Transparent postmortem

Competitions IFComp
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1

I want to thank everyone who took the time to play Transparent. I know it was a somewhat difficult and obtuse game to get into due to both mistakes and some intentional design choices I made. I have received excellent feedback which will go towards making the post-comp release a more enjoyable and playable experience.

I started working on the game late, which is my fault and a horrible habit I have. Comps are the most motivational force to get me to write, and I’m really happy that there are a lot more springing up throughout the year. I thank all of the organizers who are creating new comps and giving authors this kind of goal and inspiration instead of having to resort to releasing unheralded games blindly onto the IFDB conveyor belt.

The major elements of what became Transparent have been in my mind for years. When I decided to enter the 20th annual comp (on the date of the deadline to submit intent!) I fused an old screenplay I had written (film crew investigating a psychologically impacted house that won’t sell) with a concept for a theme park haunted attraction (the exterior layout and extended backstory of Thorne Manor.) The dealmaker for me was Daniel Stelzer’s generous offer to let me use his amazing music extension, and I decided I could whip out a relatively compact and interesting game in a month.

All projects insidiously expand to fill every bit of your free time and grow three sizes larger like the Grinch’s Christmas heart. If you write a parser game, don’t be surprised whenever this inevitably happens.

Writing the game wasn’t the problem. I’d started enough bad games that I actually was able to avoid some pitfalls ahead of time and structure my code so that I didn’t get lost in a morass of random undirected effort. I maximized every spare moment I had building the map in Trizbort and writing room descriptions in my spare time at work, and painting the image of the house in the newest MSPaint (which is shockingly good, I discovered!) on my work computer. What I wasn’t able to predict and account for was that my very experienced beta-testers weren’t going to help me very much at all in the final week before the deadline, which was when the entire game came together and the finale/solution/endings went in. The photography system got lots of testing. Lots of individual parts of the game got tested. But I never got anyone to make it all the way through the game from beginning to end to give impressions of the overall feel and play of the thing. This is my fault. If my testers had no other lives, I probably would have been convinced to fix the inventory limit earlier, and to fix the “light” synonym problems, and to pace the game more intelligently, and provide a slightly better motivational through line for the PC. It ended up being like a stage show filled with good individual elements and scenes that never had a complete dress rehearsal before opening night.

The multimedia elements actually were the least problematic element in creating the game!

Horror is a very difficult genre to write, and I had several goals in mind:

I didn’t want to ever tell the player that they were scared. I wanted the dread to build up organically with the player noticing subtle changes in the environment, either as planned events, or as a result of the butler’s behavior. For example, every door makes a sound. I wanted the player to hear doors opening and closing when they weren’t doing it and make them come to their own conclusion that someone else was in the house. Some reviewers interpreted this as a poor choice when the PC would not react explicitly to large-scale events such as a crawling disembodied hand, or flat-out poltergeist manifestations.

I intentionally kept the PC gender-neutral, so a player could insert themselves into the character instead of feeling they were playing a pre-set person apart from them.

I wanted the mansion to have a multilayered backstory, but I didn’t want to cram any of it down the player’s throat as blatant exposition. I wanted curious players to be able to search for it if they cared to, and I didn’t want to explain it all completely. I hoped players would be able to fill in gaps for themselves and that imagination would render the unknown possibilities more vivid than if I directly spelled out what exactly happened before in a cutscene.

I wanted the game to masquerade as a simple re-playable scored photograph-hunting expedition (conceptually similar to Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder,) that would eventually ensnare repeat players to stumble across hidden secrets that led to extra endings.

Unfortunately, in my attempt to not lead explicitly, I didn’t make it clear enough that just taking pictures and leaving the property was a completely valid ending. More than one reviewer explored the mansion and decided that the trail ran cold and they didn’t know what to do next. This was actually one of my diabolically evil intentions: I wanted some people to decide there was no mystery and leave, (very much like the film crew probably did with other haunted locations) only to read later of others who had different and more extensive experiences in the house. Thus the house would build up it’s own little meta-mystery. The separate endings I had intended as Easter eggs.

This didn’t work for two reasons.

One: I put the extra endings in the walkthrough feelie, which was probably stupid.

Two: I have to imagine that player expectations have evolved since the days of Infocom where there could be a game like Zork… “Hey, a locked house!” “Fill this cabinet with treasures. Go!” …and players would persistently work their way deeper into a game because that’s what you do. In past days of IF yore, if there was a locked door, you searched for the key. If a mysterious phone was ringing in a locked room in an abandoned house with no phone service, you wanted to find out why. If you had a map with a big blank space marked DON’T GO HERE, then you inferred that was your goal. Expectation of what is a clue and what is motivation are much different now, and many have been groomed to expect the multiple-choice format rather than the essay question. Players are less likely to put on a hardhat and dig their own way down into the Great Underground Empire then they were twenty years ago.

That’s not an condemnation of modern IF players, that’s just a miscalculation on my part on how IF has changed. The post-comp release will have extra clues and more inventory space and a clearer through-line to keep players motivated. I’m very fortunate to have had this learning experience.

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Transparent was one of my favourite games this year exactly due to many of the design choices you listed, particularly the bit about not cramming too many explicit (unnecessary) explanations about the protagonist and the house down my throat.

I hope you won’t water it down too much in subsequent releases (I played the first version).

3

Wow, thank you!

I realized reading this back that it sounds like I’m disparaging parser vs choice, which was not my intention at all. My game last year was choice based, and so was my Ectocomp. I’m fond of both mediums.

4

Seconded. If the light switches and inventory issues are tweaked, I would keep the rest largely as it is. And I think the hints about “Endings” in the pdf are just the right level of intriguing and encouraging further exploration, without giving away too much. The “Spoilers” section could maybe be put on another page, to check only if necessary!

5

I have to say, I thoroughly enjoyed Transparent - it was in my personal top 3. I particularly enjoyed the open-ended sandboxiness of it. It felt the least linear of all the games in the competition. In addition to your two reasons above, I think there is a third. IF, and gaming in general has changed it seems to me. Expectations are, from the player, of being led through a narrative as opposed to being challenged to create a narrative.

This article is interesting, old (2001), and as I see it, not necessarily so apt in 2014: siggraph.org/artdesign/gall … s/0378.pdf

Ade McT

6

" … I think there is a third. IF, and gaming in general has changed it seems to me. Expectations are, from the player, of being led through a narrative as opposed to being challenged to create a narrative."

I tend to agree. Perhaps it’s because of diminished attention spans, too many other things to do, disinterest in the game in general, a history of mechanics-based parser IF, or many other reasons. Thinking is tough, and subtext isn’t used enough for players to get practice at interpreting it. There’s a review of A Fly on the Wall, a game in EctoComp, that states perhaps the game would have made more sense if the reviewer had concentrated more. A Fly on the Wall doesn’t tell you a story; it sets up multiple frameworks for you to think of your own, based on your personal beliefs and expectations.

Neil

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I think that the first thing to say about that style of exhaustive, self-directed play is: it’s not a great fit for the comp. I’m OK with that style of play, but primarily if a) I have dedicated a leisurely chunk of time for playing it, and b) it already has a pretty solid reputation. Neither of those can really happen within a comp.

I think it’s also a really tough thing to make work with horror, because it doesn’t leave very many pacing tools. (Opinions obviously vary. I could never get into Theatre, which has nothing to do with choice-based games, or with Modern IF Expectations unless they’re the modern expectations that we’ve been working from for the past decade and a half. But yeah, I was never very interested in digging into the Great Underground Empire.)

8

Re. A Fly on the Wall – If you’re referring to my remark “possibly I needed to be playing with more time and concentration”, then, yes, I did not sit down with the game and a piece of paper and chart out where all the characters were going when, and it seemed only fair to fess up to that fact in my review. I also really didn’t expect to need to do something like that for an ECTOCOMP game, because that’s pretty much the opposite of the kind of game ECTOCOMP usually contains (short, whimsical, puzzle-light and often not constructed solidly enough for meticulous note-taking to do anything but expose flaws). Because I’d brought the ECTOCOMP games with me traveling, by the time I had played the game a few times and found myself baffled, I wasn’t in a position to play it in a different way. If this had been a standalone game, I would simply not have reviewed it, but with comp collections I usually do report on non-ideal play experiences in the hope that that will be useful. I apologize if that tack gave offense.

I have to disagree with a general view that “players aren’t willing to do the work”, though, when there are hundreds of posts here about Hadean Lands, just from the past two weeks or so, both about the puzzles and about the meaning of the story. Evidently many players are willing to do that work in the right context.

For me the critical issue in all of these cases has to do with expectation-setting, and what you’re communicating to your player about what kind of play experience they’re getting into when they start. HL essentially wears big “this is a challenging puzzle game!” stickers all over it.

Transparent was kind of confusing on this front, I think, because the feelies implied that it might be a story-focused game, and from the opening I did not in fact get the impression that “just” taking a bunch of photos and leaving was the right tack – in contrast with Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder, which is really really overt at the outset about the treasure-maximization goal.

9

“Re. A Fly on the Wall – If you’re referring to my remark “possibly I needed to be playing with more time and concentration”, then, yes, I did not sit down with the game and a piece of paper and chart out where all the characters were going when, and it seemed only fair to fess up to that fact in my review.”

I didn’t mean to criticize your review, and I’m sorry if you took it that way. It just seemed that it was a good example of how some games needing more time and thought to figure out, and players don’t always do that, for many reasons.

“I also really didn’t expect to need to do something like that for an ECTOCOMP game, because that’s pretty much the opposite of the kind of game ECTOCOMP usually contains (short, whimsical, puzzle-light and often not constructed solidly enough for meticulous note-taking to do anything but expose flaws).”

I guess I just don’t see this as a negative; I don’t see how defying expectations in any context is bad, especially if the game is more complex and thoughtful than one initially thinks.

“If this had been a standalone game, I would simply not have reviewed it, but with comp collections I usually do report on non-ideal play experiences in the hope that that will be useful. I apologize if that tack gave offense.”

No apology necessary, and I’m glad you said what you did. As I mentioned, I just thought the review was a convenient example of what I was thinking of.

Neil

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“I have to disagree with a general view that “players aren’t willing to do the work”, though, when there are hundreds of posts here about Hadean Lands, just from the past two weeks or so, both about the puzzles and about the meaning of the story. Evidently many players are willing to do that work in the right context.”

But this is only a subset of players, those who downloaded and (probably) finished Hadean Lands. To draw any rough conclusions, we also need to know how many people didn’t download the game because they didn’t want to play a complex, thought-intensive game, and the number of people who relied heavily on discussing hints rather than figure it out for themselves, and the number of people who didn’t finish it because doing so would be too labor-intensive. Unless the rules of a particular competition forbid people from solving puzzles or a mystery, I don’t see how any context in which someone plays that kind of game as wrong.

Neil

11

It’s an interesting subject, and probably deserves a wider debate.

From Emily’s post:

I don’t know that bare numbers support this.

Total global consumers for the text based complex puzzler that is HL : 500 (? I don’t know this, it’s just a number as an example. I would be really interested if Andrew, for the sake of understanding the global IF market, would release his sales numbers)
Total global consumers for Flappy Bird : 50,000,000

I take the polar extremes to make a point.

Games players, in general, “are not willing to do the work.” as is evidenced by the immediacy, linearity, ephemeral, and temporary nature of the vast proportion of web delivered media (games, etc…) today. Only a vanishingly small percentage of them are IF hobbyists, and are.

Is the future of IF a commercially, market led activity that relies on a business case predicated by populist games with a large consumer target market. Or is it a purely ‘hobbyist’ activity?

Based on the analysis of the modern web consumer demographic, is there a level of player investment that can be defined wherein there is a business case for a pro publishing / distribution house for IF Games? Or does IF remain the domain of the hobbyist, analysed academically and without a commercial future outside of lone indie’s?

Ade McT

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More than that. Not an order of magnitude more, thus far.

Surely the domain is not “everybody with a smartphone”, but IFComp voters?

13

Agreed. And there, in one sentence, is the problem.

14

“Surely the domain is not “everybody with a smartphone”, but IFComp voters?”
“Agreed. And there, in one sentence, is the problem.”

Surely the lack of popularity of IF can’t be reduced to players not wanting to think through the games?

Neil

15

We’re talking about different problems, then.

HanonO’s original post was about how Transparent did in IFComp. Emily and the others were responding to that, and how they think the IFComp audience has or has not changed. If you want to get into the future of IF in the mass market, fine, but this is going to be seriously incomprehensible if we try to mash them together.

16

Choice of Games is a publishing house for choice-based IF; we pay professional rates.

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Certainly not, as indie puzzlers like Spacechem, Braid, etc. continue to do extremely well, and require at least as much thinking as IF.

I think the lack of popularity of IF starts and ends with accessibility, which has always been a problem even before the rise of mobile.

18

Re. the willingness to explore of the already small target audience. This is indeed a big problem, and yes, this has changed over the years. It has been said before, it’s an issue of trust. Will the reward warrant the effort. If the game’s author is Zarf or Emily, it’s a non-issue, but only for them. What players should probably remind themselves of more often is: no risk, no fun! Those aforementioned authors also started once and they were given the chance to prove themselves, to earn that trust. This is still possible, sure, but the mindset of expectations has narrowed significantly.

19

I agree “this game was more thoughtful than I expected” doesn’t sound like much of a negative! But I think indicating “this game is likely to require note-taking” has more to do with telling the player what she needs to bring to the table to get started – more like listing all the required ingredients at the start of a recipe, or tagging a yoga video with the equipment it expects you to have.

Anyway, thanks for the clarification.

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“But I think indicating “this game is likely to require note-taking” has more to do with telling the player what she needs to bring to the table to get started”

And indeed your review may have done the game a favor by preparing potential players, something the game should have done itself. However, I have it on very good authority that the author didn’t expect the need for players to take notes!

Neil