What plot bunnies have you been harbouring?

Oh, I’m a sucker for the “death game” genre! And while it’s not an uncommon premise in general, I don’t think I’ve seen much of it in IF, and the office setting is also unusual. If you were going for a semi-comedic tone like DR, you could really have some fun with workplace dynamics.

Anyway, some plot bunnies that have been hopping around in my head (some of them for quite a while):

  • I do cosplay, and back when I was on a tight budget, I used to buy cheap wigs from a hair salon that was probably a mob front (long story). I’ve always thought you could do a sort of North by Northwest thing in which something important was stashed in the packaging of one of the wigs, which someone then buys, and then the poor bewildered wig-buyer has to deal with a couple of mobsters chasing them through a comic convention. (Possibly the wig they bought isn’t even the one with the McGuffin in it and it’s a total mix-up.)

  • On the total opposite end of the tonal spectrum: Years ago, for a game jam, I started a Twine game in which the PC had grown up in a space colony with her mother. The PC was returning to Earth after her mother’s death, and for vaguely handwaved space travel reasons, could bring one and only one memento of her mother with her. So the game was basically just looking at each of the objects and reading through the associated memories, each representing a facet of the PC’s relationship with her mother, and then choosing which facet to emphasize through the choice of which object to bring. Even though this would be a pretty small game, I never got very far into it, and once I’d missed the jam deadline I wandered away and never came back, but I’ve always been fond of the idea.

  • I’ve kicked around an idea for a game with two PCs (alternating POVs) in a sort of shared dreamworld where the world would transform based on the player’s choices in the previous segment, but I haven’t yet managed to come up with characters to hang this mechanic on.

  • This is the most recent of these ideas and consequently not very thoroughly developed, but: an alien first-contact game where the PC is one of the linguists trying to figure out how to communicate with the aliens. Basically the thing I wanted Arrival to be and was disappointed that it wasn’t (in that the linguistics were [1] less of a focus than the linguist’s personal life and [2] based on a decades-old discredited hypothesis). The gameplay would probably be a bit Heaven’s Vault-like, but I hope the focus/story would be different enough that it wouldn’t feel like a total rip-off.

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I am very interested now. I’m guessing you already know about Suveh Nux, The Edifice, and The Gostak (three games about learning to understand a foreign “language” in different ways)?

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Oh, yes! I hadn’t thought about any of those in ages, but they are definitely all classics of “language-learning” IF. Probably worth revisiting them if/when I decide to go ahead with this idea.

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Compared to those three, where would this one fall? Is it a “learn by saying things and see how NPCs respond”, or “learn by saying things and see what magic happens”, or “learn by entering commands and see if the parser accepts them”?

Or something entirely different? Learning via artifacts without immediate feedback or such?

(This is a place where I think IF shines more than any other medium so I’m very excited.)

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Largely the first one! The idea being that you’re in there talking to the aliens, making note of what they’re saying to you and trying to say things back. Maybe there would also be segments in between where you could review recordings of other people’s conversations with the aliens to get more data? Like I said, not a very fully developed idea yet. I figure you’d also have a “dictionary” function that would list all the words you’ve encountered and you can put in what you think the gloss is, though I’m not sure yet (1) whether I would want it to tell you if you’re right and (2) whether it would be free-form entry or picking from a pre-selected list of options.

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Well, there’s the completely unrealistic one I’ve already talked about… and then there’s this one I really wanted to have written a year ago, but haven’t gotten around to yet. The basic idea is that you’re an engineer in an experimental underwater habitat and need to fix some sort of hardware issue, lest the station must be abandoned. The station is laid out in a ring shape, so navigation would mostly use “clockwise”/“cw” and “counterclockwise”/“ccw” instead of compass directions. At some point you would have to leave the station to do some work from the outside.

Really, the main hurdle is that I have a hard time coming up with puzzles. It was fun to think about the theory of such a station, though.

I’ve thought about submitting this to SeedComp, but that would feel as if I’m officially giving up on ever implementing the idea, and I’m not ready to do that yet. (Also I’ve kinda hurt my wrist and writing a lengthy text in time for the deadline doesn’t sound appealing right now.)

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I force my best friend to help. She’s great at puzzle ideas. Some of her ideas make my eyes cross-- how am I supposed to implement THAT?!-- but a lot of them are really solid. I believe in making other people do some of the work!

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Oh another bunny I have milling about: An hacking game, conveyed through IF. While it won’t be exactly like the real thing, the idea is to have puzzles and mechanics that make the player use the same kinds of problem solving that they would use when hacking irl.

This bunny has a child which demands to be procedurally-generated. Okay.

Mood. I eventually get there, but my partner will watch me laying on the floor, staring at the ceiling for 20 hours at a time, while manically writing notes or coding test simulations in JavaScript on my computer.

I try to think of puzzles that can be reused or remixed multiple times throughout the game. People who think of distinct, one-time-only puzzles are absolute superheroes.

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I’ve had this puzzleless, sci-fi/horror, workplace slice of life thing I started implementing in Twine some years back, starting around 2016ish whose title never really solidified for me. Best I got was “A Case of the MONs.” I never got past the opening bits of it other than some other scattered parts: weather reports with normalized acid rain, news articles, a couple dialog trees with co-workers, some ideas for weird work tasks. It was basically just like… eh, kinda what it was like to work in I.T., but as a near-future dystopia (because we haven’t seemed to be heading in any other direction) peppered with like thoughts/examples on “What is Wrong with America,” addiction, corporate water ownership, surrealism, and murder. Unfortunately the opening was still somehow very “my apartment”-ish, and I think that hurt my motivation to push past the opening except for jotting down snippets. Plus as much as I tried it all kinda took itself too seriously and I couldn’t deal with that.

It was a lipogram of Y, not like as a “whoa, sick stunt bro,” but more to try to keep it interesting enough that I might see writing it as fun or at least a neat challenge instead of just soul-crushing. I had a whole “made for TV movie” short story written for it that was something I wrote shortly after the 2016 election that went nowhere (I mean never got published anywhere and never really got workshopped either) and really dis-spirited me for a while. It was also to feature one ending where the player is killed in an active shooter event because there are so many games around that subject, but almost never from that perspective. Also because Run, Hide, Fight,” is the most ridiculous safety policy a country has ever come up with (if you’re not American, yes that is a 100% real, American safety training video). I thought about buckling down on this Twine thing again after witnessing an active shooter event in my apartment parking lot last April, but still never made progress on it.

Other features: You could talk to the angriest version of Garfield, a sort of hallucinated static tiger vowing revenge against the start of the workweek and the Nazis that ultimately co-opted him as a symbol. William McFarland was president, pushing legislation to ban remote work. Dated references to Cats (2019), including the new hit movie “Cats II: Return of the Jellicle Dead” (is it too late to toss that one into SeedComp?). Nestlé and Coca-Cola owned the Great Lakes, thanks to an article that I actually barely even had to rewrite.

Instead of continuing to write it, I became deeply depressed and did a lot of cocaine and molly for… a while. It seemed like a rational response at the time. I’ve since moved on to other things to write [and off those illicit medications! Please don’t do drugs. :slight_smile: ] for now, but ideas for this one still churn in my head from time-to-time, and I still do appreciate the challenge of attempting to eliminate the letter Y from a passage now and then.

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I’ve been really struggling to write a Twine novel on the Herodian dynasty. There’s so many fertile stories to tell, but I just can’t for the life of me discover the rhythmic pulse that brings them all into one song. Like at a sentence or passage level, the gears still turn, everything still works, but nothing seems to spark the story into propulsive life. I wonder if anyone has any advice about how to condense a rich but disparate set of ideas into a single animating design?

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This by no means always works, but what I usually try to do is take one idea or strand of what I’m working on – a bit of plot or a character arc or a thematic motif, whatever feels sparkiest at the time – and then run with it as far as I can and try to write myself into a corner. Like, I’ll bull ahead, intentionally ignoring any warning signs, until I’m well and truly stymied by some barrier: say the plot bit doesn’t work because it’d either be too easy or too hard to accomplish the thing that needs to happen; or the character arc only makes sense if they’re extravagantly vulnerable to betrayal or suspicious of strangers; or the thematic element is muddy because it’s too abstract and I haven’t figured out a way to get the stuff it represents on the page.

Then once I’m well and truly muddled I just stay there for a day or two, desultorily reviewing the other parts that I hadn’t paid attention to while I was going down this particular rabbit hole, and let the hind parts of my brain see if they can make anything happen. Often they don’t and I’m just as stuck – but sometimes, like magic, I’ll be in the middle of vacuuming or taking a shower and suddenly I’ll realize that one of those other pieces is the way out of the dilemma, and they snap together like jigsaw pieces.

To the extent it works, I think it’s because it activates different parts of my brain – instead of a creative work I’m trying to wrestle into shape, it becomes something like a puzzle to solve, and that difference in perspective sometimes lets me see (or create) connections that wouldn’t have occurred to me if I hadn’t metaphorically put my back to the wall.

EDIT: Also, I’m not super up on the Herodians, but what little I remember make me very excited for this once you wrangle it into shape!

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I feel like it’s always this way for me until one day it pulls together, unless it doesn’t and the game goes into the file of shame. If it comes together, usually what happens is that I’ll be scowling at it and feeling pissy, and then my brain will pull a scrap of paper out of my mental “ideas” cabinet and that will be the thing that works, the thread that stitches it all up.

Also, I recommend getting smart people to play/read it very early, and give them free rein to criticize. They will often come up with an idea that pulls it together, or help you get rid of the things that are holding it back.

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Yep. Just because an idea doesn’t work now doesn’t mean it goes in the furnace and 'twas all for naught. Don’t feel guilty to back-burner something that’s not working and try something else. I’ve had many “full game” concepts I thought a lot about that ended up just being an element in another game. Good ideas won’t go away. Like cats: if you ignore them, the ones that matter will hang around and find their place.

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When I find myself stuck in the middle of a story and I can’t put it aside (sometimes you can’t!), I remind myself that everybody in my story wants something, and that they are all on their way to either getting it or not getting it.

I can usually find something to do with wanting, getting, and not getting.

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I’ve wanted to make a game where the player has the misfortune that they really are a disgraced former Nigerian prince looking for assistance moving money, but they can’t get anywhere because everyone they contact assumes the player is a scammer. The player must go to greater and greater lengths trying to prove their authenticity and sincerity, and, when the player finally finds someone who’ll listen and things look like they’re turning around, it turns out this individual is a scammer and the player now has to figure out how to retrieve the money they were trying to move in the first place.

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The other one bouncing around in my head is a game surrounding a dimension hopping locksmith. You get different job requests that the player can accept or deny (everything from a request to unlock some of the 50000 locked doors in Silent Hill to making a master skeleton key for Zork). Your trendy interdimensional locksmith competitor is pushing new voice activated smart locks and seems to always be one step ahead of you, while smugly mocking your “hopelessly old-fashioned ways.”

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Had one pop up yesterday based on observing my two idiot cats. (Okay, one of them is pretty smart, but she has no sense of self-preservation so that’s just a different kind of stupid. Love them!)

Smart Cat is constantly discovering new ways to get herself into trouble and cause chaos, whereas Stupid Cat learns a new thing about once every blue moon - unless he sees Smart Cat do it first, in which case FOMO allows him to learn it too. (This usually involves going somewhere they’re not supposed to go, so Stupid Cat is deathly afraid that Smart Cat is having fun without him). I thought that would be a fun game mechanic, where the cats are trying to navigate some obstacle course for Reasons and the puzzles revolve around making sure Stupid Cat has line of sight on Smart Cat to learn whatever silly skills he needs to keep going.

At first blush it seems like an idea better fit for a parser – I guess you could do it in Twine a la The Bones of Rosalinda but I don’t think I have the chops to pull it off. I’ll sit on this one and maybe toss it into SeedComp next year if I don’t have any other brainwaves about it.

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An extra layer of complexity would be if there was also Old Cat who has a few of those elderly disadvantages like not being able to jump so high.
After Stupid Cat has learned the move from Smart Cat, Old Cat could bribe Stupid Cat with treats out of her secret stash to move stuff around so Old Cat has a little height before jumping.
Smart Cat jumps up the windowsill. Stupid Cat sees that and follows. After getting a treat, Stupid Cat pushes down a potted plant for Old Cat to stand on.

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IRL, Stupid Cat is in fact an Absolute Unit while Smart Cat is about half his size, so that tracks! I’d just have to use some creative license to ignore the fact that if there were treats around Smart Cat would go bananas until she got one, especially if she thought Stupid Cat was getting something she wasn’t. (There’s a lot of sibling rivalry going on here.)

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Well, since you’re already working with line-of-sight for Stupid Cat to learn from Smart Cat, you could expand that idea to make sure Smart Cat is not in line-of-sight when Old Cat gives the treat to Stupid Cat.

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