Brrr!! Yeah, it’s cold out there, and it feels like it has been forever, and that the warmth of summer was just a dream I had several years ago that I sometimes remember. In real life, I had a dream when I was in middle school that there was a murderer hiding behind the couch, and I saw her reflection in the window against the dark of night. Yikes! Summer is a way better dream.
I guess it's about time to sum up everything we did for the past week or so. We’re coming fresh off of a game jam where we made a demo for a completely different game that we’re sending out into the world soon, so we lost a bunch of time to that, but there’s still lots to report! Hopefully after this we can get to regular weekly dev logs.
The New Plan
We took another look at the game, and at our timeline, and have settled on a path ahead for the immediate future, at least.
We still are attached to the idea of fleshing out some of the unfinished work in the build we had for the showcase last semester, but those are taking a sideline as we focus more on the overall containers that these systems will exist within, those being time and narrative (perhaps the containers of all things, in our minds at least). We will probably work on improving things like rock collecting (maybe most importantly) and expanding the status & sticker system alongside the development of those larger systems.
Progress:
Time:
I entered the garden of beautiful delicious vegetables and fruits and roaming rabbits that is our unity project and planted some new seeds. That is to say I built a simple time passage system. Jib and I talked about this semi-extensively to figure out what system of time passage would really work for us and our purposes. There are a few different systems we were debating:
- Time passes when the player enters the right scene (typical narrative game/RPG progression) (AKA time does not progress on its own)
- Class begins when the player enters the classroom, afternoon play events happen when the player talks to the key NPC, etc.
- Time progresses as the player moves between scenes (literal Unity scenes) (Used in the Boku no Natsuyasumi games)
- The game is composed of smaller scenes, and each time the player moves between two of them, time increments forward a bit.
- Time progresses at a fixed rate, almost constantly. (As in games like Moon, Stardew Valley, Minecraft, etc)
The typical RPG system of “time passes as the player progresses” was off the table pretty much immediately. A lot of our efforts in the design of this game are to de-center the player as a protagonist, and to create a world that feels rich and alive. This system sort of works against both of those things, by making the player completely control the world, and also making the world super dead and stagnant.
Time progressing as the player moves between scenes is compelling, but in our case it didn’t really feel like it did much different than time progressing at a fixed rate, other than complicating things for the player, and maybe creating a more crunchy, maximizable system than we really want.
So then, it seems we’re led to scaled real-time progression! You may remember my other post where I talk about how great Moon is (at the beginning) at making the player feel like a child, using this very system. I should be saying Yippee!! But I’m not.
Why I’m not saying Yippee (and why i am okay now):
The wonderful thing about time in Moon is that despite all of the restrictions it creates, it’s infinite. You can repeat the day cycle over and over again and the game won’t end, and nothing will change. That is where the problem lies for our game, since we have a very fixed timeline, where the game only lasts five days, and each of those days varies significantly. While this isn’t necessarily a problem, this ticking clock would likely create a sense of urgency in the player rather than a sense of chilling and being a child.
We talked about a couple of possible solutions. First, we considered simply letting the player progress the story at their own pace, just like in Moon. Time progresses at a fixed rate, but the “adult world” story would progress based on player actions in some parallel narrative, like a long-term game between the kids, or the building of something with rocks, etc. This felt a bit too hands-off (for us as authors), as the buildup and tension of a creeping storm in the latter half of the narrative is quite important to us, and we think it should be heavily directed. This would also probably lead to the game running out of content after a while.
Our second solution, which we ultimately settled on, came from an earlier meeting where we had mapped out all possible interactions in the game, marking during which interactions time would pass, and during which time would not. We had already decided that the “play” events in the afternoon would freeze time ( time would just progress to the next broad time period like “evening” or “night” after the game ends), as would certain interactions like opening your DS to grab a sticker, and reading the forum on your computer at home. As our primary concern was a constant sense of urgency and pressure, we decided to add a section at the end of each day where time does not pass, and there is nothing of particular importance to do, where the player can wind down, think, etc.
We’re not certain exactly what this will be, but we toyed with the idea of a dream sequence influenced by the events of the day and what rocks the player picked up as well as a night routine, where the player just has to brush their teeth, drink a warm glass of milk, and so on. Maybe they also have a dumb little cousin staying with them that likes to chat with them on their DS while they sit in bed, and they can look out their window at the town, other cozy stuff like that. Yeah it’s a cozy game section. We can’t let our game get too not cozy do you remember our artist statement? Its important and stuff.
Immediately after this conversation, we talked with Winnie, and she expressed some concern over the fact that a player could incidentally end up not believing anything in particular, because they’ve just been like wasting time and playing a game on their phone at the same time and stuff. Her suggestion was to implement a point in the game where the player will repeat the same day over and over again, groundhog day style, until they give some indication that they have some kind of strong belief. We think that this could be as simple as “investigating” something, or reaching a certain friendship threshold with certain combinations of characters, and will probably be a combination of things. Of course, the player should be allowed to not believe anything on purpose, and we also don’t want to run out of content, so we would cap this repetition after three of the same day.
This was a great suggestion! We decided on day 3, as it would be right before stuff started getting serious, and would allow us to introduce the approaching storm at the end of day 3, after the check has been made and we’ve confirmed that the player will move on to day 4. We also had already talked about some games that the kids could play that could span multiple days, and as Winnie noted, kids could do the same thing every day for way more than three days in a row and be happy.
Again, the actual check that we will make is uncertain right now, but we’re pretty confident that we’ll move forward with this idea.
All of this time talk leads me to think about the fact that we kind of need to either coerce the player to surrender to the game and the finitude of their perspective, or to make them not even realize how much there is to miss. It’s something we faced even all the way back in our first ever thesis prototype, the archaeology game. So I will think about that and probably continue to forever and ever.
Time as it Stands now:
From the start, we’ve broken our in-game days down into sections, but now that we have more information about when time passes and stuff, I’ll put the breakdown here:
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(time passes) Morning: Walk to school, talk to friends outside. Very brief. Teacher gets you at end of time block.
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(The entire school day is skipped, generally)
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(time passes) Afternoon: Can walk around the entire town and talk to anyone, listen in on adult conversations, etc. Best friend grabs you at the end of the time block to play.
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(time does not pass) Afternoon part 2: play with friends. Scripted narrative sequences.
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(time passes) Evening: Walk home. Chat with Blueberry from outside of their house. Mom gets you at the end of the time block.
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(time does not pass) Night: Get ready for bed, read the forum, etc. Still in development lol.
So after all of that, I just made a system where time ticks at a constant rate and can be paused, as well as manually set through different functions. It also sends out a broadcast at a given interval that can tell objects to update whatever needs to be updated to match the time. It is currently not connected to the other systems in the game.
Narrative:
Jib and I had a meeting where we reviewed our story to re-familiarize ourselves, and ran into a bit of an issue with our four “possible truths” that we were planning to leave breadcrumbs for. The core of it was that it felt somewhat unreasonable to ask the player to believe anything other than the fact that Blueberry was guilty of killing two people, when Blueberry was present for two eerily similar deaths, especially when some of the alternatives were things like “a mysterious older kid who is completely uninvolved did it,” and some kids had beliefs as simple as “Someone was involved!”
The most interesting thing here is not that two people have died in similar ways, but that Blueberry was there both times. And in addition how it works as a mystery, our story is about sensationalization, so it feels much better to have characters latch onto an interesting hook like that, rather than unnaturally disregard it.
So this required both a reframing and a slight restructuring of our mystery.
The Question:The reframing lies mostly in the question that we’re asking to the player. The pertinent question isn’t really “Who did it?” It’s more like “Why did Blueberry do this?” or at the very least “Why was Blueberry there for two subsequent deaths from falling?”
This question shifts the focus from a whodunnit of following breadcrumbs to more of a psychological mystery/story about a potentially troubled kid (see The Aosawa Murders by Riku Onda). I think that this is also a bit more in line with a decision we made after a meeting with Winnie discussing our mystery, and whether we want to focus more on creating breadcrumb trails that lead to a hard belief, or create a possibility space of belief that slowly shrinks, but never fully excludes all of our primary “possible beliefs.”
We decided on the latter, and this decision was part of a wider shift away from our initial creative challenge relating to the Rashomon Effect towards what we feel is the heart of the project, a critique and exploration of sensationalization and existentialism. In Winnie’s words, rather than having branching arrows that point towards different solutions to the mystery, “All of the arrows point to the fact that there was a death, and that’s it.”
Whatever trails the player may follow, in the end we want them to return to the fact that someone died, and how that’s simple and it’s terrible and tragic, and it’s boring and maybe that’s part of what makes it so hard to face head on. This also kind of points to a fitting ending, where after all of the buzz and excitement and fear, the storm passes, and nothing bad happened at all, and life goes on. Anyways!
I actually feel much more confident in my ability to write this type of mystery than a concrete “fair” mystery that works from several different perspectives. The biggest challenge will just be scaling information so that the player gains confidence in a certain belief at the particular point that we want them to (though we can be a bit less worried about that being perfect thanks to Winnie’s great suggestion!)
We still are open to including a possibility of the supernatural, but we need to test out if this “why” lens works and is compelling at all! So we’re working on that now. More on that later!!!!!
The Structure:Thinking about the story with this new frame, we were really captured by the idea of including a detective in the story. With this more uniform belief, that of course Blueberry is involved, all of the kids would be gossiping about Blueberry and “remember this thing that blueberry did?” and “My mom said this about blueberry’s family” and so on, and so we want to introduce our detective as the outsider who believes the exact opposite of everyone else. In the detective’s mind, Blueberry can’t have killed two people, so their investigation runs completely opposite to the beliefs permeating the town. I think it’s a fun inversion of a classic type of detective story, and I think it will be really compelling to experience that type of story from the perspective of one of the kids. Though the player won’t get a ton of access to this character’s story, I think that the disruption of an opposite belief from an outsider will, more likely than not, actually increase the strength in the belief that blueberry did it, or at least will have some polarizing effect.
We also now have decided to remove the mysterious freaky older kid character. They are interesting, but don’t serve much of a purpose in this new version of the mystery, and may end up making things muddy instead. But the good news is that we get to salvage a lot of that interesting stuff by just giving it to Blueberry! Yay! Congratulations Blueberry!
This is way too long but the good news is that I’m almost done. On to the next steps!
Next Steps:
I mentioned testing out the “why” angle earlier, and that’s the main focus for the coming week-ish! I’ll be writing a super straightforward “why” day, where it explores one possible psychological reasoning behind Blueberry’s “actions.” Then we’ll implement it, super busted style, into a cool prototype.
If that works out great, then shortly after that we’ll have to get deep into the “concrete progress” zone, stepping out of the “have ideas and think about them a lot” zone. Gwah! That basically just means: link up our time passage system with the other systems, expand rock collection, write the entire game (or just one day really) with a level of specificity heretofore never even considered, build the map in-engine, build the game, finish the game, etc.
More specifically, the immediate goals after this prototype would be:
- Send out emails to possible external advisors
- Integrate time passage with other systems
- Revise “daily events” and other broader written things to fit with our new direction