Log entry: day 55
Fifty commits in one Saturday.
In the morning I asked to get rid of the flicker: "I'm seeing some kind of tone shift, the picture gets darker, then lighter. That definitely has to go." Our own old-film effect was darkening and lightening the frame eight times a second. We switched it off.
Then the main thing. I brought in four write-ups about games where the world lives without scripts, and said what I wanted: "use all the objects, like in a real physical world." And also: "more physics, more interactions, unpredictability… uncontrolled chaos." 162 objects got a mass, a material and traits. The rules are written as lines of text: gum sticks to anyone, a load slows you down. By three in the afternoon five waves were done.
Now you can throw gum, whatever you throw sticks to the wad, and you can build towers out of things. I built one and threw it: "Built an 'art piece', a kind of tower, grabbed the whole tower by the base and threw it, and it started spinning, really glitching out in midair." And I asked: "Just no overengineering and piles of calculations, okay." A stick of gum held one kilogram, and a stepladder weighs three and a half. Now it holds five.
I also wanted to "stick a beanbag on someone, and it'll slow down their walking. Even on the deputy head." So that's what we did: a load stuck to you cuts your pace, a beanbag cuts it in half. The chase uses that same pace, so a duck covered in stuff chases you more slowly.
Next came a bucket on the door, wet and slippery, a bucket on the head, a stink and fire extinguisher foam. With a bucket on their head a person can't see anything and wanders around blind.
The students' heads are square and wider than the bucket, nothing would fit over them. So the head with its hair is hidden for a while, and the bucket goes in its place upside down. You can put the bucket on yourself too: the screen goes dark, a strip of light is left only near the floor, and nobody can recognize you in the bucket, like in a mask. I wrote: "the new behavior is a riot too."
Only the students back away from someone who stinks. The adults wrinkle their noses and go on with their business: a toilet brush won't drive the deputy head away. A foam cloud lasts six seconds, and the adults can't see through it. And the extinguisher's jet pushes you backward, and on your own foam your feet grip eight times worse.
In the evening came the "riot" round. The fire extinguisher became a rocket: in two seconds you fly eight meters. In a puddle people try to keep their balance: windmill, heron, the splits. I asked: "let's take all the animations, we'll hand out different ones to different people at random." And if the duck deputy head falls over on her own right in front of you, the camera zooms in, the world slows down for half a second, and the screen says "QUACK!". A student or a teacher who falls gets none of that.
Just like real life
And we started on the case. Each clue rules out suspects, like in Outfoxed!. I added: "for me, something the troublemaker doesn't have on him is a clue too. Let's go." A hair became a clue. The first one came out thick, and I wrote: "is that a hair??? … a whole thick curl, like tentacles…" It became one thin hair. And the investigation board on J is now cork, with photos of the students.
At first the photos on the board were the faces I'd taken with the camera during play. I asked: "in the photos in my office I'd like to see not the faces I 'remembered' with the camera, but real ones… just photos from the front." Now the game has a tiny photo studio, a separate little world with lights and a backdrop. A student with this round's features steps in for a moment, click, and the photo is ready. A new game takes the photos again.
The case: photo, clue, verdict
One more fix that day came from my child: there was a spot on the band-aid, and it felt unpleasant that it was blood. The spot was removed completely.
Log entry: day 56
In the morning I read about how much indie games make on Steam and the right way to go through a playtest to a demo. The first item was language: the interface is now in English by default. A Windows build appeared too, and eight shoe styles from my sketch.
I wrote: "Let's tidy up the interface somehow. It looks awful, these settings." The interface became sharp, and the settings were sorted into tabs.
A second chapter and the gang appeared. I replaced the "Next" screen with a drumroll: "let's add some drama… a drumroll, make it intriguing." And a wrong accusation now gets a gray frame and a fine: "You've disgraced your classmate's honor, like, how could you. Pay him 50 coins!"
I also asked: "I don't get what the gameplay gets out of me being listed in a particular class? What does it affect?" The next day there was no class of your own and no desk of your own. Any chair is yours, any classroom is home.
In the evening I played Untitled Goose Game and wrote: "the physics and the character movement are pure magic… the kind of thing that goes straight to the heart."
Log entry: day 57
In the morning the desk was lowered to the Russian GOST standard: from 77 centimeters to 58. And the game now opens with my studio's splash screen: a rooster as a stamp, lettering typed on a typewriter, a voice.
Then "like in Goose Game". The honk on Q: a whistle, a meow, a quack, a cuckoo, a giggle, a snore, hiccups. Footsteps that land on the heel, squeaking sneakers. For the arms I picked floppy: "We're going with floppy." After the first try I wrote: "I didn't really see much difference. Well, make it softer."
All fifteen honk variants are built in code from the same voice as the teacher's mumbling, only a child's. Next to the "quack" there was a note: our duck is the deputy head, isn't this teasing? When you honk, the teacher looks toward the sound, not into your face.
I took the thunderstorm out of the wonders outside the window: "let's take the thunderstorm out of the wonders, it's boring."
In the afternoon the flight engineer wrote a winter album, "Winter Term": sixteen tracks in an hour and a half, in four rounds. I listened and wrote reviews: "12 Snowplough is top stuff… 15 Avalanche didn't land at all, though there's potential… 13 Frozen Pipes sounds too poppy and cheap, not technical…" The rejected ones were rewritten.
In the evening we put together a Steam page with the status "Coming soon": texts, covers, screenshots. For the cover we picked the duck at the blackboard. I started signing up for Steamworks. And short videos appeared on the site, and the game films them itself.
Log entry: day 58
We checked the "Wet floor" short against the game with no staging. In the short the janitor mops up the wet rink. In the game he never came to the rink at all: in the short he'd been put there by hand. Now he mops it up on his own.
The honk got a sign: a ring of trembling strokes around the head. I asked: "They shouldn't blink, we just need them to sort of tremble, no need to make a loader-style animation."
A new logo appeared: the flight engineer traced my picture. A crown, the word THE on a yellow brushstroke. And I removed the mosaic: "take out the mosaic, we've got way too much junk breeding here, we'll have to clean it all out later."
Log entry: day 59
I wrote: "I need to see a plan. Maybe a drawing. So we understand each other." The game started with a drawing, and eight weeks later I asked for one again. In the evening the flight engineer drew the school as it had become.
The sixth version of the trailer also went up on the site, all six in one day.
Log entry: day 60
I said what kind of school I wanted: "the school should be fun to walk around… like an awesome arena for playing and wandering." That's how the "arena school" came about: eight steps of replanning, with the famous Building 20 at MIT as the model. The first stage was done right away: a canyon in the west wing. A gap two floors high, little bridges, tiered seating by the glass wall. I took a look: "everything fit in nicely." The stairs into the skate bowl were removed: "don't like the stairs into the bowl, remove them, it doesn't make sense."
In the afternoon the trailer went up on Reddit. A viewer asked exactly what I hadn't thought about: why did the paper clue turn up when the toilet got flooded, instead of lying there all along? And how does a clue rule out suspects? I agreed on every point. We went through options, and I said: "I like finding clues at the crime scene."
The result was a new main rule: the gap and the force. The culprit's trace lies in a gap nobody looks into. Your prank brings the trace out into the light with the same force. He flooded the room, and the water pushed a candy wrapper under the partition. You flooded it, and the water washed the wrapper back out. And the gap is where the force came from. I caught that one in a frame: "why should something wash out of the stall if my prank is flooding the sink?" And I told the flight engineer: "don't overcomplicate it, or next thing you'll start moving clues around."
In the evening I gave it a voice memo of me playing the glukofon tongue drum, a minute and a half: "make a soundtrack out of my glukofon playing… pull samples from my playing and make 4 tracks." That became the album "Glukofon". I said: "Great, save it as a new album."
Log entry: day 61
Today is Friday.
The clue now shows up at the exact moment the prank counts, and the hero thinks: "…and I never noticed."
I read notes on a talk by Mike Sellers about systems game design, and a write-up on how to keep a player longer than five minutes. The flight engineer reminded me about help from the gang, and I replied: "help from the gang is a great idea that I forgot." Now when you honk, a friend shouts "Miss, there's a wasp!", and the teacher turns away.
A detective rank for speed lasted 46 minutes. We decided not to reward speed, otherwise players would rush instead of working things out. And the end of a case is now a folder: the culprit on the left, your investigation on the right, a "SOLVED" stamp on top.
And in the afternoon the atrium appeared: a covered courtyard under a glass skylight, with an oak in the middle. A plaza by the entrance, a skate park, a school bus.
The arena school: from paper to glass
At first the school lawn covered the skate bowl completely, only the rim stuck out, and you couldn't get down into it. Then the lawn was cut around the bowl. But you still can't climb out of the bowl on foot, the wall is too steep. That went on the list of debts.
On day one there was a ChatGPT picture and seven drafts of the drawing. Now there's a school where you can flood the toilet, glue the teacher to a chair and find out who did it first.
Where it came from
Four write-ups about games without scripts. The board game Outfoxed! for the investigation. Untitled Goose Game for the honk, footsteps and arms. Building 20 at MIT for the arena school. The Russian GOST standard for school furniture. A viewer on Reddit. Mike Sellers's talk and a write-up on the first five minutes of a game.
The week in numbers
- 114commits
- 50commits on Saturday
- 162objects with mass and traits
- 16winter tracks in an hour and a half
- 1:34of voice memo made a 4-track album
- 46 minutesthe detective rank lasted