🎮 PLAY CONFINED (WEB)

Check out Part 1 here.

Spoiler Alert - if you'd like to play Confined, you're better of reading this afterward instead.

Part 2: How About That Post Mortem?

What I Actually Made

Confined is a linear narrative text game divided in three stages, best (and obviously) described as the start, middle and ending.

The Start

The introduction where the player finds out they are imprisoned in a cryogenic stasis chamber for a crime they do not remember. The purpose of this ordeal is for convicted criminals to be rehabilitated in order to safely return them into society.

The player meets an AI named MAA (or the Mnemonic Assessment Algorithm) which is designed to assess whether the player remembers their crimes after they come out of rehabilitation. At this point the player learns that RA, the Rehabilitation Algorithm, is offline and MAA also doesn't work properly, rejecting the player's answers and returning them to rehabilitation no matter what the player says. This process runs three times (or more, if the player gives the same answer more than once) and is meant to frustrate the player. This part was a bit of a risk, normally you don't want to frustrate the player at all, but I felt that looping back in this manner was a solid reflection of the theme. Additionally, even though RA is offline, 10 years pass on each loop.

Once the player has given three different answers they are moved up to PEA, the Psychiatric Evaluation Algorithm designed to figure out of a prisoner is of sound mind. This AI, being more advanced and realizing there's something wrong, provides the player with access to the System Maintenance Network, a back-end system where various AIs can be switched on/off and accessed. The player has to figure out why the system is not functioning properly.

The Middle

By turning off MAA and/or PEA the player can redirect power to RA and talk with the AI. This starts some back-and-forths with PEA and leads to a dialogue with the Firewall, a watchdog AI that protects an archive named Data Storage. Once in Data Storage, the player stumbles upon a log entry written by the former warden of the facility. Here they learn about the facility and more about who they are and what has happened in the past. (I'll leave this vague in case you'd still like to play the game.)

The End

Upset by what they learned, the player is directed by PEA to PAA, the Prisoner Adjudication Algorithm that has the authority to release prisoners from their stasis. As dialogue progresses, the player is offered an alternative explanation as to who they are, and finally is offered a choice that leads to the end of the game.

The workings of the cryogenic rehabilitation system.

What I Wanted To Make

I had two main goals this jam: 1.) Write a non-linear narrative, and 2.) Code a clever logic system, what turned out to be the System Maintenance Network. Both of those goals were basically failures.

As mentioned above, this is a linear narrative game. That's not what I initially wanted. I was hoping to include branching story lines, giving the player more agency in where the story goes. Writing the story chronologically, I was often as lost as a player of the game might be. I didn't know where any of this was leading. At one point I intended to at least split the player's dialogue points in 'polite' and 'rude', and reflect that metric after you finish the game. All those things turned out to be too ambitious.

Additionally, the depth of interaction with RA and the Firewall was very lacking. I had bigger plans for this, especially planning to have a chance to run into the Firewall upon each algorithm transition once activated, but I just ran out of time.

The logic system of System Maintenance Network was meant to be a lot more advanced. Initially I wanted the AIs to each have various personality sliders (empathy, authority, etc), as it were, and the player would have to rebalance their personalities using the available power to get the correct settings to pass them. Looking back at that idea now, that was very obviously too ambitious.

As I worked on the game, I decided I wanted to change the look of it using the CSS functionality of Twine 2. I hadn't changed my previous Twine 2 projects, Fight a Monster and Grid Game from the default look at all, and I figured I could get the game to feel more like its contents by having a light (#eeeeee) background with big dark text on it.

I wanted to add character symbols for each AI so the player could more easily tell them apart. Normally I am just the graphics guy of our Ludum Dare entries, but given that I was going at it alone for the first time I figured this could be the one bit of clear visual design I could implement. I managed to do this, but I wasn't necessarily satisfied with how some of them turned out. MAA and PAA are a mother (who wakes you up from your sleep) and father (who sets you free in the end), which I was happy with, but RA doesn't necessarily look that much like the Egyptian god, and the style of PEA just doesn't really match the rest. Ideally there would have been a clear single style in which all those personalities were reflected.

To Summarize

I overscoped hard, but there was an acceptable minimal viable product within the broad confines of my concept. I wanted complex story, I settled for simple story; I wanted advanced logic, I settled for simple switches. If I were to go at another project alone, I hope I will remember this lesson: that overscoping isn't necessarily a risk if there's still a satisfactory finished game in there after stripping down its complexity.

All those disappointments aside, I was very pleased that I managed to write a full narrative, start to end. While I've always been drawn to writing, these days I don't write fiction for a hobby at all. The last time I wrote anything complete was many years ago. Sitting down and deciding I needed to do this and then ending up with a story that - judging from the comments on the game - seems to have entertained people, well that just puts a big smile on my face.

Next Ludum Dare I do hope to group up with @daanvanyperen again, but it's nice to know that within these simple confines I can leave my comfort zone and make a cool thing.

Thanks for reading, I hope this was a useful insight.

If you like, you could play CONFINED for a while.