The original Galaxy Jones grew out of a desire to have something to enter in Spring Thing 2023. That in hindsight may have been inadvisable after having participated in IFComp 2022 – I don’t work terribly quickly. I was never terribly satisfied with that first game.
So in early 2025 I decided to make a new “rebooted” edition of the game to answer one reviewer’s complaint that while Galaxy Jones was fun, it could be more fun. My intention was to add more cool building-infiltration action. Galaxy got into the building by ramming the heavy steel barrier with her ship; she had to hide from patrolling robots; she had to hack doors and other obstacles with her spy technology; and she had a cool supersuit that could destroy barriers (and robots!) with a single punch.
But as IFComp 2025 approached, I had the itch to enter. I figured I couldn’t enter the reboot in IFComp, so I punted on the reboot and repurposed some of its pieces to serve in an entirely new game: Phobos: A Galaxy Jones Story. The name was chosen to imply that it’s not the implied sequel of the original game, but a stand-alone game, along the lines of the movie Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
And the game was looney. Probably weirder than Bureau of Strange Happenings. But I was worried about it, so I sent it to testers much earlier than I had in the past, and I noticed something funny. I found all of the weirdness grating. Forced? Maybe. And there was this thing with the guard at the end… I couldn’t figure out what to do with it. How does Galaxy get past it? Does she shoot it? That seems so… uncharacteristic. She never shot anyone (directly) in the original game.
I eventually decided that I needed to have Galaxy win the guard over to her side somehow. The mechanism I decided on was that she would tempt it with something it had never seen before: chocolate. But I was never satisfied with that. More on that in a minute.
One of the cool aspects of the early Phobos is that you found a helmet that would expand your cognitive capabilities as you installed more modules into it. And the more your cognitive capabilities expanded, the more you were able to understand the Siriusian language, and the more weird machines and rooms you were able to identify and comprehend. But I thought that these changes in Galaxy’s perception would just go over players’ heads, so I had to change the concept somehow, because I really liked the idea of a language which you decoded over time.
So two concepts came together: winning over the guard and understanding the language. And clearly the latter is a prerequisite of the former. I had found the central idea of the game! Well, except for one piece: the idea of winning over the guard with chocolate was just silly, and the game was turning out to be less silly than I had originally thought.
So that was my lingering problem as I diligently wrote the texts for the game, which the player would scan and integrate into the Linguistic Module’s database of the Siriusian language. (This mechanism was inspired by the portrayal of the early Universal Translator in Star Trek: Enterprise.) I had the backstory of the guard’s disillusionment with the Sirius Syndicate’s tactics, I just needed something more.
It was here that my wife Laura gave me the crucial piece, as I mentioned in my comments at the IFComp prize ceremony. She suggested that its commander should have betrayed the guard in some way, and that if you provided proof of that to the guard, he would abandon the Syndicate and help you stop the destruction of Mars. This was perfect. (Actually, you can use the chocolate if you want – or eat it, whatever – and there are two other methods to turn the guard as well which I won’t divulge.)
Some reviewers (and one tester) commented on the sparseness of the environment, which was intentional since the base was supposedly cleared out. But in hindsight I do wish I’d put more in there, things like the motivational poster in the barracks, for instance.
The puzzles are a holdover from the reboot. Again in hindsight, I wish I had found other ways to pass barriers, since I think the two halves of the game are pretty starkly different in a way I wish they weren’t. I also imagine that a good number of people were put off simply by that aspect of the game – my number of ratings seems somewhat low.
All in all, I’m reasonably pleased with Phobos – at least this time around I wasn’t swamped with comments about lack of polish!
- Write the sequel to the first Galaxy Jones
- Write the sequel to BOSH
- Write something entirely different
- Spend three years writing my Magnum Opus like the tortured artist I am