Log entry: day 41
In the morning we wrote down a new frame for the game. Only the adults are dangerous, the students are just an audience, and the ghost is now a school legend. People aren't targets. There was also supposed to be a thread of dares: classmates dare you, and you do it. I thought it over and wrote: "I don't like the 'dares' thing." It was dropped the same day.
My daughter played again. She liked skating around the school, running from the deputy head and hiding, but only on the second-floor stairs. She really liked the chase with music. After her run I suggested: "Maybe start the chase at three stars already? And then build it up? First the hall monitors… then the janitor at three stars, not very fast. Then at four the deputy head comes out, and at five stars everyone's chasing you for real."
By lunch the game had a name: NOBODY SAW THAT. The flight engineer checked it against Steam. Unsupervised, Hall Pass, Just Act Natural and a couple of similar ones were already taken. And instead of dares we came up with coins "for luck" for the ghost and a finale called "The Confrontation" in the assembly hall, like in Agatha Christie. I liked it: "Now this is more interesting!" and "This I like."
The same day it turned out the domain with that name was already taken: "that domain already exists. Damn." The other options didn't work for me: "Nah, I don't like the poltergeist one", "No, keep digging and rule out Prank." So NOBODY SAW THAT stayed the working name.
That day I also wanted more physics: "I just thought it'd be great if you could even rip the paper towel dispenser off the wall in the restroom. That's how much I want physics." And I looked at the planter in the yard. The planter was "not stylish", and about the urn I wrote "no idea what that even is".
And in the morning clips from Blender came into the game for every body. Walk, jog and run, with a clip for each speed so the foot doesn't slide along the floor. A crouch. Things to do at a desk: writing, being bored, dozing, chatting. A fright, "raising a hand", "scolding". I looked at the variant sheets and wrote: "variants of things and their animations come out really cool through Blender, we should always do it this way."
Log entry: day 42
The napkin flight got slow motion. I asked: "not enough slowdown. Can you slow it down even more and at that moment fly around him 360 degrees and keep the camera moving, so it's almost like the whole world froze." Now the world almost freezes and the camera circles the knocked-down kid. No more than once every 45 seconds.
In the first frames of the flight a witness's "whoa!" bubble landed on top of an adult's shout of "Gostov!", and it came out as "I whoa! !". The bubbles were taught to move apart inside the frame.
The flight engineer also started on a puppet: physics moves the body, and on screen it's a ragdoll. At first the ragdoll's arms and legs fell off. I wrote: "some of our puppet's limbs fall apart. We don't need that… invent something universal and simple."
Headphones appeared on H. You put them on, the school goes quiet, music plays. And the teacher mumbles through the lesson, so I asked "for that same teacher mumbling to land right on the beat, it'll be funny, a rap like that over a little beat." That became the track "Mumble Rap", 92 beats per minute. All 309 of the teacher's syllables land on the beat.
The yard was cleared of extra stuff: path loops around the oak, mulch patches, shrub clumps. The yard went from 313 things to 241.
On the "before" plan we found two benches standing inside each other, and 24 strips of mulch under the grasses, which got nicknamed "confetti". A six-meter flagpole was "arguing with the oak". It was moved to the porch, and there, together with the stela, it became a gate at the start of the path.
Log entry: day 43
The day before I'd written about the building: "very chaotic, no niches, boring. And this staircase just dead-ends." The flight engineer built the building's shell in Blender. Walls, floors and ceilings aren't built by code anymore. The staircase that dead-ended became an amphitheater, and niches appeared in the thick walls. In the yard the grasses now grow in sheaves, and you can hide in them: the tufts rustle and bend aside.
I picked the staircase from a sheet with three options. The wedge was marked half a day of work, moving it to the wall a day or a day and a half, the amphitheater three or four days. I picked the most expensive one: "And I like the amphitheater staircase!" By morning it was already in the game along with the new building shell.
First the sheet, then the game
Then I wrote: "Something about this ghost thing bothers me. A weird thing with notes and offering money to a ghost… I love British humor." And I added what I wanted: "I liked how linear Goose was: you play in order, moving on and opening new places… But I also liked GTA, for its freedom."
That's how Mister Nobody came about. The new deputy head, a duck, puts up rules: "NOBODY may…". And you are Nobody: the least noticeable student, the one everyone mixes up with someone else. Fail a mission and you get a SOMEBODY SAW THAT stamp on the screen. The finale is called "The Inspection". The tone is British: everyone is deadly serious, like in Fawlty Towers or Wallace & Gromit.
The coins and "The Confrontation" lasted two days. And the ghost, who'd been with us since August 22, left the story completely.
In the evening I noticed the laptop was loud: "I'm worried about those checks you've got running… the machine is humming." The flight engineer stopped the runs and deleted 60 copies of the project it had spawned. Since then we run heavy things one at a time.
Log entry: day 44
After a flight, the knocked-down student first got up and then struck a hero pose. I wrote: "the getting-up should happen in the air, so the character lands straight into it. Not that he lies there, gets up and then hop, a heroic getting-up pose, what nonsense." Now the knocked-down kid pulls himself together in the air and lands with a trick. Before, a nice landing came out in 11 flights out of 54, and after the fix in 45 out of 47.
In the evening I realized everything had drifted apart: "our game has no style, we've built a bunch of new niches that don't fit in… we need to invent some kind of kit with tokens and variables." That's how "the Kit and the Manifesto" came about. The kit is a set of style rules: colors, wall thickness, fonts. Fira Sans Condensed became "the school's hand", Pangolin "your hand". The thickness of the walls now shows as warm plywood. And about the niches I said: "we don't need niches for the sake of niches… if something sticks out somewhere, then on the other side it dips in."
The journal's handwriting, Pangolin, at first loaded right in the middle of drawing, and then every letter until the end of the game came out as a black bar. Now the font loads in advance.
Log entry: day 45
The busiest day of the week, 35 commits.
During the night the students at their desks stopped shaking. I'd noticed it back on the 26th: "The characters sitting in class often kind of shake or move jerkily, it really annoys me. And they even turn their heads the wrong way." Now they sit calmly and watch what's going on.
The lockers and the restroom moved to Blender. And then I asked: "wait, our toilets have no windows? we need to do something!"
When I was looking over the new washroom, I reminded it: "You remember the sink there has to have an overflow guard, which I'll need to plug with paper in the game?" The basin with the overflow moved to Blender along with everything else. The restroom was built in three passes in one day.
The restroom in one day
And in the evening came the main character. I made him myself first, in ChatGPT. I pushed for him to look like nobody else and to have charisma. I brought the flight engineer sheets with the hero from every side, plus a girl student and a punk. The flight engineer drew the hero in Blender with a script and took measurements from the front and side views, and I tweaked him right there, in Blender. Nineteen commits from 17:35 to 22:14, about 49 variants named by letters. Four face variants, anime, a box head. My feedback along the way: "not it. Try again. And don't make Pinocchio." And about the hair: "looks like a pile of rocks. It needs to be a cliff! A cliff!!!" In the end the hair became a polyhedron, like Sulley's from Monsters, Inc., with round eyes and no nose. We picked the hero "Beak".
References from ChatGPT
I asked: "How would you describe him, or what template did you use? Because I'll be making others soon." The flight engineer wrote the hero down as a template, and all the students would later follow it.
One pain has stayed since then: the joints. The characters' knees still sometimes bend in strange ways.
Log entry: day 46
In the morning "Clipper" came into the game: the same hero, with hair like a ship's bow. By lunch eleven students had been redone on his template.
The hero's sneaker turned out too long for the step all the walking clips were made for. The standing foot slid along the floor almost forty centimeters. The template's shoes were shrunk to the old footprint, and since then we don't give new characters shoes longer than the footprint.
The hero's template for everyone
Things learned to be pushed properly: a thing moves if the body's force is bigger than the friction. You can move a desk by leaning into it. You'll never move a cupboard.
The vending machine's glass is now thick, like in real life. That's exactly what I asked for: "The glass in the vending machine is tough and thick, you need to kick it with something big or keep hammering at it." A thrown chair breaks it right away, a ball only on the sixth throw. The cracks come in two stages, and by morning it's all whole again.
And the duck's board appeared. On it are the rules "NOBODY may…", and on top of the rules, stickers with crossed-out lines and "did it ;)". If you fail a mission, there's a teacher's note: "Must try harder."
In the evening the game's first page appeared on the website. It was already called Duck the Rules, though in the documents the game would stay NOBODY SAW THAT for another week.
I made the picture for it in ChatGPT, and the logo was cut out of it. In that picture the game is called "Duck the Rules: Schoolyard Rebellion", and that's the long name it went under in the first version of the site.
Log entry: day 47
I wrote: "the mopping animation went missing somewhere." The janitor carried the mop around without moving it over the floor. It turned out the swing had disappeared eleven days earlier, and the checks had stayed silent. The flight engineer added a new check that measures the pose after everyone who changes it is done.
On the hero's template we made the teacher "Fringe" and the janitor "Brush". The first teacher came out as tall as a girl student. I wrote: "it's kind of a kid's body, they should be taller." Fixed.
Where it came from
GTA III and San Andreas: freedom, mayhem, stars, chases. Goose Game: chapters with boards of rules, playing in order. Agatha Christie: "The Confrontation", which lived for two days. British deadpan: Fawlty Towers, Wallace & Gromit, Hot Fuzz, the English rhyme about Mister Nobody. The Matrix for the slow motion. Sulley from Monsters, Inc. for the hair. The Lebedev guide, the section on 50 things for the rec areas.
The week in numbers
- 95commits
- 3storylines in three days
- 19commits on the hero in one evening
- 6,252tufts of grass in the yard
- 309of the teacher's syllables on the beat
- 11 of 54 → 45 of 47nice landings after a flight