First of all, I’m really happy I entered the Thing this year. I had a blast playing the games and reading the reviews. Congratulations to all authors and reviewers, thanks to the organisers, and thanks to everyone who played my game, reviewed it, or sent bug reports!
I’ve been on an IF hiatus for nearly two years and, truth be told, I hadn’t been planning on ending it. But then things changed in my life. I got laid off from a small translation company where I’d been employed for 11 years. (In fact, everyone got laid off, and the company shut its doors. It was blamed mostly on AI, which I believe was partially true – there were more issues than just that).
Before I go any further – please don’t worry about me, I have work. As of now, I’m doing freelance translations and looking for something more permanent. I’m supper happy I have something to do (even if setting up my own company was something completely new, and stressful, for me. And even if lots of projects I get are for post-editing of machine translation, which is of greatly varying quality. Sometimes it’s actually very helpful, especially with formulaic texts, like a GDPR notice. Other times, it makes next to zero sense, gets super confused by formatting, reverses the meaning of safety instructions or translates a single technical term in 5 different ways and you’re lucky if one of them is the customer-mandated one… I guess it all depends on how the MT is prepped and applied. Yes, the “fixing things the drunk robot broke” part in The Universal Robot was based on personal experience).
Anyway, back to the topic! After I got laid off, I found myself with a lot of free time on my hands. (This was end of February, and I only started freelancing in April). I was afraid doing nothing productive wouldn’t be good for my mental well-being, so I desperately wanted to occupy myself with something. That’s when I remembered Spring Thing was coming up – I think it was two days before the intent deadline. That day, on a walk, I got the idea for writing The Universal Robot and got really enthusiastic about it – especially the multiple endings.
I submitted my intent to enter and for the next two weeks I would set up my alarm clock to my standard working day time, get up and “go to work” writing and coding the game. At first, I had to basically re-learn Twine, because I’d forgotten so much – luckily, I had my older games with exploration and inventory systems I could adapt. I had much less time to complete the game than usually (most of my older games took something between 3 months and 2 years to write), so it’s quite short and not as involved as it could have been. (Originally, I had an idea for more flexibility during the mid-part of the game. In the finished version, the puzzles to replace the battery and the arm only have a single solution each, and the variety comes from using the training helmet on different things. I had plans for more potential arms, and other ways to modify and sabotage the robot, but I had to abandon them, as this would have exponentially increased complexity, and sadly I didn’t have enough time). But I was still happy with what I created – not in the least because I got back to writing IF after such a long break. The Universal Robot talks about serious things, but in a silly way, because I tend to react to problems with humour. It’s still darker than my other games, but as I’m an optimist at heart, I couldn’t help but include some endings where our plucky hero survives against all odds (Including the (in)famous Ending 13/12!).
This whole experience reminded me how much I enjoy writing and playing IF, and how great the IF community is. I already have some ideas for my next game – I have no idea when it will come out, as it’s going to be a lot longer than Robot, plus I have a “paper” gamebook I’m writing in Polish that I have to finally finish, but I hope to bring it to you all one day.
Thanks for reading, and for being part of a truly great community.
Cheers!