1
Around 2022, I decided to rewatch a bunch of Hayao Miyazaki movies. By then I’d been working on an IF game for a couple years, and in the game dev version of the Tetris effect my brain was compulsively attempting to turn anything it came into contact with into IF. So I was watching The Castle of Cagliostro, and I had three thoughts in quick succession.
The first was, “I bet it would be fun to write a heist game where you can switch between the members of the Lupin gang.”
The second was, “That sounds like a pain to design. Also it would be hard to write puzzles for Goemon when all your options are >CUT THING WITH SWORD.”
The third was, “That sounds like a challenge.”
2
I had two rules in mind when I started planning the game:
- The command ‘cut’ should never be refused. If the player types >CUT TREE, the PC will attempt to cut the tree.
- The sword can never fail to cut something. The PC can, but the sword cannot.
These are very good rules to follow if you’ve ever thought that adding new objects to a game doesn’t feel enough like throwing a live grenade into a room. Every object I created had the potential to completely derail a scene. I couldn’t even describe people’s clothes without dealing with the consequences of cutting them off of them. And how about distant scenery? Could I even describe the landscape without having to deal with the player attempting to >CUT SKY?
3
What would cutting the sky even look like?
4
I’m bored with standard fantasy. In my teenage years I ate it up, but I think I grew tired of it. I still love The Lord of the Rings, but anyone not named J.R.R. Tolkien who tries to talk to me about elves had better do something unusual with it.
This is kind of a problem when you’re trying to write a game about a magic sword. I didn’t want to write an outright comedy again, so I needed a setting where a swordsman wouldn’t be too out of place, and I needed a setting fantastical enough that I wouldn’t need to worry about trifles like “verisimilitude” or “physics” or “relative hardness of different materials”. But not a typical fantasy setting.
In 2023 I reread Jack Vance’s Dying Earth series. I’ve always been fascinated by that sort of setting—a world existing in the shadows of its past, where so much has been discovered and forgotten that ancient technology now functions as magic. It seemed like a good fit for my story. It’s the sort of setting that allowed me to just write whichever strange new set piece I could come up with. That’s always fun.
5
The game’s staunch commitment to pacifism was a purely practical one. My self-imposed rules meant that attempted murder was always on the table, but I wanted more variety in my puzzles and goals than just ‘kill this new guy’. (Also I didn’t want the game to end up being too much like Gun Mute with Swords.) So I put a limit on how many times the player can kill someone.
At first I envisioned the mechanic as a sort of “get out of puzzles free” card. If you weren’t feeling a specific scene, you could just kill the person involved and skip the whole thing, but you could only do this twice before getting a game over. That’s not how it worked out. The game’s nudges towards non-deadly solutions ended up discouraging players from attempting murder at all.
In the end, I think the game is stronger for it.
6
(I did not consciously decide to make Gun Mute with Swords. At no point during the initial planning process did any comparison even cross my mind. And yet halfway through writing the game I looked at what I had and realized with a sinking feeling that Gun Mute with Swords was exactly what I was making. The limited parser focusing on a weapon. The lack of compass directions. The gunman. The far future setting. It may not have been a conscious choice, but I couldn’t deny the evidence.
I was worried people might think my game was a rip-off. But in the end I think it has enough of its own character and identity to stand on its own. No one who commented on the similarities seemed put off by them, so I think it turned out fine.)
(Speaking of subconscious influences, I recently replayed Swigian and wouldn’t be surprised if its harsh minimalism ended up informing my approach as well.)
7
What does it mean for a game to have a limited parser? The actions the game pushes you towards reflect the priorities of the PC. This is true of most games, IF or not, but limiting the amount of available actions really makes this clear.
What kind of person interacts with the world primarily by cutting things?
(The ability to kiss the various NPCs was something I included on a whim. It just felt right. It was only later that I realized why.)
8
While in the end I went with the much coveted Funniest Wizard award, I would like to report that at least one person also deemed him the Hottest Wizard in the entire competition.
9
I burned out pretty hard while writing this game. I don’t know why. It’s the simplest and shortest game I’ve ever made, it took the least amount of time, and had the least amount of real life complications. It’s just something that happens sometimes, I guess.
By the time Spring Thing was drawing near, I could barely even look at the game. (The steppes section was supposed to have an actual puzzle. It didn’t.) With my other two games I was at least somewhat proud of the result, even if I wasn’t sure what other people would think of it. With this one I just wanted it over with.
But, you know, it’s Spring Thing, it’s more chill than IFComp, it doesn’t really matter as much if people hate it, right?
10
And then that didn’t happen.
Thank you to Brian for running the event, thank you to my beta testers for helping me hammer this thing into a presentable shape, thank you to all the reviewers for taking the time to write down your thoughts about something I made, and thank you to everyone who played the game for not coming at me with torches and pitchforks for disabling UNDO. It’s been a fun ride.
