Log entry: day 27
My daughter sat down to play.
After the flood, the school also raised a thunderstorm over the classroom, though nobody asked for one. My daughter lowered the blinds, and the class spent twenty seconds staring at a covered window. The flight engineer checked later: out of forty tries, the school threw in the extra storm 36 times. One rule was to blame: an empty list of triggers meant "any will do". Now it means "none".
There were also icon clouds over people's heads. A while back I'd asked for pictures instead of phrases myself. After her playthrough I wrote: "we need to bring word bubbles back into the game, the icons are confusing. The icons can stay." The words came back.
The icons on the attention meter didn't read either: they were an eye and a finger. I asked for "very simple… angry smileys". The flight engineer wrote down the reasoning: a finger and an eye are something you have to learn, but furrowed brows make sense with no teaching at all.
In the evening the flight engineer measured why the game was lagging. It turned out the scripts were eating the frame, not the graphics. A hundred and fifty light fixtures were ordering a fresh shadow for themselves four times a second. One fix, and the corridor got 14 percent faster.
The measuring had to take turns: old, new, old, new. After an hour of runs the laptop slows down by a third on its own, and the first measurement was inflated by that drift. Those 14 percent are the honest ones. At my request Retina was switched off: the window was drawing four times more pixels than you can see. In the commit the flight engineer wrote: "This doesn't cure the lag, and he's been told so plainly."
For the first prank with a count, "Tear down three notices", we drew a torn sheet icon. On a small icon, an even zigzag along the bottom blurred into the letter W, and the sheet read as a robot. You recognize a tear not by the teeth but by one corner being whole and the other ripped out.
Log entry: day 28
Today I played the demo through myself. I ended up with a lot of notes.
"none of the classrooms have a teacher's desk". In the game the desk was there, but in the editor it stood invisible, and the chalk and the globe hung in midair. I couldn't get into room 703: "the teacher's desk is right by the door, I can't even get in." The door handle was a peg, and I wanted it "turned 90 degrees, along the door". And also: "it makes no sense at all that a sheet of paper stops the door from opening!" The door got stuck on a sheet of paper. And a mug it would either pass right through or shoot six meters.
The mug got shot because of how fast the door moves. The door swings a quarter circle in a quarter of a second. In one physics step its edge travels farther than the door is thick, and the physics just didn't have time to notice the mug. Now on every step the door feels out the strip it has swept. Only a chair, a bin, a beanbag and a fire extinguisher can block it, and a sheet of paper slides under the door, like in real life.
The handle was made the way I asked: a short neck and a lever along the door toward the hinges. The door check hadn't noticed the desk in 703, because it measured the door leaf and the doorway, not the way up to the door. A new check went through 135 doors and right away found a second one like it, in room 710.
Then I flooded the toilet and waited for the janitor. "so why did nobody clean up my flood, wasn't the janitor supposed to come with a mop? Look into it." It turned out the janitor did walk up to the puddle, but nobody had asked her to mop it. In two minutes the water spread over six hundred cells.
That same evening it turned out the end of the demo could go to a teacher. Everyone in the school shares the same body, and the player's gear rode along with it to eight teachers, the janitor and a classmate. The game over signal comes once, and a teacher caught it first. The flight engineer wrote: "The duty to drop the curtain landed on him, and he has no curtain." And the half minute the camera stood still after the flood was a safety catch: the shot was waiting for the janitor at the puddle.
Going back to class cost more than wandering around: "it bugs me that I got taken to the deputy head when I got 'points' for walking into the classroom (and before that I was strolling down the corridor)". While I walked to my desk, attention built up faster than on a stroll. Fixed.
And when I finished the task, the demo just ended abruptly. I asked for "some little action scene, at least five seconds or so". Now before the end there are six seconds of camera: a wide shot of the classroom, a dolly past the kid, a rise from behind his back.
Seated students had a flickering shoulder. The skin of the shoulder and the shirt were arguing over which was closer to the camera. The shoulder was made a little narrower than the sleeve, and while at it the flight engineer found 24 more spots like that across six character looks.
The night after the playthrough
In the evening I wrote: "how about we put a fine halftone effect over the whole game… to smooth over the flaws in the graphics and make it feel warm and cozy". The flight engineer made a print dot, grain, a warm tint and darkening at the edges. All in one pass, no scripts. That was the first step toward the game becoming a comic.
I also wrote: "I see triangle-shaped shadows on the facade". It turned out that at 10:15 the sun sits exactly in the plane of the facade, and the shadows fell in triangles.
Log entry: day 29
In the morning, the clocks. "need to fix the clocks, the model's weird, the dial planes don't line up". It turned out all six clocks in the school hung with their faces to the wall. A single second hand stuck out from under a blank cover.
After the clocks we set up a check on all 47 rings in the scenes: a ring may only be squashed along its axis. The exceptions are listed by name, among them the toilet seat ring: "the toilet bowl is oval".
I was worried players wouldn't think of plugging the sink's overflow, and asked for hint thoughts. Now the kid thinks out loud when he stands at a sink or at the blackboard.
The janitor now catches kids skipping class. That's my idea: "maybe when the janitor sees you he stops and asks: why aren't you in class? And stands there a while, and you hide around a corner or get out of his line of sight, and he goes: 'Must've imagined it', and walks on."
The flight engineer checked the old plan from three.js against what's in the game. Of the 153 planned actions, 39 are done. I reminded it: "we have to remember the level of offbeat play: a flying poop or a unicorn outside the window, that's a decent reference for crazy. We need to bring in absurdity and mayhem."
Since that day ten mayhem ideas have sat in the queue. "The toilet choir": flush them all in a row within ten seconds, a tune plays, and the radio announces a ghost musician. A pigeon lands on the teacher's head. After every prank the teacher sets up protection on her desk: "garlic, a candle, a horseshoe, a sign 'no ghosts allowed'".
I also hooked a tool up to the Godot editor myself, one that lets the flight engineer work right in the open scene. With the school open, the editor console was putting out 256 errors. By lunch there were zero.
Log entry: days 30 to 32
Not a single commit on the main branch. The work went on in parallel sessions: the oak, the bike, the bench, the logo. In the editor I used the mouse to push in the third row chairs in three classrooms and moved a sink in the restroom.
Log entry: day 33
In the evening I said: "Go ahead and commit. We did a lot of work in the parallel sessions too." Seven commits went in within three minutes, from 20:57 to 20:59.
What was in them. The title screen no longer flies around the whole school. I put it like this: "No need to fly around the whole school. We'll just show a cozy shot from the yard… a tree, little lanterns." The camera drifts toward the oak for 24 seconds. A completely still shot would look like the game had frozen.
The logo. I brought a picture, and the flight engineer traced it into vector: three layers, 440 nodes. Now the loading screen shows the logo, not the Godot robot.
The first bike appeared by the porch. E to get on. It goes faster than running, and turns half as willingly.
I helped with the bike: I drew it in Figma and sent it to the flight engineer with the words "let me help you here. Look." It answered that it had recalculated the fork rake from my icon.
Except you couldn't get to it: by the demo's rules the outside door was locked. I wrote: "We should really open the doors so you can get out of the school. I don't feel like climbing out a window to get to the bike." The porch was made into a room of its own, like the yard.
The flight engineer built the yard bench in Blender as one piece, instead of twenty boxes in Godot. I looked and wrote: "this is better than what we got in Godot. Always do it this way." Since then everything that stays put we make in Blender.
And the oak. First I asked for lower branches, so you could stand under it and hide from the rain. Then I asked for more branches, "like a fairy-tale oak, all branchy". After two tries I wrote: "weird, not fairy-tale at all, the branches come out unevenly at the bottom, one off on its own". And I showed what to aim for. The new one is built from that reference: a fork at four meters, seven boughs, a dome of 54 slabs, a birdhouse. Seventeen meters tall. Half a day went into a new bough that wouldn't budge in the shot. And the oak builder in Blender also repainted my bike rack while it was at it, and the color was put back later.
September 18: the oak, the logo
At the very end I wrote: "time to bring our school properly to life. Let the students get up from their desks, off their chairs, go out into the corridor at break and come back when the bell rings." That's already next week.
Where it came from
My daughter's playthrough, five fixes in a day. My own playthrough, even more. Goose Game as the yardstick for absurdity: the funny stuff comes from a prank running into physics and people's stubborn behavior, not from scripted scenes. I made the logo from a ChatGPT image.
The week in numbers
- 43commits
- 36 of 40times the school raised an extra storm
- 6 mhow far the door shot the mug
- 600cells of water while nobody called the janitor
- 256 → 0errors in the editor console
- 17 mhow tall the new oak is