T w e n t y S i d e d

There’s almost nothing in the way of story in the game, although it’s not for lack of ideas.

My original idea – which you can still sort of see scraps of here and there – was for an insane world. Since “robots go haywire and kill humans” is such an ever-present trope in fiction, I wanted to create a silly world where the reality was just as common as the trope. A world where homicidal robots were just a fact of life. A world where the solution to killer robots is to build more robots to protect you from the killer robots, and then when those go haywire you get more to protect you from them, and so on, until the air is thick with robo-warfare. The companies that make the robots are terrible at engineering, and the people are all mindless consumers with no sense of self-preservation.

This wasn’t intended to be some heavy-handed social commentary on consumerism or anything. It was really just an excuse to make “crazy robot” jokes and gently poke fun at well-worn genre tropes.

It’s a bit like Saints Row The Third, where the player is encouraged to not feel bad for the idiot civilians they run over, since they’re all shallow and stupid. In Saints Row, people vapidly worship the endlessly destructive, mass-murdering gang. So when they die it’s not an injustice, but comeuppance. Maybe throw in a dash of “Everyone is insane” from Borderlands.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Good Robot Postmortem #3: Story”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

My original design for the game was “2D Descent”. That was the core inspiration for the project: Bright colors, electronic music, shooting lasers at crazy robots in caves. But this design wasn’t working. I didn’t know how to fix it and I was worried I was too close to the project to be able to analyze the thing objectively.

Lots of people offered advice. I had a dozen different, completely contradictory suggestions on how the game might be fixed. Everyone was happy to tell me how to fix the game by making a completely different game, but if I couldn’t realize my own vision then I probably wasn’t qualified to build theirs either. My original vision didn’t work out, and I didn’t know where to go next.

One of the key problems was that I’d never really worked out a proper fail state for the game. I had the moment-to-moment stuff down, but the win / lose states were undefined. If you died you’d just respawn, BioShock-style. It’s not that I thought having a game with no lose state was a good idea, it’s that I’d just never settled on a particular system.

How should death work? Maybe like Borderlands, where you’re taxed 10% of your money / XP when you respawn? Maybe like Dark Souls, where you drop all of your money / XP when you die, but can recover it? Maybe like Pac-Man, where you have a fixed number of deaths before a game over? Maybe like a modern game, where death reloads the last checkpoint? I fiddled with all of these and a few other ideas, but none of them really jumped out as the “correct” solution.

I guess early in the project I sort of assumed the answers to these sorts of questions would become obvious as the game took shape. I expected mechanics to “click” into place, but that never happened. I had a dozen different directions the game could go in and I didn’t have a good sense of which way was best. I was paralyzed by choice. I realized I could spend the rest of my life prototyping stuff without ever moving any closer to my goal.

And so the project stalled.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Good Robot Postmortem #2: Gameplay”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.