I’m now taking a break from game jam updates to talk about another game I released. Game jam updates later today!
In previous years I’ve posted IF Comp reviews. This year I was silent on the matter, because I entered the comp. I didn’t do this anonymously – some people do, but since it was my first released IF I didn’t really see a point to hiding my identity. The rules of the comp are such that one is not allowed to publicly discuss her game until after judging is over. So I’ve merely refrained from bringing it up, save in the author’s forum on intfiction.org that’s set up for author discussion purposes.
A hearty congratulations to the victors, and in fact to all who participated!
I didn’t enter the comp to win. In fact, since I created a slasher-horror game, I was absolutely certain that it wouldn’t win. I am honestly very pleased to have placed 8th. I’m tied with another game I rather liked (which was also horror, hooray). I also beat a few games I liked better than my game. I think the comp community in general wasn’t really sure what to make of Porpentine’s howling dogs, and Escape from Summerland had bugs early on that made it unplayable despite the final version being a strong game.
The primary reasons that I entered the comp were: 1. a deadline as motivation to finally finish an IF, as this one had been in the churner for the better part of the year 2. a chance to distribute the game to a broader audience and receive feedback. So I consider this a smashing success. I never intended to enter the comp with the game when I started it. But someone on IF MUD said “well are you putting it in the comp?” and I figured, hell, why not. Okay.
The rest of this post contains spoilers for the game, which is called Body Bargain. If you’re interested in playing it, haul yourself over to the convenient IF Comp Results Page. There are also seven games there rated more highly than my game (and one that tied), so you should find something you like.
If you are actually interested in playing my game, let me state up front that no one should play my game. It is terrible. One reviewer compared it to The Human Centipede. It’s not quite so scatological but that is otherwise somewhat accurate. I feel bad that I inflicted it on beta testers (not just because it’s gross but also because it was buggy and I misspelled some things (this is still true in the current/final version, to some degree)).
So why the hell would I write something like that? The released game contains an author’s note that covers the basics. I am fascinated by the inherent horror in unlicensed body modification and plastic surgery. A commenter on the forums observed that the game, despite its subtitle, didn’t tackle transhumanist themes exactly. In that sense it was more about how, though we can try to leave our bodies behind, we still might have human problems and vanities. Of course the game was also inspired by lots of schlock horror that I have watched in movies over the years.
The villain character of the piece is a dude named Overclock that I’m fond of. He’s been banging around in my writing for probably longer than a decade in various forms. I am pleased that the idea behind the character seemed to come across well enough in this short format. It’s not a voice I find hard to get right, but the character isn’t the typical “mad doctor.” He’s more of an auto mechanic or a tattoo artist in tone. He’s an obvious sociopath, fascinated by cutting things apart, but not cackling mad in the traditional sense. You could have a reasonable conversation with him.
The protagonist, Rain, is a straightforward character (to me), but I had a harder time getting her voice right in second person narrative. Sometimes I wanted to have her say something, but wasn’t sure how to walk the line between having her say something directly or having the player imagine what was said. So, we get in her head a lot, but a lot of her dialog is paraphrased rather than outright stated.
One of the things I was trying with Body Bargain was the video-game-like method of telling the backstory almost only with dialog and environmental objects. In interactive fiction, this is not entirely necessary. It’s possible to have an extended flashback sequence, for example. But I really wanted to have the environment do the talking and to make lots of backstory optional, something the player sought out and was rewarded with rather than handed to them. I think this works for some people and not for others. Some people weren’t clear on why they were there. I know that uncertain signposting (what am I supposed to be doing?) is something that bugs me in IF, so maybe I was only half-successful with this.
There are other things I could’ve done to improve the game. Primarily, it was a little buggy in execution. There was a major bug that I fixed where Overclock would talk to you while he was not in the room, but it was in the original first release. There were a lot of little bugs in the text. I was fighting a little with Inform to get it to understand that I wanted default responses like “Dropped.” removed in place of something else. In a few cases I just gave up. I will fight further with this.
I got some feedback that I could’ve used a tighter editor. I have a sickness where it comes to commas. Sometimes I go back and remove lots of commas from text once a piece is done. But to focus on the interactivity, I left a lot of stupid stray commas in I otherwise shouldn’t have. Often my husband serves as my editor. In this case, he struggled with the parser, so he wasn’t able to offer good feedback in this regard. I used him purely as “what would a completely raw newbie see in this game.”
I didn’t do a good job with beta testing really. Not the readers themselves; they were fabulous! This is all on me. I really underestimated the time it would take for some people to do a favor like “reading a horrible cruel-spirited text game that is also buggy.” If I enter the comp again I’ll leave a lot more time for testing and do more rounds of testing. I do want to say again that I am super, duper grateful for the testers that I got and appreciate your help loads and loads.
I know that more ambitious games are obviously made, but some of the things I’m doing in this game felt hard, at least, for someone relatively new with the scripting language. I have an NPC that has various emotional and health states, moves around on his own, and has some dialog that depends on his states and timing of the narrative. I also had lots of doors and keys which were fiddly and a pain. I was using them exclusively for pacing purposes. This is not a perfect solution. But I have no plans to be less ambitious in future games. In fact, both of the other two IFs I am excited about writing are trickier in execution than this one. (Or else I would have done them first.) I like multiple endings.
Feedback that the game was really gross or off-putting did not surprise me. It was designed that way and I knew that it would not be for everyone. I knew that some segment of the IF Comp judges would dislike this. I’m highly flattered that I had the honor of having Emily Short and Pippin Barr, whose works I admire, both engage with and be ultimately put off by my game. I’m highly flattered in general that so many people played and rated whether they liked the game or not.
Feedback that did surprise me had to do with “the puzzles.” To be clear, I consider this game basically puzzle-free. I put the player in a bad situation and then give the player a lot of options as to how to handle it. Switching the labels on chemicals (yes, I know the chemical use wasn’t a hundred percent medically accurate – it was basically just Google searching until something looked close to right) is pretty oldschool and barely a puzzle. The only tricky part was noticing the affordance was there in the first place (looking at the back of a door of a room you entered plus semi-controversial “search” verb). Some people thought items in the game (like the industrial cutter) were red herrings, but I don’t believe in them. Anything that exists is either there to give context and additional story, or because it has some actual use.
I know that in the future, though, I need to be much clearer about signposting things that might be considered a puzzle. There were multiple ways to finish the game, and it really could’ve benefited from a “did you try ___?” menu at the end. The intfiction forums has explained to me how to make this work – I was having trouble getting it in in time.
I also need to work a little more on presentation. There’s actually a nicer, high-rez cover art but I wasn’t paying attention when the comp page resized it to a tiny little thumbnail. I uploaded a better thumbnail, but it was a little late. I also should’ve given a prettier walkthrough, and I had a glitch with the blurb. This was just noobishness. The comp page asked for the blurb very early, so when I initially uploaded the blurb, the game was still in beta. I said so, in case that was getting posted up that way. I accidentally forgot to remove this disclaimer when the final game went up and it said “still in beta” for about a day after it wasn’t. Whoops!
I got some feedback that Savannah needed to have more to say, so that was added in release three. I also got some feedback that rescuing her was confusing. This is entirely my fault – I tried to add multiple ways to do this, and there’s about five different ways right now. But the walkthrough that I submitted contained a way that wasn’t the most intuitive way. I am at least pleased that, if you engage with Savannah at all, the game passes the Bechdel Test. (I hope that every story based game that I write passes the Bechdel Test.)
White Dragon by the way was based on a real (internet) person (via a Something Awful thread). This is not the last time I will write things inspired by Something Awful threads. They’re just too darn inspirational. That character worked as intended. I got some feedback that people felt really bad about how he was treated, and others that thought he got what was coming to him. I deliberately made this sequence as cruel as possible, maybe a little over-the-top cruel. I also deliberately gave no particular narrative payoff for killing him versus not killing him (it changes a line or two in some endings, but that’s all). The one thing I worried about was seeming fatphobic with the narration in this sequence (Rain is fatphobic, but it’s easy to misinterpret that as authorial). (Overclock is also really homophobic, but that isn’t immediately apparent.)
Once my plate clears a bit again, I am going to take the feedback I received and do a post-comp release with bug fixes and updates. I am really pleased to have been a part of the comp this year. I’m very happy with the amount and quality of feedback I got on Body Bargain and I hope that I thanked everyone individually who sent me a transcript or a tip. If I somehow didn’t: thank you!
And, you, thanks for reading my post mortem! If for some reason you got this far without actually playing the game, let me again mention that nobody should play this game.
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