Week 1, overworld

This is an edi­tion of Robin Sloan’s video game devel­op­ment diary.

Welcome! I’m very happy to have so many of you along.

I want to say thank you, in particular, to the readers who are not steeped in video games and their devel­op­ment — the readers for whom this newsletter is a bit of a gamble. You’re sure to encounter some jargon you don’t understand, and I want to encourage you to hang in there. This is a rich, fas­ci­nating world, and even my meager foray will, over time, reflect that.

You should, however, feel free to skip the really nerdy parts.

Let’s all just take a moment to appre­ciate the deep wonk­i­ness of the k in the hea­dine at the top of the page … and then dive in.

Last week

I’ll always begin these newslet­ters with a snap­shot of what I’ve got.

Right now, I have got: a pro­to­type game that, although excru­ci­at­ingly minimal, has all the things: a branching story, a map, text pre­sen­ta­tion, audio playback.

You’ll find images of the game, as it exists now, fur­ther down in this newsletter, in the sec­tion about maps. There’s a lot to set up before that, though — this is the inau­gural edi­tion!

The total work

I’ll begin in the most basic way: why make a video game?

The rea­sons overflow. Just like books, video games have been for­ma­tive aes­thetic expe­ri­ences for me, par­tic­u­larly in my youth. For me, media-making has always pro­ceeded like this: I encounter some­thing meaningful; I decide I want to pro­duce my own ver­sion of that some­thing; I learn how to do it. So it’s all reverb, really: impulse reflected back from mate­rial, trans­formed but recognizable. The mate­rial is me.

Deeper, now. Some days — not all, but some — I think video games must cer­tainly be the 21st-century incar­na­tion of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, the “total work of art” that draws upon and inte­grates all other forms. For Wagner, ca. 1849, opera was the Gesamtkunstwerk.

There is a lot in that whole for­mu­la­tion that’s ques­tionable, but I will just plainly confess: for me, its allure is not. In video games, you get to deploy story and prose and graphic design and moving images and music — you get to “play all the keys on the keyboard.” (Is that actu­ally idiomatic? Where is it from?)

Deeper still. Video games offer a kind of “critical infrastruc­ture” com­pa­rable to the kind avail­able to books, music, movies, and (maybe more recently) TV.

Why does this matter?

As you might know, I pro­duce a lot of odd-shaped dig­ital projects; this thread from a fic­tional social network (?!) is a recent representative. I truly love making these things, but/and I am often frus­trated that the only “critical response” avail­able is what I’ve come to think of as the “nod of approval.” I like nods, and I like approval — but I like real engage­ment even more. When you’re pro­ducing work in a genre that con­sists of … only that work … it’s a tall order to expect people to like, invent a whole new way of talking about things … just to talk about your thing.

But simply by calling some­thing a game, you give people the frame­work — the permission — to eval­uate it. To com­pare it with other things. To include it in lists!

You will see, as this project progresses, that it would have been per­fectly rea­son­able to call it “an extremely enhanced e-book” or “a super-duper inter­ac­tive dig­ital story.” I strug­gled with ter­mi­nology for a long time; I am now over it. This is: a video game.

Here’s one more reason to make a video game, entirely persnickety: I believe that almost all video games handle text very very badly. I mean that not in the sense of “prose quality”—which is a whole dif­ferent conversation — but rather in the sense of type­set­ting and text pre­sen­ta­tion. There’s a lot to say about this, and I will, in due course, say it, at per­haps eye-rolling length. For now, I’ll just tell you that, when I play video games, their treat­ment of text frus­trates me, and some­times an upwelling feeling of “you’re doing it wrong!” can be a great motivator.

Sound snack

In each newsletter, I’ll include a bit of the game’s music and its production. The com­poser Jesse Solomon Clark and I share a Dropbox folder, and some­times … 

files just appear … 

with names like gong_bath_2.mov.

(Tap or click the video to unmute it.)

The stack

I know many readers are curious about the tools I’m using. There is a LOT more to say about each of these, but, to start, I’ll just sketch out the stack:

• The game’s core, its branching story, is han­dled by Ink, a format devel­oped by Inkle Stu­dios in the UK. I learned Ink writing for Neo Cab, and I came to really truly love it. In a future newsletter, I’ll explain how it works.

• The pre­sen­ta­tion of text on the screen is han­dled by a simple JavaScript frame­work I built myself, about a year ago. It extends some of the dis­play ideas from my app Fish, but instead of a linear “one text fits all” flow, it plugs into Ink’s branching and weaving.

• The game’s map is han­dled by THREE.js, a flex­ible 3D engine.

As implied by the tools above, this game runs in a web browser. There are a few nice things about this choice.

First: the browser is a really good devel­op­ment environment. There are slick, pow­erful tools for inspecting lay­outs and mea­suring performance. You can bop over to the con­sole at any time and crack open your game’s data struc­tures, even com­pose little test func­tions on the fly. For readers unfa­miliar with programming: it’s like having a live X-ray.

Which is impor­tant, because some­thing is always broken.

Another nice thing: a game that runs in a web browser doesn’t have to be a game that’s dis­trib­uted via the web. You can easily wrap it up as a stand­alone desktop app or even an iPhone app. For pro­grams that aspire to be “like real apps,” this process can be treacherous; for pro­grams like games, which don’t require much beyond a rec­tangle and some col­ored pixels, it’s straightforward. (Some readers will protest: “But your JavaScript won’t run as fast as native code!” Gently, I will remind those readers that I am making a text-centric nar­ra­tive game.) (Then, I’ll mod­erate my snark; there are, in fact, a lot of con­sid­er­a­tions to bal­ance here, and I’ll get into them in future edi­tions.)

The ecstasy of the airship

As this newsletter proceeds, I will spoil basi­cally every­thing about this game. The sen­si­bility here is defin­i­tively “you are working in the studio with me,” not “this is a very long and nerdy movie trailer”

So. Here’s the whole idea behind Perils of the Over­world.

Section of the Final Fan­tasy II over­world map

Classic role playing games almost always fea­ture a mode in which your char­acter is roaming the regions between towns and dun­geons; this zoomed-out macro view is called, by convention, the over­world, and a huge part of the fun of these games is the process by which the over­world opens up to you.

A river roars; you find a bridge. A moun­tain looms; you hunt for the rumored tunnel. The land runs out; you hire a boat.

In the game Final Fan­tasy II, released for the Super Nin­tendo in (could it pos­sibly have been) 1991, there was a moment in which you boarded an air­ship and the over­world dropped into thrilling pix­e­lated perspective. This air­ship opened fresh swaths of the game, revealed whole new continents. At one point, the game asked you to pilot the air­ship into posi­tion over a chasm, then descend into an entire under­ground kingdom.

This feeling of new regions opening up is the soul of over­world, and, by extension, the soul of these games. Maybe I’m pro­jecting a bit; I will just speak for myself: it’s the scale at which I enjoy them. I tol­erate the dun­geons, the mon­sters, the battles … only so I can explore more of the map.

That accounts for “the over­world.” What, then, are the “perils of”?

Section of the Final Fan­tasy II over­world map

The classic struc­ture of an RPG (as well as its fan­tasy novel antecedent) has the char­acter questing across the world, meeting people who have problems, helping them, earning their aid — “please, accept this amulet!”—and pro­ceeding on the quest. But this struc­ture over­looks an impor­tant emo­tional reality:

When you help people, you get attached to them.

In RPGs, it is posited that the urgency of the quest out­weighs your alle­giance to spe­cific people and places. But what if that’s not always true? What if you arrive at a tavern, offer to help out in exchange for room and board, then dis­cover you enjoy the work? What if, thirty years later, you own that tavern?

What does the pas­sage of thirty happy years look like in a video game?

What if, in order to unlock a magic door, you must reforge a leg­endary sword, so you study under a great black­smith … who pulls you aside one day to say, “You have a true talent for this. This town will need a new black­smith soon. I’m leaving for the moun­tains; my father is sick.”

But I’m on a quest, you say.

“So you’ve told me. Here’s what I will tell you: this is impor­tant work. Not the swords; those are for show. I mean the horseshoes. The shovels.”

And you realize you’ve never been hap­pier than you have these past two months; that you do have a talent for it, and that’s a new feeling, isn’t it? So you agree, and take over — and the magic door stays shut.

The idea is that you’ll play Perils of the Over­world over and over, starting fresh each time, an appealing loop. The game will be difficult, in the sense that you will prob­ably lose: your char­acter will, against your best efforts, find a place in the world. But this “game over” won’t be unpleasant. In fact, dis­covering all its dif­ferent ver­sions it will be a large part of the fun.

You are on a quest, and there will be mon­sters and dun­geons in this game — but they won’t ever be what ends it.

These, there­fore, are the true perils of the over­world: the good people in it, and the possibility, every­where you go, of making a real connection.

The map’s question

I’ve often said that my favorite genre of book is simply “the ones with maps in the front.” A map kick­starts the engine of nar­ra­tive even before the story has begun — what a great trick. A map asks: what’s that? How did it get that name? Who lives there?

A map can’t stand alone, of course. Its ques­tions must be answered — some of them, at least. The tan­ta­lizing labels have to get “hydrated” into scenes and stories, or they sit there inert, even a little numbing.

But when map and story work together, the res­o­nance is profound. (This, by the way, is why I am so delighted that my novel Sourdough has a map on its first page. That map depicts the most fan­tas­tical place of all: the San Fran­cisco Bay Area 😝)

Here’s a zoomed-in sec­tion of the uni­versal benchmark. Note well its per­fectly-calibrated style, its rough discursiveness; this map is clearly the project not of a pro­fes­sional car­tog­ra­pher but a stu­dious hobbit:

Map of Middle Earth by Pauline Baynes (I think)

Next, a zoomed-in sec­tion of one of my all-time favorites, the map of Earthsea, drawn by the great one herself, Ursula K. Le Guin:

Map of Earthsea by the best there ever was, Ursula K. Le Guin

Notably, Le Guin drew this map before she knew what most of those loca­tions were, or what they meant. This archipelago’s whis­pered “what’s that?” was there­fore as much a ques­tion to her as to her even­tual readers. Wonderful.

On Twitter, I asked for images of people’s favorite maps, and Eric Carrasco’s reply jogged a deep memory. His favorite is a favorite of mine, too: the map of Lloyd Alexander’s Pry­dain drawn by Eva­line Ness.

Map of Pry­dain by Eva­line Ness

In terms of landmarks, this map of Pry­dain is a bit scant, but, in fairness: Pry­dain is a bit scant. It is the map’s graphic severity that grabs me — the flat checker­board of those castles. Fabulous.

A minimalist, mono­chrome map seems like a good place to start. Here’s a snap­shot of my cur­rent POTO pro­to­type; it looks like shit, but/and, that’s the point. In a month we’ll flip back to this edi­tion of the newsletter and go “oh WOW can you believe how far we’ve come??”

But of course: this isn’t just paper. It’s a screen, and there’s a 3D model lurking behind the glass. So we can do things … like this 😉

All the themes

Above, I dwelled a bit on the video game Final Fan­tasy II, which was utterly for­ma­tive for me — just a half-step below my most beloved books. This was also true for my friend Matt Thompson, whose deep appre­ci­a­tion of FFII has lin­gered in my mind for many years. He has a way of talking about it, a way of framing it … so, as I was thinking about this newsletter, I mes­saged Matt and asked him if he had a moment to reca­pit­u­late that appre­ci­a­tion.

He replied with this single, multi-paragraph, essay-quality text mes­sage:

FFIV (for us purists) was the first time I ever got the power of epic storytelling. As the story progressed, it just lay­ered on theme after myth­ical theme, using every new char­acter as an oppor­tu­nity to explore some of the deepest chal­lenges of humanity. That sounds grandiose, but it’s true. The story begins with Cecil, the Dark Knight, on a quest to become a Paladin, a war­rior of light, after he real­izes he was fighting for a fallen king. Cecil’s efforts at redemp­tion are thwarted by his best friend, Kain (not Abel, natch), who betrays him at his lowest moment, leaving him to certain doom.

After his first boss battle against an ice dragon, we learn that he’s made an orphan of a little girl, Rydia, by slaying her were-mother, who was only trying to pro­tect her. She tran­scends her trauma by becoming a pow­erful black mage who needs no pro­tection, able to summon her mother’s avatar in battle.

We meet the star-crossed lovers, Edward and Anna, whose father Tellah fears Edward, a mere bard, won’t be able to pro­vide for her, and con­spires to keep them apart. Little does he know that Edward is secretly the heir to a desert kingdom. But Edward and Tellah learn that nei­ther love nor money can pro­tect Anna, whose death at the hands of the final boss spurs Tellah to learn the spell that will end him and the boss at once: Meteo. Ulti­mate evil can of course only be van­quished by ultimate love.

Then there’s Palom and Porom, the chipper young twins who sac­ri­fice them­selves for their friends, earning honor and a sort of immor­tality by becoming for­ever entombed in stone.

Love, hatred, guilt, innocence, sac­ri­fice, betrayal, mortality, immor­tality, art, money, redemp­tion … It was the first story I loved that took on all the themes, char­acter by char­acter, vignette by vignette, and built a coherent world out of them. It was so satisfying. Better than the MCU.

A few min­utes passed, and another mes­sage appeared:

Oh wait, I almost forgot, the char­acters go to the frickin moon. So throw that in there while we’re at it.

Next week

After a week of wiring com­po­nents together and con­juring crude graphics, I can’t pro­cras­ti­nate any longer: I have to write the first draft of the first sec­tion of the game. As part of that work, I’ll pro­duce the first ver­sion of a world­building document. Mine will be more Le Guin than Tolkien: ques­tions, not answers.

Here we go! Thanks for reading. You’ll be playing this game before long.

From Oakland,

Robin

This has been an edi­tion of my video game devel­op­ment diary, sent by email every few weeks. You can subscribe: