I was thinking about the thread about maintaining your enthusiasm and something that occurred to me is that I am, primarily, making a game for myself. But I am working in the field of I guess you’d call it procedural narrative/emergent storytelling.
The thought I had is that if you’re making a more traditional puzzle-based IF work, you aren’t really writing for yourself are you? Because you already know the solution to your puzzles. You know “the ending”.
How do you relate to your own work? Who do you make it for? Or do you do it for the making process rather than the product of the process?
I think you’re always writing for yourself, whatever else you’re doing. Writing is communication. Communication needs targets. So when you write, you’re writing to one or more targets. The only omnipresent target while writing is oneself. Whether you’re enjoying the process or not (being a writer, you probably are) there’s got to be some act of projecting yourself into a target to assess the functioning of the writing. For a lot of people, the projection of the self as a target can be considered to be an ideal reader of the work.
I do both. I love the actual creation and feeling of control creating it gives me, but I want to create games I’d enjoy to play too. I’ve played Milliways through before, not just for bug testing. And my other games every now and again, just to see if i still enjoy that game. (Truth is, some of them I don’t.)
But yes, I make the games I’d want to play, but the enjoyment of creating it comes first for me. I don’t care I know all the spoilers. That’s some of it, seeing if I can still be impressed by them anyway!
I love playing my own games. Obviously, when I’m working on a game, it goes through periods of tedium, monotony, frustration and excitement. By the time a game is nearing completion and I’m going through all the testers’ feedback, I get to a point where I’m absolutely sick of it. That’s when I know it’s nearly finished.
However, a year or two down the track, I might find the need to play it again. By that time, I’ve forgotten all the minor details and it’s great to rediscover them.
That’s a perspective I hadn’t appreciated, that with the passage of time your relationship to the work may change. I should have because I experience it often with music I made years ago (sometimes I even have to confirm that it’s mine because I cannot fathom how I made it).
It’s been a little while, but…I’ve generally tried to make the kind of game I would enjoy playing. Which isn’t necessarily the kind of game that tends to be the most talked about or the most popular.
Some parts of the creation experience are fun, and some aspects (like planning out puzzle details) have made my brain hurt. The testing experience can be a lot of fun, though. And might provide more feedback than I’ll get after game is published.
I can’t experience my own game as a player would who is unfamiliar with the puzzles, but I can read transcripts to try to find out if testers are having the kind of experience I want them to have…the kind of experience I would wish I were having, if I were experiencing the game for the first time.
One, I like to make strategic-based puzzles where you need to learn a system, and those can be hard for me on replay (for instance, I have a minesweeper puzzle in a parser game that I can never remember the solution to). Those are pretty fun to replay.
Other than that I hate replaying my games, so I try to make them good for audiences. That’s why I do so much beta testing; if I want to make people happy, I have to find out what they want. I do some games and writing in other areas without as strong of a beta testing culture and my products in those fields are often severely lacking.
I write for myself. I need something (a subject or technical problem) to get excited about, or else it’s hard for me to do the kind of work that it takes for me to make a game. I write things that I would want to write, I suppose.
There does come a point, though, where I recognize that I want people to see what I’ve been making. I’ve made a lot of choices where player experience trumped my own sensibilities and vision. There were other times when I went my own way. The testing process is part of that, of course. Negotiating authorial vision and audience experience is just something intrinsic to my own experience of writing.
By the time I release something, I will have played it through many, many, many, many times. And many more than that, probably. As a general answer, I think I would want some time to pass before going back.
I haven’t replayed Repeat the Ending since I added story mode to it maybe 18 months ago. It’s large, for one thing. It’s also pretty draining emotionally for me, since it’s about things that affect me personally. The guide and critical edition stuff might seem like some sort of low stakes “bit,” but they’re just as personal to me. I have thought about doing something for the game’s five-year anniversary. If so, I’ll play it a few times, I’m sure.
But! I do open the source code often, and that’s nice. I can see where I’ve progressed with my Inform capabilities, and that feels pretty good. It’s also nice to stumble across a random response and think: That’s not bad, is it?
I have two games coming out next month (I hope!), and I think this trend will hold: reading source, yes. playing, no. At least not before a long break.
I generally write games that I think I would enjoy playing, but also just for the sake of “can I make this work”—a lot of parts of my games started with “hmm, this seems like it would be difficult, I wonder if I can do it” and then proving to myself that I can.
Which is often a recipe for terrible puzzles, but that’s what testing is for!
well, I sometimes code for personal fun (I don’t think is a fair puzzle dealing with the complex electromechanical fire control devices of warships of yore… unrestricted and unrestrained RAM level of Zarfian cruelty) but I prefer to kept the arming switch on “SAFE” on the subject of personal bias vs. feedback in the context of testing…
and, no, I reckon that are 30 days prior of the Amnesty day, but I will never let out sources of absolutely unplayable (without extensive knowledge of ballistics and WWI/II Naval technology…) IF.
I write for the person I’d be if I never wrote a text adventure, and I write for my 15-year-old self who was impressed by it all but wanted something new.
It’s true I can’t be fully surprised by my own game, yet when I play something I wrote 5+ years ago and have an “I forgot I slipped that in! I’m glad I did!” moment, well, it’s as close as I can get.
I know I can read a walkthrough of an old game of mine and it brings back a ton of cool memories.
I also write to say, yes, other people write worthy things, but here’s a gap worth fulfilling.
So I guess I’m sort of writing to put that in as well.
I agree here! I like the challenge, and I realize I also appreciate games that tried something odd and didn’t fully succeed.
I wouldn’t mind writing something like that – but of course we work as hard as we can to make something succeed, once it actually compiles! (Or we try. Life and lack of willpower can get in the way.)
I agree, and I think this heavily overlaps with what keeps me/us motivated to make games. Some of it is love of the craft, and some of it is that a lot of the stuff I like is hard to find. Lady Thalia’s genesis was entirely due to EJ and I being connoisseurs of what we affectionately call “gay trash” and there’s never enough of it to suit our tastes (especially back in 2021 when we started), so we write it ourselves. It’s less out of a desire to be unique and more of, well, if this existed I’d be too busy playing it to write, but it doesn’t so here we are!
Of course, not everything we write is filling some unicorn niche but there’s usually some itch we’re scratching that isn’t getting scratched another way. “Wouldn’t this concept be neat” is the genesis of most of our games! Actually replaying them is something else, of course (testing has a way of beating all the fun out of it), but it’s all about the idea of playing it.
Interesting question.
I am mainly writing for a small group of my friends, but i do write for myself as well.
The one i am working on right now is a “Part two” of a game i made for the group last Halloween and it was supposed to be one-shot with some atmosferic apocalyptic world building in our own city. In the first game i have asked them to go out and look for clues in our city during the Halloween night.
They really loved it and after they kept asking me what will happen in the next one, so i said “i wonder that myself” and started to write it. And i admit it did took me a long time, but so far i have over 150 passages with game map, 5 diffo ending and till last month i didnt know how the main plot line will end.
So that really surprised me when the correct ending just revealed to myself.
And also, it did so when i was about in first third of the story, so i know how i beggins (with the ending of the last game), i know what happens after and i know how it ends, but i still have quite a lot to add to the middle.
I am kinda thinking of this one game as a story that narrates itself. Sometimes i know one plotline i want to add and it gives me idea of what else i have to write.
And i absolutly want to play it. I am replaying like 3 times everydy i write, bc i wanna make sure all the links and coding is correct, but i want to be the first one to play through it, when its done, bc i picked up creating games as a new quirky hobby and i never realized how much it would make sense for me to just do this.
I watched a weird video that talked about how the structure of our brains mirrors some of the properties that can tap into the quantum realm.
Our current computing requires either specifically tailored algorithms or brute force to come up with solutions (like a satisfying end to a story, for example) where each iteration is done one at a time. However, quantum computing does every possibility all at once and with proper understanding we can pluck “the best” solution from the mess of possibilities.
The video talked about how sometimes solutions to complex problems just “pop into our brains” and the idea is that maybe our brains tap into the quantum realm, at some level, to achieve this.
I found that fascinating, is all.
Anyway, I have a half-finished, mostly linear, story I worked on a year ago that I shelved. I re-read it every few months or so, to see if I can pick it up again. It’s a bit of a comedy and I always find myself amused even after the umpteenth read. (Yes, I amuse myself.) I think it’s safe to say that I would play this game a few times, like returning to a good book or re-watching a favourite movie.
nice idea: AMUSE MYSELF as a metacommand giving hints about amusing things to do in the story (generally revealed at the end, with the AMUSING option)…
the first game i ever wrote was really bad and makes me cringe in hind-sight. but i go back occasionally and poke around in it to remind myself that, yes, i have improved.
That reminds me of the history of the game Rogue. The developers incorporated procedural generation into everything so they’d still have fun playing the game, even if they knew how everything could in theory be jumbled together.
This is my favorite comment in this thread by far lmao.
Some years ago I looked back at my first attempt at a game in Java, which I did with a textbook, my dad who hasn’t programmed for over 20 years and Eclipse autocomplete lol. I remember cringing at the garbage mess.
These were really good thought provoking questions for me
While you might know “the ending”, you probably won’t know every twist and turn the player might take to get there, not until you’ve done that writing. For me, game design is about fabricating a journey that has a start, middle and an end.
Most of the time I don’t know what the middle looks like until I get stuck in. Is that relatable to you?
“How do you relate to your own work” and “are you doing it for the making process” make me think about what motivates me in my own Game Design practice. Presumably you’re working on projects you like. Presumably you enjoy the game design process already?
If I’m designing a game for myself; I’m doing it for the personal satisfaction. Over the years I’ve found game design and development methodologies that are pleasurable if not cathartic for me.
If I’m designing a game for a client; Then generally speaking I’m not the audience, but I do everything I can to empathise with the intended audience so I help make something good for them - and if I don’t like the work, I just won’t take it on. In that sense I’ve been lucky in my career.
If you don’t enjoy the process of writing or making games, or if you don’t like the current story you’re working on, that might come through in your execution, which would be problematic for your audience
