Things are coming along...

I'm almost done designing the world for You Will Probably Lose Your Job. I only have four more screens to make! Additionally, for the first time I'm putting a little effort into putting shadows into one of my game worlds. Makes quite the difference, I think!

Digital: A Love Story

If you follow the indie game scene, you've probably already heard of Christine Love's Digital: A Love Story, but I had never gotten around to playing it until recently. It is essentially an interactive novel, but while most interactive text stories are told merely with text and hyperlinks or user commands, Christine Love does a creative thing and tells her story through the GUI of the protagonist's computer, and it really adds to the immersion.

On top of that, while it is an interactive story, the interactive components draw the player in without challenging or overwhelming him, and it does this while maintaining linearity and building a strong relationship between the player and one of the other characters. I think this is an amazing feat; in games you usually have interactive components that merely provides the player with challenges while telling a linear story, or you have interactive components that have the player determine the outcome of the story. The problem with the first is that you have a game that is only an interactive story in a very loose sense, and the problem with the second is that it is difficult to create a strong protagonist with motivations and behavior separate from the player, which limits the type of story you can tell. Christine Love somehow has created a protagonist that, even though you control him, has personality and motivations unique from the player. Yet, when I played the game, I felt as though I was one with the protagonist: his motivations became my motivations, his outrage was my outrage. It might not sound like much, but I think that's amazing.

Essentially, Digital: A Love Story it everything that I want my games to be, even if they are in a different format. It's really good, so give it a play.

First Draft of the Revolution

I played this really cool interactive story the other day.  It's a particularly creative take on the "choose your own adventure" concept in which you play the role of various characters as they write letters to each other, and it does a remarkably good job of world building for such a short work. Check it out!

More YWPLYJ Screenshots

Haven't had much time to work on You Will Probably Lose Your Job, but here are some more screenshots of the game world for your pleasure:

Game writers and their thoughts on interactive narrative

Here's a great interview with Valve's Erik Wolpaw and Double Fine's Anna Kipnis on writing stories for games, non-game interactive narratives, and games developed by one-man teams (all of which are relevant to what I'm trying to do). Valve's always been telling great stories through their games, and I really enjoyed  reading what one of their writers had to say on some of the stories being told by modern experimental indie games. Give it a read!

Storytelling Through Games

Here's a fairly good article about the potential of games as a medium for storytelling. I'm actually in the process of writing an essay on the same topic, and it is always refreshing to read a piece by a game developer who agrees that interactive software can tell stories as well or better than other mediums, but that  potential for storytelling is being wasted on shallow, linear, overproduced playthings.

The only point of disagreement I have with the author is his praising of the player avatar over the player character. When the protagonist is an avatar of the player, makes decisions based off of the player's history in the player's world, but lives in a separate world... a lot is sacrificed. Avatar characters in games can't undergo complex character development the same way characters in novels and movies can unless the player who is operating the avatar is undergoing development himself. Even in that case, the character development is a result of events that happen in the real world, not the game world. It poses a serious problem for storytellers, I think. More about this when I publish that essay I mentioned.

It's August (more or less)

A few items of interest:
1) You Will Probably Lose Your Job is growing into a much larger project than I originally planned. Right now I'm making tile sets and creating the maps before I start writing the code. The dream sequence of the game is going to look something like this:

 2) I'm starting to rethink whether or not I, as one-man team, have enough time and patience to tell the story I want to tell in Space Punk with sound and colorful graphics and do it justice. I'm thinking about instead attempting to tell the story in the format of an interactive electronic book. More on that when I'm done with You Will Probably Lose Your Job

3) Play this. It's a short flash game called dys4ia by Anna Anthropy, aka Auntie Pixelante. It's about her experiences as a transgender woman undergoing hormone replacement therapy. It's really cool; I wish more people would use games to tell these sorts of stories instead of the usual stories of wizards and space marines.