I was pretty sure that I knew what I wanted to do for Ludum Dare 24 long before the theme voting even started. Not in specificity, mind you. That’s not quite in the spirit of the competition (‘the spirit of the competition’ being under higher scrutiny than usual this time thanks to Kongregate). Still, I was pretty certain that I wanted to do a piece of Interactive Fiction. This fall I’ll be taking a class about the subject, and I’ve spent the past few weeks reading things like Espen J. Aarseth’s Cybertext and Janet H. Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck.
I was, however, prepared to do something in Processing if the theme demanded it from my imagination. ‘Parallel Worlds’ may have spawned a Neoplasticist bit of nonsense, but oh well: it wasn’t meant to be. Maybe I made a spiritual successor to Pac-Mondrian in a… Parallel World, but I digress (and I apologize for the bad wordplay).
Frankly, I’m not a strong visual artist. Graphics are typically little more than a means to an end for me. I mostly get ideas about systems and narratives, not images. So text-based game design has sort of captured my attention lately.
In the days leading up to the revelation of the theme, I studied the documentation of a few different systems: primarily Inform and TADS. The pseudo-English of Inform actually put me off and the familiarity of the syntax used in TADS was appealing, but I still couldn’t help but feel like there was too much going on under-the-hood that only surfaced itself in really cryptic ways. Too much felt out of my hands.
I’m also not sure I love the aesthetic of parser-based Interactive Fiction. Recently I played 9:05 by Adam Cadre and the limitations of the typical Zork-style interface really made themselves apparent to me. I do think 9:05 is a clever little piece of IF, but I spent something like 15 minutes in-game (as each command took a minute of in-game time) just figuring out how to unlock a door with a keycard. When the interface is that clumsy and arcane (and intrusive), I can’t help but be turned off a bit.
I also have a general distaste for puzzles, which IF is well-known for employing as its main ludeme. I think puzzles often come across as a very unkind expression from the game designer to the game player. It’s an obstacle whose structure is laid bare as arbitrary, perhaps more so than any other design convention. To me, puzzles and grinding are (typically) unfortunate traditions that keep audiences away from content and, frankly, waste the precious few moments we’re all granted in our time on Earth.
And speaking of grinding, the emphasis on rooms and doors in physical space make IF feel too much like a dungeon crawl, regardless of a work’s actual tone or subgenre. Typing “north”, “east”, “north”, etc is just too specific a paradigm for me to feel comfortable within, at least for what I feel like creating. It demands a specific spatial relationship between parts of your work, one that I think draws the medium closer to time-wasting than mind-expanding.
Hypertext fiction, on the other hand, can be a little more liberating. You move from webpage to webpage, clicking discrete links—not guessing at commands to type at the digital Game Master who is keeping you from the game’s meaningful content. The interface isn’t a puzzle in itself, and while there may be fewer gratifying discoveries for the player in hypertext fiction, I’m very happy that I found Twine, a tool for making hypertext fiction that I used for Ludum Dare 24. Twine isn’t perfect, but it stays out of your way, which I wouldn’t necessarily say Inform and TADS do very well.
The ‘game’ I made is Dhp 129: HF, a spiritual successor to an earlier game of mine (Dhp 129). The HF stands for two things: “Hyper Fighting” if I’m joking, and “Hypertext Fiction” if I’m not. Now, I described it as a ‘game’ because it’s not a typical IF adventure. As I said, I wasn’t in love with the spatial structure of traditional IF, and—as you will see or already have seen from playing (if you’re so kind to do so)—this game doesn’t favor moving from room to adjacent room. It jumps from time/location in emotional space-time to time/location in emotional space-time, much like traditional literature can. I think this is an important quality that most games miss out on. Sure, Skyrim’s got fast-travel, but there’s a reason that film directors edit out actions that we can take for granted. Action games are, at their core, about moving from one place to another. I submit the genre of platformers as evidence.
But enough criticism of our medium. Let me now defend myself from criticism!
Sometimes a theme’s relevance to any given Ludum Dare game is tenuous, and if anybody wishes to level that criticism against Dhp129: HF, that’s fine. However, while aspects of the work are based on ideas I had a long time ago, I hadn’t decided on making this kind of a game until after the theme was announced. I was fully aware of said theme when I was brainstorming, and this was the concept I was inspired to work on. For me, that’s good enough. Still, know that I did spend a few minutes wondering if it had enough to do with ‘Evolution’. I now feel pretty strongly that it does comment on multiple definitions of ‘Evolution’.
And as a final note, I want to share both the excitement and anguish I felt over this project. There are descriptions of horrible things in Dhp129: HF, and I did my research. I watched very unsettling videos that made me feel very uncomfortable, physically and otherwise. Also, with this being the most prose I’ve written in a very long time, I feel that I opened myself up a lot on this project. It can be very easy to hide behind sprites, physics engines, and tilemaps, and I invite you to make something rawer yourself next time you make an interactive-whatever-you-make. The game is written in the second-person narrative voice that is so common to IF, so it may not be as naturally revealing as something written in the first person… but making this was cathartic nonetheless.
I hope you don’t hate it!
