The Project: Adventures in Text

Or maybe that should be hieroglyphics? What started out as a project to explore interactive fiction and text adventures became a desire to write at least one functioning game that led to building a one room interactive fiction to test this which quickly spiralled into the project for the month, What’s That Scratching at Your Sarcophagus, a micro sandbox where you play as a undead pharaoh rudely awakened from your slumber and eager to drive out the intruding tomb robber by any means necessary.

Try it for yourself: What’s That Scratching at Your Sarcophagus?

The Checklist:

Created a complete and functioning (at least so far) micro interactive fiction with multiple endings (at least 5 distinct + some of those with various paths and variants).

Whacked up a webpage and played around with code for the first time in a while.

Taught myself Inform (amongst much gnashing of teeth) and stuck it through to fix the issues even when I thought half the endings were broken.

The Undone:

Sadly could not make it to the 2019 Global Game Jam. But there’s always next year!

Creating What’s That Scratching at Your Sarcophagus was fun but also one of my biggest challenges yet. To go from nothing to a complete, playable project using a medium (Interactive Fiction) I’d never designed for using a system (Inform) I had no knowledge of was a bigger chunk to bite off than I originally anticipated. With not many free hours over the month and health issues eating into even more of that time for a week, the project became as much about learning to manage my time & efforts as exploring text adventures. I had to set aside some of my more overly ambitious notions and outline what I needed for a MVP and build from there as time allowed. Overall, something of a roller coaster but I’m happy with the results and look forward to dabbling in more micro gaming experiences in future.

Style tile-ing it up to sort out text styles for system prompts, player input, descriptions, and more (all in faux retro style, of course).

Highlights of the Month:

Side Project:

Making a game! Like a real game you can play on your computer or phone and it kinda, sorta, mostly works! I’ve written a good smattering of tabletop games but this is my first digital game and required a different approach compared to writing a rulebook.

I’m now officially halfway through the Side Project Project! 6 project down, 6 to go.

Oh and Net Magazine happened:

The Side Project Project as side project of the month in Net Magazine

At Work:

First pull request + merge into production! Okay so I literally just created some sizing conventions but it was still fun to officially contribute and go through the process and production checks of contributing to a company repo that aren’t a thing when I’m working alone on my own projects.

Half another notebook full already! Two sizeable systems in the works means lots of meaty problem to think through and interesting design challenges to face.

The cross-continent UX team has regular (virtual) meet ups to catch up but for 2019 things are shaking up and those are now becoming virtual critique sessions to show off work, get feedback, raise awareness of what’s going on across the product portfolio, and of course our usual chitchat and ribbing. So far it’s working like a charm and been great to see everyone’s work and the iterations between sessions.

What’s That Scratching at your Sarcophagus as Inform7 sees it

Lessons Learnt:

Distinguish users’ language and actions from the system’s

Learning on the job:

…and address each in the appropriate way. From the copy on a single button or the words used to describe each step, the seemingly smallest details can make a huge difference. Not only that, asking if this is really how the user would see it or whether this is actually an implementation feature and unnecessary distraction on the way to their goal has a massive impact on how you approach the design.

Applying on the side project:

Inform lets you program in simple English. On the one hand that’s really neat, on the other hand it can extremely frustrating because it raises your expectations because you expect actual understanding of English (which it does not do. And actually is an interesting concept from the UX perspective because it should feel nicer and easier but actually becomes an alternative syntax which can sometimes make you expect more from it because it doesn’t have the obvious, machine-like quality of other syntaxes in coding). Layer on top of that the fact that designing game involved writing nearly 5,000 words and what you call an object might not be what the player calls an object and there were a lot of language considerations to work through. This became an area where I dedicated a lot of time over the project.

Accidental abstract typography art while messing with text styling

What assumptions are you making?

Learning at work:

When you think you’re done, stop and ask ‘what assumptions are we making?’. Same when you’re stuck. Take a moment and zoom out. Why are we doing that here? What are we really trying to achieve? Etc.

Better yet, start with the high-level timeline and try to stay think at a high level and holistically for as long as possible. It can be tempting to dive down a level when you think you’ve got the high stuff sorted but chances are you’re missing an extra layer of refinement which can only be done at the top conceptual architectural level.

Applying on the side project:

It was easy to get carried away working on a particular puzzle or item, especially if I dove straight into Inform, but that can be counterproductive when crafting a one room sandbox where different items need to have multiple layers of interaction and usage. To start with, I sketched out a high level flow of how the ‘light puzzles’ played out and interacted. Then came the skeleton text, and only then diving into programming it (which would reveal new potential or raise questions, making it easy to circle back and reevaluate the thought process at each level as necessary).