Arrival post-mortem
Stephen Granade
they invite designers whose games have just been released to discuss them.
The designers seem more than happy to perform an autopsy on their game and
talk about their successes and misses. I like the idea, and I especially
like the imagery of a released game as something which has inexplicably
died, so I thought I'd run with it.
If you haven't played Arrival and you don't want the experience spoiled by
the sight of its messy innards dissected on the newsgroup, please skip
this message. Never fear--you can always retrieve it through the wonder
that is DejaNews.
---== The Setup ==---
The number one question people tend to ask is, "Where do you get your
ideas?" (Okay, they don't actually ask *me* that question, but other
writers/designers tell me it's a popular question.) You'd probably be
better off asking Andrew, Adam C., or Christopher Huang that question,
because the idea for Arrival came from a pretty mundane source: I can't
draw.
See, when I found out about HTML TADS, I thought, "This is really neat.
Boy, would I ever love to make a graphical game." I put a blank sheet of
paper on my desk, titled it "My First HTML TADS Game," and stared at it.
I ended up staring at it on and off for about a week. Other than the
title, the page stayed blank. I didn't want to start planning a game until
I had decided what kind of graphics I was going to use since, if I were
going to make a game with graphics, I'd have to come up with said
graphics. Somehow.
For a while I thought of making black-and-white stick figures. Hey, I can
draw stick-figures like nobody's business. Unfortunately, no stick-figure
story suggested itself. At the end of the week, I had come to the
conclusion that I was permanently stymied by my inability to draw any
better than an eight-year-old.
In hindsight, it seems glaringly obvious: make my protagonist match my
drawing skills. If only I had paid $70 for that time machine, I could have
saved myself a week's worth of brainstorming.
I have a vivid recollection of me at age eight, daydreaming about what
would happen if aliens ever crashed in my backyard. In half of the
daydreams, the aliens were good and kind and, out of gratitude for the
help I gave them, anointed me President of the Universe. (The fact that
the office of President of the Universe was probably an elected one never
crossed my mind.) In the other half, I saved the world from the horrible
alien menace.
This seemed like as good an idea as any, and better than some. I decided
that saving the world from aliens was much more fun than just helping them
out. To top it off, I decided to give myself some extra wiggle room by
deliberately setting out to make a B-grade sci fi game. Bad pictures?
Goofy special effects? It's...deliberate. Yeah, that's it. Besides, I
hadn't written a just-for-fun game in a while, and this seemed like a good
chance to create one.
I was most likely influenced by a strange mix of Mystery Science Theatre
3000, Calvin and Hobbes, and any film directed by Mr. Corman. The only
event in Arrival taken more-or-less directly from my childhood was the
comment about knocking the mortar off of bricks. Ever done that? I spent a
summer doing that for my dad in order to save up enough money to buy one
of those inflatable rafts. Despite saying "never again," I found myself
*again* knocking mortar off of bricks this summer, only for my own
apartment instead of for my parents' house.
---== Beginning Implementation ==---
On the first day, I made my best and worst design decisions back-to-back.
The good decision: I decided to implement Arrival as a straight text
adventure before adding whiz-bang graphics. I didn't plan any of the
graphics or sounds when I started. As I went along, I noted down objects,
scenes, and events which I thought should be illustrated and then got back
to the writing and programming.
The bad decision: I did very little initial planning and design. Hey, it's
a short demo, right? I'm going to do this in two months and release it
long before the competition. I mean, I just want to slap something
together. Who needs serious planning for something like this?
Geez. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Skipping the initial design steps didn't
permanently cripple Arrival, but it made my task much harder and resulted
in a game which wasn't quite what it could have been. You can skimp on the
design for a game this size and get by, but it's more work overall.
All I did before coding was make a rough layout of the spaceship and plan
the ending puzzle. Everything else was done off-the-cuff.
The only item of interest (to me, at least) in the inital coding was my
decision to break the fourth wall in order to keep the player from going
south in the living room. I didn't want the house just to consist of a
hallway, a kitchen, and a living room, but I also didn't want the player
wandering around the house--the action is supposed to center on the aliens
and the backyard. Since I was already going for over-the-top silliness,
why not throw in an occasional sarcastic narrator who doesn't mind
breaking the fourth wall?
---== NPC Interaction ==---
I've never felt comfortable with NPC design. Do I make them respond to
items and objects? Should I use a branching tree conversational system?
Should I keep the player from talking to them at all? This ambivalence
tends to manifest itself in strange ways in my games--people with no
mouths, people who are pets, people who are only a head, etc.
My approach in Arrival was a bit uneven. Initially you only interacted
with Zigurt and Floban twice: once at the beginning, and then again when
you brought them the things they wanted. Mom and dad sat in the living
room doing nothing. It wasn't until one of my beta-testers pointed it out
that I realized that Arrival was lifeless.
So I slapped on some more NPC interaction. Mom and dad became more active
once I introduced the "getting them out of the room" puzzle--more on that
in a moment. I added two key bits to Zigurt and Floban. One, I let you
watch them get the cap back off the tylenol bottle. Originally they
vanished into the aether, then returned with an open pill bottle. Two, I
gave them responses to every item in the ship's hold.
---== Puzzles ==---
Some of the Arrival puzzles I like. Some of them I don't.
Filling the gas tank with water is just this side of unreasonable. I
wanted the player to have to make a lateral shift--the aliens are
described as disliking water; they want rock salt to dehydrate; and, gee,
look at this, I have a garden hose and access to the fuel tank.
Unfortunately, most people just tried to wet the aliens down with the
hose.
Closing the pill bottle to get the translation book is, while not
well-motivated, the puzzle I am most satisfied with. There is no time
limit. You can experiment. You cannot get into an unwinnable state while
fiddling with it. The timing elements aren't too difficult and do not
require the use of restore or undo. Unfortunately, that puzzle is
completely unnecessary.
The "get your parents out of the living room" puzzle is evil. It was added
in long after the rest of the game was nominally finished, and it shows.
The puzzle initially appears hard to time correctly; if you hang around in
the kitchen, mom will send you directly to your room; you can only tell
dad once about the lights. In the next version, should you hang around the
kitchen, Mom will say that she'll send you to your room after she's done
cleaning up, and it'll take her much longer to clean up. You will also be
able to tell dad about the lights more than once, and each time he'll go
to the backyard. Granted, these changes won't make the puzzle a good one,
but it will make it a passable one.
---== HTML Stuff ==---
I don't do a lot of fancy HTML formatting in Arrival. The two big flashy
HTML things I did were the compass rose and the web page. For the web page
I looked around, found some pages which I thought were goofy, and stole
elements from several of them. The compass rose I did using a table and a
lot of trial and error. (compass.t coming soon to a GMD near you.)
I learned HTML by looking at people's web pages, so I can't really
recommend any books. If you're writing an HTML TADS game, don't sweat it
too much. Know how to use image tags and some of the basic text mark-up
tags and you should be set. HTML TADS games aren't web pages, so don't go
too crazy.
---== Organic Growth ==---
A lot of Arrival grew like The Blob on speed. Since I didn't do much
initial design, I had to apply a lot of spackle and grout later. Some of
the cracks showed more than others. See which of the following you caught:
The obsession with cleaning items slowly grew over the course of writing
the game. First I had the player clean dishes. Then I needed a way to keep
the player from wanting to open the Weber. Then it blossomed from there,
until it seemed like all Kid thought about was cleaning stuff.
Originally the exam room was just for fun. When I decided to let you see
how Zigurt and Floban opened the tylenol bottle, I decided that they'd
most logically (!) use the exam room tools.
At first, the aliens just asked for rock salt. Then I thought it'd be
funny if one of the aliens (Floban, as it turned out) had a predilection
for processed snack cakes. Finally, I added the Precious Moments doll. The
knick-knacks had always been in the living room, and the aliens' hold had
always been stuffed with kitsch, so it made sense that they'd want more.
"Beauty is in the eye of the alien" and all that.
While the map of the ship was planned from the beginning, the compass rose
in the status bar was added two days before the competition. I'm not sure
I'm pleased with it, and I'd be interested in knowing how many people made
it go away ten seconds after they started playing.
As mentioned, the "get your parents out of the living room" puzzle was a
latecomer to the party.
---== Pseudonym ==---
A few words on my choice of a pseudonym.
Arrival is very different from _Losing Your Grip_, probably my best-known
work. In part I was afraid that people would come to Arrival expecting a
smaller version of _Grip_. I was also interested to see how people would
react to the game if they had few preconceptions about the author at all
going in.
The name "Samantha Clark" is in honor of two of my relatives.
---== Random Thoughts ==---
Zigurt and Floban look like they do because of the particular difficulty
of working with generic Play-Doh. I wanted the aliens to be strongly
associated with color. When deciding what they would look like, I asked
myself, "What shapes can I reasonably make with generic Play-Doh that
tends to dry out quickly?" The ball was my obvious first choice. Floban
almost looked like a giant snake ("Hey, these are easy!"), until I decided
that a snake with tentacles was way too Freudian for such a light-hearted
game.
The graphics turned out better than I could have ever imagined. My
favorite is the picture of Zigurt and Floban shooting out the backyard
light. Every time I see Zigurt hefting that Han Solo blaster, I get the
giggles.
I'm also extremely pleased with the opening conversation involving Kid,
Zigurt, and Floban. I rewrote that scene over and over, occasionally
pacing about the apartment and muttering bits of dialog to myself.
I wanted the player to have a semi-specific personality, but not lock the
player into a specific gender. I toyed with giving the player an ambiguous
name, but finally decided that calling the player Kid all the time was a
reasonable solution and fit with the mood of the game.
Having someone run around with two pie plates dangling from a string while
you take pictures is a lot of fun.
The biggest disappointment of the game for me was mom and dad. They had
such promise, but I didn't do much with them. Bad author. Bad! Bad!
The fact that I have now placed fourth in two competitions has not been
lost on me. What this fact signifies is open to interpretation.
One of my beta-testers suggested that I discourage people from playing
Arrival unless they could see the pictures. I was tempted, but my
overweening need for everyone to play my game won out.
Something I had not expected was how Zigurt and Floban would become real
to me. At first they were fairly generic B-movie aliens. Then they started
developing separate personalities, until each of them had a distinctive
manner to them. Zigurt was the more stable, mature one, while Floban was
more flighty and easily upset. Floban was, of course, the Mission
Commander--alien bureaucracies are no more competent than human ones.
That's it, really. For the most part, I was very happy with how Arrival
turned out, its flaws to the nonce.
Stephen
--
Stephen Granade | Interested in adventure games?
sgra...@phy.duke.edu | Visit Mining Co.'s IF Page
Duke University, Physics Dept | http://interactfiction.miningco.com
Doeadeer3
You might review my review in rgif, I just managed to post it.
Of course, I haven't finished the game yet, so it probably isn't detailed
enough for what you want.
Doe :-) I am hoping to get to it this weekend it's on the top of my list.
Doe doea...@aol.com (formerly known as FemaleDeer)
****************************************************************************
"In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane." Mark Twain
Jonadab the Unsightly One
> If you haven't played Arrival and you don't want the experience spoiled by
> the sight of its messy innards dissected on the newsgroup, please skip
> this message. Never fear--you can always retrieve it through the wonder
> that is DejaNews.
> I was most likely influenced by a strange mix of Mystery Science Theatre
> 3000, Calvin and Hobbes,
Fiddlesticks.
I was going to resist the temptation to start playing any more games
until I either finish one of the ones I've started playing or else
finish writing one myself. But now I have to look at this one.
- jonadab