https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=p89ykjt0rtr7qwry
Grand Island Bank Robbery is the last of the ‘unfinished big Inform games’ I’ve had kicking around for the last few years. I have a variety of unfinished Inform games that are smaller or worse, but from here on out I guess it’s time for something new.
Warning: The rest of this review has huge spoilers! If you want to try the game first, it’s not hard to get all the treasures and reach the end.
In 2017, I entered games called Absence of Law and Swigian to IFComp. I wrote this message to Chandler Groover afterwards:
I told myself that I wouldn’t enter again if I won, and I would enter if I lost.
It looks like I probably won’t take first (though I expect to do well). So I’m planning a new game.
It’s a bank robbery in the 1920’s, and you’re a robber. The title is something like “Grand Island Bank” and the cover art will be a picture of John Dillinger.
I’m going to follow Swigian’s development cycle: no scenes, no new verbs. But I’ll have it be a treasure hunt.
If you successfully steal all the treasures (taking about 100 actions), you reach the ending, where you’re chewed out by the police chief. It turns out you were really an undercover cop.
So you can play again and hide all of the treasures from the other thugs (about 50 actions), or just take them yourself and run.
I’ll keep the short paragraphs from Swigian, but add descriptions for each item. I’ll enter it anonymously again.
And it won’t be a comedy; I never liked writing comedy.
So I had this idea for 9 years, but never did anything with it. The references to Swigian are about how I made it a ‘fake game’ by having minimal detail and only straightforward actions.
From the beginning I wanted to have one treasure inside butter; either you’d find it there or put one there to hide it. Similarly, you’d either find a painting behind a map or put one behind a map.
I just couldn’t think of a way to make it interesting, and I had better ideas in the meantime (like Grooverland or my other tribute games or commercial games).
Already back in 2017, I made the general map and decided to use gangster slang and to make all the characters people from Great Depression books. I had Scout (who would hide something in her mouth like in Goonies), one of the guys from Mice and Men, Tom from Grapes of Wrath, Jay Gatsby, even Jack from Titanic (who would be terrified of doors).
It took me a while to research the gangster slang. I was writing stuff like this:
say "Pretty Boy hands you the list. He says, ‘Say, kid, this is the last of the stuff. Keep your mush shut and find the goods while we keep an eye on these bazoos.’
One of the key concepts I had all along was to say ‘The boss won’t like it’ but have ‘the boss’ actually be the police chief, not the mob boss.
and just realized (last year) that I wouldn’t even want to play a game like that, let alone write one.
I decided to finally finish it up this year, maybe to try to make a ‘try to win IFComp game’. I even considered stopping helping with the IFComp committee to enter, but changed my mind after seeing how hard it’s been for competitions to get helpers (also, once I finished this up, I realized it would not be good with the packed, time-crunch forum of IFComp, since it benefits from multiple replays).
Anyway, I still couldn’t find something I liked. I finally realized that ‘hiding’ the treasures wasn’t good, since there are so many places you could put them. I had, like, a crack in the floor that leads to a vault. Why not just put everything in there? Why have different hiding places for each item? I couldn’t come up with satisfying ‘hide things’ puzzles.
So I had to idea to let the player make counterfeits instead of hiding things. That opened up a ton of other options. I put a bunch of trash everywhere that would be useless as real treasure but could be repurposed (looking back, it was a lot like the Max Fleischer 1936 cartoon ‘Christmas Comes But Once a Year’, one of my favorite cartoons as a kid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dfeokaw2xc)
Still, there was a pain. If I made it too hard to find the counterfeits, the second half would be impossible. Too easy, and people would guess it right away.
I also wanted to make it possible to play either version from the getgo. One game I deeply admire is Slouching Towards Bedlam. After playing it once, the whole game is recontextualized, and you can replay with completely different motives and goals. That’s what I wanted; no new game +, just branching paths.
I finally came up with a bizarre idea: what if you could play a third time? What could it be? I settled on being Cupid from mythology, pairing up lovers.
Why cupid? One, it would give me a reason to develop extensive backstories for characters, which would make the game have really well-developed characters for the first two rounds, which would surprise and intrigue people.
For another, I’ve always struggled writing romance. Trying it, I always get cooked. My romance game Untitled Relationship Project had really sad and depressing romance. My last two Choicescript games had uninspiring romances with gender selection and a variety of choices on the LGBTQ spectrum. This time I thought I’d focus on straight romances and try to figure out how to make them tick. I pretty much failed here, too. My goal was to make them more realistic (for some of them) or base them off of We Never Learn (a kind of low-quality but fun manga). The feedback I got on these romances helped, though. I went and watched a bunch of Hallmark movies after and talked to others, and for my new Choicescript game I’m working on, I am instead focusing on making interesting characters first, people with their own arcs, so that dating them is more compelling.
Anyway, I added this third feature, and everything clicked in place in my mind. We’d have three ‘bosses’.
I wrote the third story first, and had it tested. The testers were super helpful (one suggested flipping gender dynamics; the current Francine and the widower were once Francis and a widow). They were also very confused. Most of them thought the game seemed kind of nonsensical in parts since I had a bunch of placeholders for the puzzles that weren’t created yet.
I then wrote the counterfeiting part. It was getting better, but I still had the issue of blank parts and placeholders.
I finally wrote and tested the beginning, and people started having more fun with the game. I had to do a pass and fix the story. Several testers had great ideas. The most common idea that they had which I didn’t implement was enhancing the romance stories to be longer. To be completely honest, the reason I didn’t invest much time in that (even though I knew it would improve it) is because I felt like the twist itself would be what impressed players and kept them engaged and the actual content itself would not be memorable. I may go back and add more in the future though if people disagree!
Like always, the testers were the lifeblood of the game. Thanks to lionstooth, rh, Hidnook, Doug Egan, N. Cormier, max fog, jkj juio, andrewj, Tobias V. I. Langhoff, E. Joyce, Brett Witty, Tabitha, Zed Lopez and Daniel Stelzer!
Last of all, I changed the name from Grand Island Bank to Grand Island Bank Robbery to make it more clear what it was about.
What’s next for me? I’m finishing a Choicescript game with a co-author. The game is called Shadow of the Curse-Eater. After that, my sister who’s obsessed with Brazilian Jiu-jitsu wants to make a choicescript game about a jiu-jitsu gym and a corporate takeover; something small like 100K words.
I’d love to make a game as an IFComp prize like I’ve done 3 times before, each of those was fun.
I’ve had an idea for a while of a random dungeon/puzzle generator that can flip between over-done IF styles (collecting pages in a lab, treasures in a dungeon, memories in a mindscape, or litter in an apartment), showing how many of them are really the same underneath. It wouldn’t be fun, but making it would be fun.
I also would like to make another big game. One option is an anthology like Narcolepsy, where I’d ask choice-based authors to write short linear stories to be included in a larger framework. The other option is to make ‘my own Anchorhed’. Never Gives Up Her Dead was my version of Curses. My version of Anchorhead would be a game with a large map that takes place over several days or acts in the same world, with the map changing and evolving over time. Worlds Apart is kind of similar, as well (and I guess Blue Lacuna). So something like that would make for a fun bigger project.
Thanks for playing Grand Island Bank Robbery!