Xeneth

[RELEASE] Nasty/Good/Badass

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[Now playable at https://xeneth.itch.io/nastygoodbadass]

 

Basic Premise:

"The player is subjected to a series of questions. These questions are framed as a series of hypotheticals, much like in an online personality test. Each question has exactly three possible answers that correspond to the theme of Nasty, Good, and Badass."

 

[Day One]

It's my first real jam, so I'm aiming low and trying to keep this doable by myself with little to no programming or art experience.

The episode title Nasty/Good/Badass jumped out at me as a simple trinary game dialog selection that I could do in Twine!

 

Being a reclusive and traditionally unproductive procrastinator, I definitely want to get out of the house as much as I can during the jam, so being able to work on a laptop will be key. Turns out Twine is a bit persnickity about where and how it saves your work, so for now I'm going to manually sync up with archive files on OneDrive.

 

Given time zones and having company over, goals for day one were pretty light. The project file was ceremonially named and things generally got laid out, that's about it.

 

Work Done:

  • Solve workspace syncing between laptop and desktop

  • Start design doc with rough structural ideas

  • Test storing and printing of variables

 

NastyGoodBadassCreation.png

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[Day Two]

So this DevLog isn't going to be super interesting or pretty to look at given the nature of the project.

Nothing wrong with that, I'm still going to try to update it every day; It's a tool for self discipline that emulates the kind of meeting overhead I would experience if I needed to communicate with a team.

 

No real writing progress today outside of a good discussion featuring hypotheticals with my girlfriend... that said, the gist of the narrative is mostly decided upon. Documentation doesn't fully reflect this yet and prior to the work week proper I need to get the design doc into a state fit to hold copy... But it remains to be seen if it's worth composing text in a separate editor before slamming it into Twine proper.

 

Twine itself is proving to be a bit of a workflow nightmare! It doesn't lend itself to any sort of source control or versioning out of the box, and the lack of apparent undo states mean you have to be really careful during editing. I even managed to mess up some text by fiddling with the volume buttons on my keyboard, so there's some weird hotkey stuff going on as well.

If I attempt another text-centric game in the future, I'll definitely be switching over to Unity; I've heard there's actually solid tools for IF style workflow now.

 

Work Done:

  • Display order of Nasty, Good, and Badass answers randomized
  • Question testing skeleton converted to easily callable "function passages"

NastyGoodBadassDay2.png

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[Day Three]

Holy shit I forgot how bad my brain is at parsing and retaining boolean logic states!

This is why I tried to become a designer instead of a programmer; Even when reading my own code I feel like grokking a new flow of functions pushes my understanding of some other workings out of my head temporarily.

 

Still zero progress on writing actual copy. Everything in the game itself is just identifying statements and test text.

I think the plan is going to be to do the majority of the writing while I'm out of the apartment at coffee shops or other wifi enabled spaces once the work week proper start up tomorrow... I also have another potential workspace lined up that I'm too nervous and excited about to even write about right now! More on that next update.

 

Work Done:

  • Explanatory comments added to function-like passages because DEVELOPMENT BEST PRACTICES
  • Logic for serving different questions based on previous answers is limited but functional
  • Full question and answer tree logic filled out in editor (still need to design ending determination though)

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[Day Four]

Today was mostly an anxiety-ridden test of the whole "working outside the apartment" thing. The atmosphere and wifi of my target coffee shop worked out, but I did still have trouble focusing. Next time I go I might try to drown out the default jazz of the place with my own more upbeat tunes and see if it gets my hands flying a bit more.

 

Somewhat lame progress on the game itself, but the documentation now reflects the actual design of the game, which is nice. Designers more so than other disciplines really should keep good documentation to help justify the "softness" of the discipline. I've always kind of valued Producer-esque and Engineer-like qualities in the Designers I've worked with more than Artistry... Which says a lot about my having a QA and Art background.

 

Part of "the great confidence collapse of 2016" might be that I need to become a better Producer and Engineer to feel good about my role and potential in the industry. Food for thought.

 

In winding down for the night I had a development epiphany when trying to solve a problem that sort of... cascaded.

I'll avoid spoiling the structure of the game to talk about it for now, (and hopefully my thoughts on the subject will crystallize to Remo-like clarity in the meantime) but it felt like a tiny and seemingly reasonable type of design decision that's currently a microcosm of larger issues plaguing AAA development, threatening to drive up the price of making games.

 

I took some notes and will definitely be returning to the topic once I've shipped something here... And I haven't forgotten about where I told myself I'd go to get writing done tomorrow. Oh god.

 

Next time on Nasty/Good/Badass: Oakland

 

Work Done:

  • Design documentation now reflects what the game is and needs to become
  • Chapter tree cleaned up in editor to fit and scroll nicely

post-8533-0-67863700-1462859475_thumb.png

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[Day Five]

This is a big step! Currently jamming from The MADE in Oakland, (Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment) which is a neat video game museum and community space. Being around other people that love games and are also doing creative work really is worth the additional layer of social anxiety. I should return on Tuesday of next week too, deeper into the jam.

 

Writing of actual copy is still going to be the meat of this project, and today was bogged down by some misunderstandings about how Twine handles if statements. Lessons were learned though, "is" works better than "=" and nested conditionals need to be supported by a little "else" magic, but everything appears to be functional and playable from start to finish now.

 

This technically marks the "design lock" point in the project, though it feels weird to be using such an agile/team oriented term on a solo project. Given that it technically has a schedule though, perhaps it's not so strange after all; I now know exactly how much needs to be written before it's done, and there's little chance of scope creep.

 

Work Done:

  • Nature of all endings finalized
  • Final score calculations hooked up
  • First full debug playthroughs complete

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[Day Seven]

Day six ended up not containing any meaningful progress. I guess that was like a "weekend" where the project was concerned, even though my schedule is basically random at this point.

 

The meat of the actual question writing is underway, but the format and the design are quite restrictive from a writing standpoint. It's taking a surprising amount of effort to sort of "paint within the lines" of the intended piece.

 

I must make an effort to prevent further dev logs from primarily devolving into, "oh jeez writing copy is harder than writing design documentation".

 

Work Done:

  • First draft written for most early pre-branching questions
  • Found three points for some light randomized encouraging text to further break up the Q&A pattern

post-8533-0-16401200-1463065111_thumb.png

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[Day Eight]

HOLY SHIT Jake described the game on the cast... this is the sort of thing I typically handle extremely poorly, but talking about anxiety issues won't really solve them the way finishing this thing will, so that's enough of that.

 

Was very pleased to hear that the Thumbs are planning to stream playthroughs of the jam games! This is great news for everyone involved, and should help further cement Wizard Jam as a "thing".

 

Now that it's almost all content creation and iteration, the systems designer in me is getting antsy. I didn't really create this thing with streaming in mind, so it's going to have a more muted impact than it could.

 

Putting a pin in that too; promise I'll talk more about tone and the process at the tail end of this thing.

 

Work Done:

  • Question writing/editing continues
  • Tweaked function formatting of line breaks to give answers a little more breathing room

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[Day Nine]

I'd say there's light at the end of the tunnel.

Writing proceeds as planned, but I can't help but feel as if a creative writer by trade would have handily "solved" all these little narrative hooks in such a way that the painting of the world is complete, like, a week ago.

 

Of course the reality of creative writing is that it's far from a concrete series of problems to be solved, and the reader/player does not magically "get it" once you've quantified all of your adjectives or whatever. 

 

Narrative design is going to have to be something I practice at some point in the future; This project has uncovered a weakness that I should have known was there... All my experience is with systems and content design, (and not the type of content that takes the form of evocative copy).

 

Work Done:

  • All questions and answers have at the very least rough placeholder copy
  • Proofreading tools researched for the inevitable editing phase

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[Day Eleven] (lost this post somehow, but this is a fair recreation of it)

My sleeping and waking schedule, (and thus updates/progress) have become pretty random...

 

The more writing I get done on this thing, the more obvious it becomes that the Idle Thumbs episode title "seed" of the project has had a lot less impact on it than the other media I've been steeped in since starting...

I've been listening to a lot of ambient experimental electronica like Halley Labs' Aurastys, and catching up on the Friends at the Table campaign COUNTER/Weight, so the dystopian sci-fi vibes just sort of took over I guess.

 

Not that I'm complaining, the thing obviously just is what it is at this point and that's fine, I'm just learning stuff about how I create that should have been more obvious in hindsight.

 

Note to self regarding post jam topics that still need to be covered here: Tone as it relates to the order I did work in, and an epiphany about trying to solve design problems with content.

 

Work Done:

  • All questions and answers are now first draft copy complete
  • Added a credits screen with some external links

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[Day Twelve]

It's Tuesday for the second time since the jam started, so once again I was coworking from The MADE in Oakland! 

Being there presents its own unique stressors and sources of anxiety, but I think the point is that they are completely different ones from what I face at home.

 

The guys that attend regularly are super chill and just code and test up a storm for hours. I really need to hone my work ethic.

 

Work Done:

  • Some editing to make the "voice" of the questions more consistent
  • Six branch endings plotted (but not fully written out)

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[Day Fourteen]

Time for proofreading, and potential edits... then let's put this dang file on the internet.

 

Dragged my feet for too long, this thing could have been up on itch.io a couple of days ago, but I guess I'll just admit that it's scary... This is probably why I don't have a website, the idea of "my things" being out there in the world is alien and sort of off putting, which is obviously emotional and makes little sense.

 

Work Done:

  • Finalized writing
  • Created a cover image because itch.io prefers it

post-8533-0-11825200-1463692269.png

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[Release]

https://xeneth.itch.io/nastygoodbadass

It's done! (Well, I'm sure someone will find a typo and cause me to obsessively update the file again, but yeah...)

 

Earlier in the thread I talked a bit about how it felt like the tone of the game "got away from me" at some point during the creation process, and I figure this would be a good point to expand on that a bit.

Spoiler time: If you haven't played it yet go do that, it's really short!

 

So the seed of the idea listed in the first post of the thread really was all I had at the time. This whole 'paint a picture of a dystopian future indirectly' thing just sort of happened as I thought about the kind of questions and answers that interested me. The darker and weirder it got, the more "metagoals" took a back seat to my personal goals, I suppose.

 

Metagoals: Have Fun, Entertain Thumbs, Seem Cool

Personal Goals: Finish Something, Build Self-Confidence, Tell a Story

 

The story came from a conversation about how much STUFF there is to see and experience on the internet, more than anyone has time or awareness to intelligently digest or catalogue. It's frustrating to focus your interest to something like gaming the way I do and have that not make a dent given how much great stuff there is to play. It occurred to me that this will only become more pronounced in the future, and thought about the kind of browser or search engine that could help you navigate what's bound to be an absolute labyrinth of STUFF.

 

Initially the new concept centered around the idea that you were training an AI about yourself so that it could help you, but somewhere along the way it got all twisted up into the player themself being an intelligence residing in various distributed networks. Lots of random details about the world that emerged from this project are still kicking around in my head, so it's possible that I'll return to it at some later date, hopefully in a less restrictive format than a silly quiz with only three answers to each question, heh.

 

It wasn't until

that I realized that things had stopped conceptually being very funny or entertaining, but hopefully those qualities were sufficiently supplanted by stuff that's thoughtful or interesting.

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[Epilogue]

Time to wrap this thread up once and for all! This Wizard Jam has been a great experience and I look forward to playing all the other entries- Thanks for being rad, Idle Thumbs community!

 

Nasty/Good/Badass Trivia:

  • There are a total of 20 questions, (that number serendipitously arose from the structure) but the player only ever answers 14 of them in any one session.
  • Three of the questions branch after the next scripted one, serving up one of three variations depending on the previous answer.
  • The very first question about the three J.B. secret agents is a reference to the dialogue option design philosophy in Alpha Protocol, and the discussion that originally spawned the episode title.
  • Reaction phrases like "Interesting choices so far." are purely randomized, but hold to the overarching 'three variations' theme.
  • The questions about caring for pets are very lightly foreshadowing the Cloud AIs taking care of human interests.
  • In the fiction, Janica Remo is Chris Remo's great great great(etc.) granddaughter, and her quote is actually from a Gamasutra article he wrote about games aping film, with some changes to make it about VR aping games.
  • A surprising amount of the data sorting technobabble near the end is culled from actual technical terms.
  • Originally, the "voice" of the CrecheMaster AI and the player were stylistically too similar, so at one point during development I broke up all the contractions and rewrote the questions to sound more formal and robotic, and tweaked a lot of the answers to make the player AI sound more human... Ideally this obfuscated the nature of the test for a bit longer, but hopefully in hindsight conveys a sense that the new developing intelligences are more advanced than the ones raising them.

And finally...

  • There are three "standard" endings for when one of your scores is higher than the others, and three "extra" endings for when two of your scores are tied for first. It's not numerically possible for all three scores to be the same.

This last piece of trivia ties into a little epiphany I had...

The original design called for three of EVERYTHING, including endings. When I realized it would not be possible to elegantly rig it so that one category would always win, I came up with a few solutions, like making some questions worth more than others, fudging the math to avoid ties. This seemed too arbitrary. (It's elegant and fair to have every question be worth the same amount.)

 

A solution I almost implemented gave me chills when I realized the implications: In the event of a tie, ask one of three "tiebreaker" questions to arrive at one of the three endings...

 

After some thought, not only did I deem this solution to be unsatisfying, it reeked of a problem that I'm seeing a lot of in the industry: Attempting to solve design problems with more content.

 

This microcosm of the problem pales in comparison to the AAA versions of it, but think of the questions in Nasty/Good/Badass as the levels or challenges in a more complex game, and the endings as rewards or outcomes. This was a problem fundamentally about the rewards, so why was I considering tacking on more challenges? I was reminded of copied and pasted quests to pad out the length of a game that's deemed too short, or tons of roughly equivalent options masking a lack of depth behind tacked on complexity.

 

Some napkin math revealed that all questions being equal, there would numerically be 6 possible outcomes. The more I compared my tiny game to something larger, the clearer it became that the correct answer was to add three possible endings instead of extra questions, and hey; Six is still a multiple of three.

 

In the end I learned a LOT about myself and game development from making this thing, even if it's a modest offering and I'm not 100% satisfied with the results. If you actually made it through this crazy verbose devlog, consider checking out some of the other threads in this subforum; There's so many amazing in progress .gifs and design insights... and thanks for reading!

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Congrats Xeneth! Looking forward to trying this after I get finished with mine. Also, I think this thread counts as a director's commentary.

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I very much enjoyed the gradual dystopian reveal of the game (3 endings so far, but its 2am so I might sleep...), and I enjoyed reading your epic log too. Thanks!

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I really liked the story. You took the personality quiz format and made it really interesting. Like a mini 80 Days.

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I enjoyed your writing a lot - such a good/creative take on a personality test! The slow reveal was most rewarding in the first play-through, but I kept playing to get at other thought-provoking questions afterwards.

 

Your log is impressive too! Glad I didn't read too much of it till after playing though.

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I also enjoyed it! The slow plot reveals over the course of the game are really cool, and it had a nice sense of place. I played through three times for three different endings, but on my first, canonical playthrough, I got the Video Games ending.

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This was fun! I got the

gg

ending, which worked well!

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There was a wonderful mix of humour, cyberpunk ephemera, and even a few moments of pause. Great writing, great game.

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Excellent writing! I was really surprised by the direction this one took.

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