Making Games

[post from my DW from March 2023]

Last night I played Transformation, a horror solo RPG from Absurdist Productions. The designer is Will Thompson; the game was written by Will Thompson & David Thomas. It's about you (the player character) becoming a monster (the game is up front that you WILL become a monster, as written), and how it affects your relationship with a companion.

In principle, I should have loved this. I'm in a horror mood right now (reading the manga Blood on the Tracks and the webtoon Delusion by Hongjacga - thanks to inkstone for the recs!). This RPG lists The Fly and Alien and Kafka's Metamorphosis as some of its influences. Yet the one playthrough I tried fell flat, and I'm disinclined to try another. To be fair, this might be me - I love the concept of solo RPGs (Takuma Okada's Alone Among the Stars, Tim Hutchings' Thousand Year Old Vampire) but have generally found them tricky to actually play and enjoy.

Play runs off a standard poker deck (no jokers) and whatever journaling materials you choose; the game assumes a written experience, but aside from a bit of recordkeeping, there's no reason you couldn't record this into your phone or whatever.

There's a minor bit of setup: a shuffled pile of clubs (to generate randomized transformations), a shuffled pile of spades (randomized events), and diamonds/hearts (the red cards, to generate the outcomes of daily challenges).

Mechanically, your two resources are Mementos (ties to your humanity) and Bonds (ties to your character's companion). The story explores both your character's loss of humanity and how it may strain your relationship with the companion. Rather wisely, the game advises you not to base the companion character on a real-world person and provides an appendix with a random companion generator. (I'm lazy, so I just ran Jedao One as the main character and Jedao Two as the companion. On another occasion, I might have run my default character, Maratai, dating back to my college L5R days, with some randomly generated companion.)

After some setup (deciding on your setting and circumstances within the provided guidelines), this runs as sort of a gamebook/solo RPG hybrid. For example, after determining Day 1's transformation (draw a club), you draw a club to figure out which Event you're sent to, which itself will have one of a few possible outcomes.

Mostly, the thing that didn't quite work for me is that there was a little too much mechanical machinery compared to the actual gameplay I got out of it. Some of this was just bad luck - I only got three game days (so, three choices) worth of gameplay before I hit an ending, which left me feeling like I'd done all this setup in order to...not get very much out of it? And to be fair, this is something that can happen with gamebooks/CYOAs generally. I remember playing the Fighting Fantasy gamebook Chasms of Malice, which was notorious for terrible design relying on five zillion Test Your Luck sequences that made it almost impossible to survive, to say nothing of classic Choose Your Own Adventure books that were so short that, depending on the structure, you might hit a BAD END in a couple of choices anyway. And the brevity of the game in pagecount (under 90 pages), combined with the difficulty of creating depth in branching narrative (see By the Numbers: How to Write a Long Interactive Novel That Doesn’t Suck from Choice Of Games for a discussion of combinatorial explosion and narrative depth), means that it would be difficult to achieve “long” stories anyway.

I like the idea of the mechanics, especially the two types of anchors to humanity, but (again, partly due to chance) my play experience was so short I didn't really get to see them highlighted much.

That said, there are parts of the design that are really well done. This is horror, and the designer and writers make it clear it's not suitable for children. (I think a teen who enjoys horror could play this no problem, speaking as the parent of a now-college student who played Doki Doki Literature Club in middle school, but everyone's different.) So yes, a certain amount of horror is baked in, but they do include superscripts to denote seven categories of content so you can skip/change/avoid it if you prefer:

1. Body image issue
2. Animal harm or death
3. Intimate violence
4. Self-harm or suicide
5. Mental illness
6. Physical illness
7. Abduction

I have a vague recollection of running across some of this content in play and also just skating by it; when I play horror I’m hoping for this stuff! But yes, I see why the “don’t model the companion character after your BFF” is in there given that you might do Horrible Things do the companion and some players might find that upsetting.

Because I’m me, I went ahead and skimmed the entire game after my one playthrough. There are some neat possible events and endings, and I think if I could be guaranteed of a longer play experience this could have been more fun. That said, there are a lot of interesting ideas here and I will look out for more in the future.

Side note: the game notes (both on the website and within the print game itself) that some background images were created with MidJourney, but future projects will not use AI art.

ETA: Oh, in case you're curious - Jedao One grew a fish tail and ran off into the wilderness, leaving Jedao Two to shed One Perfect Tear. Presumably Jedao One spent the rest of his days in some lake as the Loch Ness monster MER JEDAO. I am afraid I found this much more hilarious than actually horrifying. :p

[cross-post from my DW from 2022-07-31]

I played radiantfracture's solo journaling game You Are a Beacon, which I highly recommend. You are a lighthouse keeper preparing for a storm. I went in a more eldritch direction than the prompts actually call for, because I was in that kind of mood, but the game permits that flexibility.

Example prompts: "You hear a strange musical sound among your tiny grove of trees. What is its source?" and "Pages flutter down from an empty sky OR A flock of tiny birds swarms the island."

This game achieves the rare balance of having prompts that are genuinely evocative while giving the player enough freedom to shape their journaling/game experience. I often find that with solo/journaling RPGs either the prompts are so loose I resent the amount of work I have to do (being a writer is my DAY JOB, and a game that feels like my job is often not fun), while on the other end of the scale you have CYOA/gamebook experiences where everything is very constrained by the existing text. Anyway, for me the balance was exactly perfect.

I especially enjoyed the way the (poker) card deck is prepared and "stacked" to ensure a probability curve as to when certain events show up. The table was clear and easy to read (I don't know how it works for people with, say, screen-readers though), and I'm genuinely pleased with the story I came up with and am considering recycling elements of it elsewhere.