between the game and the in-game game was a whole extra layer of fun to manipulate. The whole thing ended up having so many moving parts that one of the biggest things I struggled with was how to succinctly describe it to friends and testers: Dating sim? Tour guide slice-o-life? Sci-fi things-go-wrong adventure? Video game philosophical commentary? Zombie-ghost gorefest? A cohesive narrative that actually wraps all those different story elements together?

Well, yes, actually. It is that. It is all those things. But mostly, it is a reflection of my internal musings, which are complicated, layered, and interwoven. I gave myself free reign to make whatever weird story came to my mind, and it ended up creating this very real, very human experience.

I've highlighted different aspect of the game design process in the following blog posts:

Inspirations for Creatures Such as We (Creatures)

Note: This post deals with my game Creatures Such as We. As such, it will contain spoilers.   

The concept behind Creatures took awhile to take a solid shape, but the basic premise had been stuck in my mind for a long time.

Creating a CYOA Game (Creatures)

Note: This post deals with my game Creatures Such as We. As such, it will contain spoilers.

Making a full-sized CYOA (in Choicescript) was daunting: it was a lot of writing, and it was difficult to QA and course correct. It ended up eating more time than expected in some areas, although it gave a lot of unexpected leeway in others.

Working with ChoiceScript (Creatures)

Note: This post deals with my game Creatures Such as We. As such, it will contain spoilers.

Working with ChoiceScript was not necessarily the easiest transition. It was my first time working with any CYOA scripting language, and ChoiceScript has a steep initial learning curve. It took some work to get past the initial hurdle, but I ended up really appreciating the tools and simple format that ChoiceScript uses, but I do have some thoughts on improvements.

Also, I'd like to say that while the game was assembled and tested with ChoiceScript, I storyboarded in Twine, wrote/programmed with OpenOffice Writer, and resorted to Notepad++ for interpreting automated bug reports.


Designing for Inclusion (Creatures)

Note: This post deals with my game Creatures Such as We. As such, it will contain spoilers. 

I've written several games before, but most of them deliberately avoided dealing with people, because people can be complicated and I wasn't confident on how well I could write them. I decided to step out of my comfort zone with Creatures, and do a game that was entirely based around one of the more complicated interpersonal relationships: romance. Focusing on that human interaction ended up not only being really fun, but it offered me a great opportunity to make a game with a better focus on inclusion. I wanted to make sure that I had gameplay that was respectful to real-world diversity and showed a simple, better way to have inclusion in games, and dealt with discrimination seriously.
In some of the rotating breakfast conversations, characters would bring up issues of race and gender, because it's something that's important to people, and it should be talked about. I made it clear that progress was still somewhat of a struggle even in the future, because I didn't want to present a magically post-racial, post-gender civilization. That's unrealistic and erases the real struggles going on in the world right now.

Potential Future Romance Games? (Creatures)

Note: This post deals with my game Creatures Such as We. As such, it will contain spoilers. 

I had a lot of fun playing with making a dating game, and it's definitely something I'd like to do again in the future. I wish there were more story-heavy, choice-heavy romance games out there. Right now, there are plenty of graphic novels, but I don't really find them engaging on the same level as other kinds of games: you just have so little control over your character for such long stretches of time, and often the surrounding story feels forgettable.

Friday, September 19, 2014

Coloratura

Note that this is the main page for my commentary on Coloratura. It will contain spoilers.

Coloratura (main page)
Download file (Original Text Adventure version - requires interpreter)
Play online (Original Text Adventure version)
Play online (Twine version)

Click here for the map of the game world.



Coloratura was a fun way for me to combine three of my favorite passions: science, music, and horror into something truly novel and exciting. It also was a great exercise in game design and planning. It won first place in the 2013 Interactive Fiction Competition and the "Best Game" award in the 2013 XYZZY awards, along with several other rewards.

I've made several pieces of behind-the-scenes commentary on Coloratura:
Maps and Reality
The Chile Triple Junction
Usability Concerns
The Colors of Coloratura
Otherworldly Rules
Coloratura - Final Thoughts
Coloratura and the XYZZY Awards

Thursday, September 18, 2014

XYZZY Awards (Coloratura)

Main post on Coloratura.

Coloratura won a set of 2013 XYZZY Awards: Best Individual PC, Best Puzzles, Best Individual Puzzle, and Best Game. It was nominated in nearly every category, and was so heavily nominated for Best Individual PC that it was granted that award in the nomination phase. This is in addition to already having won First Place and Miss Congeniality in the 2013 Interactive Fiction Competition that it was originally entered into. It's fair to say that Coloratura was a runaway success. But what made it so? I'm going to focus on the winning puzzle of creating the meat monster, but this creation process applied to the whole game. There will be heavy spoilers of the game, specifically centered around the solution puzzle.

Final Thoughts (Coloratura)

Main post on Coloratura.


Coloratura won the IF Competition 2013. I am absolutely over the moon! It was a stressful year or so of development with many lost mornings, evenings, and weekends. There were two or three structural refactors, and occasional tear-fueled breakdowns. But I thought I'd share some things that I learned and give some more insight into the development cycle of Coloratura.

 Coloratura spoilers, ho!

Otherworldy Rules (Coloratura)

Main post on Coloratura.

I approached the question of souls, dimensions, and auras as though from a blank slate, looking to create potentially interesting and new ways to present otherworldy concepts. I wanted to first create a consistent foundation for Coloratura's mythology, and then to draw puzzles and implications from that foundation.

The very first thing I had decided upon was the notion that souls permeate a creature’s entire body. This naturally led itself to the puzzle of the meat monster, which was a concept that I was enamored with very early on. This also helped create one of my favorite details during the joining with the Engineer: when the creature realizes that it doesn't have to pull each limb, but only pull on the neurons.

The Colors of Coloratura (Coloratura)

Main post on Coloratura.


When I was first creating the mechanics for the synesthesia of colors and color-influencing, I decided that each color (or single wavelength) was to directly represent a single emotion. Then I had the devious though that to get players into an otherworldly mood, I should include colors that were outside the human-visible spectrum. So I created a color template that included blissful white, crazy black, apathetic grey, scared infrared, furious red, revolted orange, curious yellow, joyful green, caring blue, protective violet, and commanding ultraviolet. I made it halfway through writing Act I before realizing that I had left out indigo. This was actually a blessing, because I was frustrated at my inability to include just one more distinctive color/emotion combination: Trusting.

Usability Concerns (Coloratura)

Main post on Coloratura.


One of the things that I'm always concerned about with regards to game design is making sure that the game is accessible to as many people as possible. I really enjoyed writing Coloratura's focus on this intense visual experience, but with allusions to text-based colors that required no actual ability to distinguish color or even see. In fact, I played this to my advantage with infrared and ultraviolet. But, I feel like the text representation of a visual experience also gave the player an opportunity to mentally engage in world-building more: after all, what does an infrared funneling aura look like? I could conjure an image, and so could you, but I'm not sure they'd be the same. I delighted giving auras physically ambiguous descriptions, allowing players to fill them in with their imagination, focus on the emotions behind the colors and the shapes.

The Chile Triple Junction (Coloratura)

Main post on Coloratura.

I worked hard to create a realistic and accurate back-story and setting, creating an undersea lair for the Aqueosity felt important to me. I wanted a place that exuded a mystical aura, but that wasn't played out (like, the Bermuda Triangle or Atlantis, for instance). I decided very early on that it needed to be a natural structure, unlike any other previously known, and I set to work researching viable options.

Maps and Reality (Coloratura)

Main post on Coloratura.


I created the map for the game fairly early into development, even before I had a solid idea what I wanted from each room. It ended up being a great way to ground myself, lay out clear goals, and plot the progression. I created this detailed map based off of the real schematics for the NOAA Ferrell, and that realism lent itself to some amazing worldbuilding. (I did, of course, also include a purely text-based description of the layout in-game.)


Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Divis Mortis - A Wrapup

Main Page
Play Online
Download game file

This was quite the rocky intro into game design. I've had one Java class, and one web design class (where I made a hypertext game before those were a real thing.) I picked up Inform, and started away on my 25-room grand vision. With hindsight, I should have maybe worked on smaller exercises first, because it was a huge undertaking, and I ended up writing a lot of redundant code. For example, I ended up programming a door manually, instead of just labeling it a "door". Oops. Had to strip that out. But actually in diving in and sticking to it, I learned a lot: about the language, about design, about sticking to a schedule, and the importance of constant testing.

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Tenth Plague

Main Page
Play Online
Download Game

Tenth Plague was more of a short adventure that I created while I was in the middle of work on another, larger project that ultimately never ended up getting finished. It was intended to be kind of a new and different look at what is a familiar story to many people.