This quarter, I split my independent study units across two games: Space Game (title in progress) with Krystal, Leyth, and Lucas, and Ngoc, and Loose Lips, which had some units split across another course, FEMGEN 95.
Space Game is a party game (or, lovingly, a “friendslop” game) with two distinct gameplay loops: planetary exploration with flying, shooting enemies, and resource-gathering, and interior ship driving based on asymmetrical communication and information. I mainly focused on the interior ship components, such as layout, inventory tracking and consumption, UI elements, and system-wide factors such as energy (analogous to health, but I won’t go too far into detail) and raw chemical components that are extracted from the resources collected in the ship-driving gameplay loop. Overall, the biggest hurdles encountered this quarter was wrapping my head around all the different factors Networked Objects introduce, and also working with a larger team where discussions about implementation strategy, overall design and approaches, and cohesion are much more damaging if there’s a miscommunication.
Space Game is a long-term, massive project that we started ideation on this quarter, and planned a 20-week development timeframe to last over two quarters. It is currently a rather large codebase, but I think that based on the hurdles overcome already and the overhead with setting aside design documents, discussing the game’s theory and concept, and then delving into manager structure, sets us in an excellent position to complete the project, with playtest adjustment, by the end of spring. Even thus far, the amount of knowledge I’ve gained toying with the networking libraries and thinking about server and client operations is something I’m glad I’ve been able to explore, and really the main purpose of choosing a multiplayer game for independent study. It’s been rough at times, but very satisfying when things work out.
As for Loose Lips, this is a single-player war-era complicity working simulator where players must censor letters of members of their military base, reading them. The title comes from the phrase “Loose Lips Sink Ships,” and the propaganda posters of the US during war, but also relates to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” story-wise. It is inherently queer in nature, with the key thesis and narrative scope surrounding soldiers sending letters, with a particular soldier sending love letters with flowery language, and (decreasingly subtle) hints that the relationship is queer. Applying Sarah Chess’s ideas from “Play Like a Feminist,” the game was primarily act in the narrative center, taking a monotonous task such as reading letters (similar to Papers, Please) as the central narrative framework, lulling the player into a false sense of submission, and then adding strong narrative elements that represent oppression of minorities similar to that of the rise of fascism, where the player must make a stance in their complicity at the risk of their own safety. While this game was imagined for FEMGEN 95 (Feminist Games Studio), I want to continue with the game in the future, as my final deliverable for that class was a series of design documents, rather than a proper implementation/MVP prototype.
For Loose Lips, I started development in Unity before fully-fleshing out what I wanted from the game, and ultimately decided that Ren’Py or a much more text-heavy engine that still allows for clickable operations would be best. As such, most of my technical work is deprecated, but I enjoyed the design decisions and narrative writing that I was able to implement for this game. I would not be surprised if the narrative text in this game exceeds that of my 377G P2, which as Amy Lo knows, was rather long. This was actually in response to my natural intuition to be to overplan things and then have to rush to achieve a technical deliverable. However in this case, the key gameplay mechanic (actively highlighting text to remove it, making each work a tokenized object that needs to be considered) ended up being needlessly difficult to implement in Unity, so I decided to pivot engines. I’ll take this as confirmation that my overplanning, on average, yields better results, and never rush in to technical implementation again: fool me once…
Overall, Loose Lips consumed a lot of my time this quarter, and I have a 40-page design document with the result. You don’t have to read it, as it was also my final deliverable for FEMGEN 95, but hey, at least I have some proof that I didn’t just fool around all quarter. Note that this was a multi-tab Google Doc, so the formatting is a bit off in sections, and each section has a title page. It contains an overview, a core narrative script, core letters, the “rulebook” players receive (which has narrative value and implications) and then some art assets and art direction files (special thanks to Krystal for making a lot of the assets! GOAT).
CS399 Loose Lips Design DocumentsDownload
Overall, this quarter was fun! I was able to work on a lot of technical implementation exceeding what I’ve done in the past, and I was satisfied at my ability to learn and adapt. Next quarter, I plan to continue working on Space Game with the team, while still working on Loose Lips… but I might also have something else cooking with Lucas and Noe; I’m a spiteful person, and there just may be an opportunity that would replace Loose Lips for my immediate attention, but we’ll see how that turns out… With only 1 quarter left at Stanford, I want to end it with a bang!
