UN-FUCK THE WORLD

Patrick Hill, Spring 2021

Make a friend, fight some bad guys, find hope for the future.

THE TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS

1. 93 Glitch pages
2. All passages styled with CSS including largely custom backgrounds and character designs
3. My autobiographical character, Patrick, last seen living inside a computer, appears and self-destructs, as he should.
4. Used CharNG for Baron's Adequate lore and Patrick's code sequence (as well as naming inspiration)
5. Used Googlism and Botnik (Carl Sagan) keyboards for location names and Ada dialogue, including the list of questions
6. Crowdsourced names of enemy creatures (in twine array) from Destiny 2 fanart
7. Transcribed idle chatter from OtterAI and threw it in N+7 for lulz/Patrick transmog sequence
8. Developed in the most recent version of Sugarcube and made available on itch.io (click the embed for full-screen play pls!)
9. Used Twine arrays and variables to devise random enemies/gear drops, the attack system, the quest log, and gear menus.

I used the following Oblique Strategies for conceptual & inspirational purposes:

• Repetition is a form of change: The overarching structure of this piece is based heavily on "first missions" I've played in games. The two most prominent I tried to "repeat" were Destiny 1's opening Cosmodrome mission and Halo: Combat Evolved's first mission. Coupled with Brad Troemel's recent work on "repetition mindset," this became the most important strategy I pulled.
• Tape your mouth: I wanted to give the game a sense of urgency, and a cinematic quality, by largely eschewing the player's "voice," allowing for more cutscene-like qualities to certain passages."
• Give way to your worst impulse: I love shooty space games, and I love getting loot, but I usually try to go a little higher concept. "Fuck that," said I.
• The most important thing is most easily forgotten: Because the mechanics of the game are largely "move forward and attack," I wanted to create extra depth by giving most active passages time-sensitive or otherwise variable modifiers and outcomes, twisting each encounter a little more than the last.
• Look at the order in which you do things: Again, I was heavily inspired by linear tutorial missions, which means extreme focus on gradually relaying information and advice, rather than throwing it all out at once. This meant greatly expanding the Atraks boss battle, in particular, in order to give the player enough time to understand the special/super mechanics.

THE REFLECTION

This was a hell of a class. I learned more useful skills -- html, game design, language manipulation -- in just this course than I might learn in a given semester. I've always loved games of all kinds and the theory behind them -- I love watching and reading dev stories, learning their tricks and seeing the messy code/environments -- so it was a great opportunity to get to try and fill in their shoes. I'm not sure how I feel about Twine (other than the variables/arrays I feel I probably could've done this project with a little more pizazz in plain html pls don't hold me to it though!) but that's just a testament to how well you taught this class, Luke. Almost everything we've used, save paste+click text fuck-arounds, was entirely new to me. And I'm a writing major. I don't know how to do math. All these acronyms and shorthands scared the shit out of me. But in many respects, working in Twine or in code is almost exactly like working with a literary form -- in fact, HTML and CSS force you to pay extreme attention to form and syntax, lest they break catastrophically. I can even feel the influence of this class on my writing work -- I can't tell you how many times I've accidentally typed a header 2 tag instead of hitting the command+b for bigger text. I'm deeply excited to actually continue this project, adding more missions (and hopefully a more interconnected world.) I genuinely think storytelling tools like Twine are the future of the written medium: easily accessible, ecologically sound, deeply interactive, and most importantly, extremely fun. In many ways, this class got me to look at stories in general as complex processes, with layers upon layers all calling back to themselves, much like the pie website. For my final, I wanted to make a piece that summated all these feelings: love for stories, love for the making of games, and love for playing games. So I made a game entirely derivative of all my work in this class and every game I've truly loved. Storytelling and coding are both deeply devotional processes, requiring you to sink an immense amount of time in their worlds. And oh, what a joy that is.