Some notes on the development of the robot game:
The working title for most of development was Robot Rampage, but I decided to change it at the last minute to Industrial Accident. The new title gives less clue of what’s going to happen so when the violence starts it should come as a surprise, and it ladles on grim the irony of what’s happening rather than giving it a pulpy fun feel.
This game is pretty violent, in an over-the-top black comedy way, and I actually found writing it a bit disturbing in places. Something about the fact that it’s gun violence rather than fantasy sword violence, or that you can kill defenceless people, make it feel uncomfortable in a way that the violence in Rage Quest didn’t. And all I had to do was write sentences like, “The body of the security guard lies bleeding on the floor.” I don’t know how people who work on violent AAA games do it, spending days and days coding and animating people being killed.
This game is both more and less game-like (as opposed to story-like) than Rage Quest. On the one hand, the feeling I was going for is that of a text-based first-person shooter. You’ve got a very limited set of actions, mostly just move and shoot, and for the most part each Twine passage represents a location with the links being objects in that location you can shoot or exits you can take. There are some puzzles (they’re simple and unfailable, but they’re meant to feel like puzzles), and most of the game’s structure is an exercise in level design rather than storytelling (to the extent that those are different things). On the other hand, the game is more linear than Rage Quest and it’s not possible to fail, so in that sense you’re being pulled through a pre-written story with a limited ability to interact with things along the way, whereas in Rage Quest you were shaping how the story unfolded and needed a certain amount of strategic skill to get the best endings. So which is more of a game, and which is more of a story? I will leave it to you to decide whether or not you care.
This is my first game to use sound effects, and adding them was an instructional experience. There are plenty of free sound effects online, but finding the right one is more difficult than I’d expected. (Lots of gun sounds but none of them sound quite right, etc.) I also realised that if you start adding sound effects for some events on the story, it starts to feel strange that there aren’t sound effects for other things. There more I added, the more the silence stood out when something loud happened in the story without playing a sound effect. I couldn’t possibly add sound effects for everything, so I ended up using sound effects extremely sparingly: apart from the often-repeated gun sound there are only two sound effects in the game.
On the other hand, I’ve learned that the Sugarcube story format’s sound macros are versatile and easy to use, so the technical process of adding sounds to the game was easy. I won’t be using sound in most of my future games, but I’m considering adding music to my larger projects–either using some of the free game music you can find online, or writing my own.
I made the cover by altering a free stock photo and putting some text in front of it. I considered doing this for Rage Quest but couldn’t find a photo I liked. At some point I should get round to making a better cover for Seedship, since the existing one is looking pretty sad next to the other covers on my website.
My plan now is to spend December on miscellaneous maintenance tasks, then begin working in earnest on my next game in the new year.