Log entry: day 48
We don't hand out missions anymore. The day before I'd written: "we won't give the user missions now, he'll walk up to the board himself and see what it says 'not to do'." The duck's board is now the only list of missions.
The teacher learned to get used to things. In class her attention goes to the most striking thing she hears or sees. The same trick works half as well on her the second time and a fifth as well the third time, and she just thinks: "again?"
The lighting was redone from my drawing. I removed the highest graphics level: "ultra is too expensive for a game like this."
In the afternoon I came up with: "hilarious idea: you can put on (buy, get, find, doesn't matter) super sneakers, they give you the power to walk on walls and the ceiling…" By evening locker No. 68 had a pair with a "NOBODY" tag. In them you walk on walls and the ceiling, and adults don't look up.
The flight engineer wrote out how to open every locked restroom. I replied: "You've overcomplicated the toilets… We can just not lock them in the first place. That's it." The locks were removed. Along the way the easels became pushable: "easels, like physical objects, should move, that's the game's physics."
The flight engineer hung Dieter Rams style lamps in the classrooms. I wrote: "the lights are kind of rubbish, too much… pendants look ridiculous in a classroom." They came down the same day. And for the classrooms we drew a poster, "The Periodic Table of Excuses": the dog ate it, no Wi-Fi, grandma's birthday.
Log entry: day 49
During the night the first tool appeared: gum. It glues things together, and a wad on the floor holds whoever steps on it for a second. In the demo there were 63 old pieces of gum under the desks. The next day there were 34: not every desk gets one.
The classrooms came alive: portraits of great people, a periodic table across a whole wall, funny posters, quotes from Twain, Wilde and Chekhov. Outside the windows there was now a view of a park, and in the yard it was winter: caps of snow, fairy lights on the oak.
In the morning the game crashed while I was running down a corridor during a lesson. The new lighting had put 49 reflection probes over the glossy floor, which are a kind of invisible mirror. There was room for 32. Only the nearby ones were on, but a hidden probe doesn't free up its slot. I ran around the corridors, the slots ran out, the game crashed. Now there are 64 slots.
In the afternoon I asked whether we could take animations from Mixamo. I need a lot of them, ours still had flaws, and I thought I'd save a ton of time. The flight engineer put a Mixamo walk on our skeleton and made a video, "ours vs Mixamo". I watched it and wrote: "I like our walk better. Maybe we should use Mixamo for other cases and for smoothness." An hour later the test was taken out. Only later, rereading this logbook, did I put the conclusion into words: I looked at Mixamo and realized that Claude and Blender do pretty well at animation on their own.
In the afternoon side jobs appeared, like in GTA: put the skeleton together, roll a ball of gum, give the teacher a ride on a chair. I set the frame: "I don't want to be like Bully. It needs absurdity." And I took the janitor out of the chase: "I don't see the point of a janitor who catches up to me."
Log entry: day 50
In the morning I wrote: "I've decided on the game's name: 'Duck the Rules!'. And our name is still Cool School." By lunch the name was on the loading bar. The flight engineer drew four logo options, and I said: "for now let's take the 'sticker' style logo."
The locator appeared: a little Rams-style box in the corner of the screen, and on M a map on e-ink.
The locator lies three meters from the door, not at the doorstep. The kid looks ahead and doesn't see the floor under his feet. At the doorstep you'd just step over the locator.
The taxi was redone six times in one day. You push the chair with the teacher from behind, a deadline at the top, a marker over the chair. I picked the marker: "ahaha. I like the checkers!" The passenger squeals "woo-HOOO!", and a clean ride gets a tip.
The first passenger kept getting up off the chair on her own. The chair would bump into a wall, the crash called the nearest adult to see what had happened, and the nearest adult was her. Now she gets buckled in with a belt for the ride. The flight engineer built the "Woo-HOOO!" from the same voice as the teachers' mumbling, only the pitch shoots up and then slides down. There are five versions, and the same one never plays twice in a row.
Then I wrote: "We also need to redo the Pac-Man. I'm not sure I can use that character in my game." Pac-Man belongs to someone else, and outside the window he was replaced by a plaster head that chases an apple.
The head has a hinged jaw, like a nutcracker. The apple was made whole, with a stem and a leaf: an apple with a bite out of it is someone else's sign. Instead of "waka-waka" there are now two dry plaster knocks.
October 5: the locator, the taxi, the head
The "seen on the way" rule got turned around three times in one day. The day before, getting spotted counted right away. In the morning that was removed completely, and only the deed itself was judged. I played: "I wasn't even in the classroom, I was in the inner courtyard, and it still counted!" In the afternoon we settled on this: if you're seen on the way to a mission or back from it, the mission is failed.
And your own classroom became home. I wrote: "it bugs me that in class, when I'm pranking, they take me to the deputy head… going into the classroom hides me completely and resets everything." Now nobody catches you in your own classroom, and the teacher sits you down at a desk: "upsy-daisy".
Log entry: day 51
A record: 54 commits in a day.
In the morning the flight engineer found why the bodies twitched: they were drawn out of step with the physics. The bodies now jerk seven times less.
I asked: "by default let's make the view like in GTA 3, 4, 5." Now the camera decides by itself: from behind, like in GTA, and first person when you're doing something.
Then I suggested: "let's imagine we're engineers and architects designing a school from scratch…" The flight engineer ran an engineering audit by the Lebedev guide. The school got an electrical room, a water meter room, a heating substation, a ventilation room, smoke detectors, "Exit" signs, power outlets and fire hose cabinets. The fire hose is coiled for real: six layers of four turns, twenty meters.
The utility rooms work. In the electrical room every classroom has its own breaker, with the room number written on tape. Flip it down and the classroom goes dark, and the light switch won't help. The water meter spins while a tap is open anywhere in the school. You can tap the pressure gauge in the pump room, and the needle twitches.
The school like a real one
Snow started falling, about six thousand little balls. The students got backpacks, notebooks and pens. And then I said: "right now it's really scary to look at them all being the same." The students got eight emotions and blinking.
In the evening it was the comic. I wanted the frame to be alive: "like an old film with scratches on it… more halftone and more comic." The first round missed: the boiling outline came out lousy. The fourth round was accepted.
Log entry: day 52
"So many speech bubbles at one moment is annoying." Lines became stickers, like in a comic, and anything wild explodes into a "super". There are fewer stickers now.
Riding became like in GTA: the bike goes where its nose points, in a crash you fall like a ragdoll, and you can ride along a wall.
And the main thing. I wrote: "We need to finally get rid of this (wrong) logic and the ghost concept." That day we decided what the game is about. It's an investigation, like in the board game Outfoxed! The duck bans a prank, which means somebody has already done it. Repeat it, find a trace and figure out who it was. I wrote: "Think like a criminal… so it's clear why I'm repeating his pranks. To find a clue by going the same way. Yay! Cool." In the evening the suspects got telltale features: a camera, beads, a band-aid, a daisy, a leaf in the hair.
Log entry: day 53
In the morning twelve new students came to the school. On the first sheets their character rested on role props, like a monocle and a top hat.
Faces of the class
The ghost is gone from the code. No more belief, the radio plays music, and the T-shirt says NOBODY.
In the afternoon I wrote: "the game just froze or something." On the Mac the game froze because of the graphics card, and the flight engineer switched it to Vulkan.
And a trailer appeared on the website: a detective game, 22 suspects. Its music is a remix of the chase theme.
Log entry: day 54
I asked: "Take a look, is everything up to date in my main branch? … There shouldn't be any loose ends." It turned out there were lots of loose ends. There was a big cleanup: 60 branches deleted, 47 working copies of the project, 15 gigabytes, went to the trash, and four lost fixes were found and brought back into the main branch. Along the way it turned out that 29 lamps were hanging outside the building, beyond a rounded corner.
One of the four lost fixes had been sitting on a branch since September 20. Without it, 20 seats out of 648 moved a student who stood up through a thin wall: outside, into a utility room or into the principal's office.
I also wrote two things. The first: "features used to just pour out, bam bam. And now we wait an hour or two for some silly thing that's basically tiny?" And the second: "Millimeters again. Aren't we overcomplicating things???"
In the evening the school started building twice as fast: the first frame in eleven seconds instead of twenty-five.
Where it came from
GTA: side jobs, the marker over the taxi, the minimap, the camera from behind, the riding. Bully: exactly what not to be. Dieter Rams for the locator. The board game Outfoxed! for the investigation. Old films and the print dot for the living frame. The Lebedev guide for the engineering audit. British humor instead of a fairy tale.
The week in numbers
- 143commits
- 54commits in one day
- 63old pieces of gum under the desks
- 6goes at the taxi in one day
- 15 GBof spare project copies went to the trash
- 25 → 11 sthe school's first frame