Try Again: another text-based Postmortem

 

Bit of an obvious start to a post mortem for a game with this name, but... I tried... again. I'll not get ahead of myself, though.

⚠ Try Again is a narrative game, spoilers ahead. ⚠

The Theme

Wake up. Check phone. Delay The Inevitable. A couple of ideas came to me, ones that perhaps better fit the theme, but when my thoughts went to Groundhog Day and Russian Doll in a cyberpunk setting I suddenly found myself feeling excited.

I knew I'd go solo this time, as LD50 kinda snuck up on us, and my usual partner in crime @daanvanyperen needed a relaxing weekend away from developing software for a living rather than developing software for a hobby as well. When I go solo, I make something in Twine, because that's as far as my coding abilities extend.

The Plan

The concept probably fits the Stuck In A Loop theme of my previous LD47 solo entry Confined better: Groundhog-day your way through a criminal collect-and-drop-off, dying along the way, but getting to do it over again until you inevitably die a final time. I suppose this is a continuation of thoughts I was having back then.

The Grind

I initially thought of it as a side-mission in a big AAA title open world game, which helped me imagine a structure for the story. I started outlining and while trying to look for brief outlines of movies I was familiar with, I ran into a Feature Film Story Outline Structure at
openscreenplay.com. The 12 sections mentioned lined up pretty well with what I had written down so far, so I dropped 12 nodes in Twine and put in my little section summaries:

Chapter 4: Protagonist sets out to deliver, moving through the city and interacting. Chance to get “he’s no rat” after interacting with Lil Criminal.

(She's not so Lil in the actual game.)

From there on I started writing the story from the start, adding little branching segments and choices that set variables that will be referred to later. This process took the full three days of the jam, only interrupted by music and a lot of fiddling with stylesheets... well, and work. And sleep. Some food. You get the idea.

layout.png

The Look

I'd played around with the CSS for LD47's Confined, so I knew what I could do to lift this entry from the Twine standard look. I took a look at various Cyberpunk-style UIs by googling Cyberpunk UI and settled on a font called Teko from Google Fonts and a red/blue color scheme.

The Music

I had received two comments on Confined that people would've liked music while they play, so I made a quick Synthwave track just bouncing around A minor's i, iv, VI and v chords, plopping in a genre-distinct 8th note bass pattern and two different melodic synth patterns over top, in an ABAB structure.

I absolutely drenched it in lowfi effects (Tape MELLO-FI and DAW Cassette) and various saturation plugins (Burier and GSatPlus). I tweaked it a little on the second day, adding some automation on bandpass and highpass filters to create some motion and a little bit of detail with some drum fills, a subtle riser and some soft, glitchy crashes.

https://soundcloud.com/flaterectomy/try-again-synthwave-theme

The Regrets

All in all, I am pleased with the result. But I absolutely have regrets, in order of most important to least important below:

1. Lack of agency

I started off with several choices that I wanted to reflect later on in the game. Take a pill to cure your hangover, or keep it for (someone else) later? Take a shower? Sleep away the headache? These choices pretty much stop there, save for one opportunity where you can choose to answer or ignore a call from your handler, but that only gets reflected in a single bonus sentence in a later call with him. I was simply hoping to have time to add more of these things as I worked through the story from start to finish, but that is not how Ludum Dare works.

2. Getting the music to play

I added the music through some javascript, but it required me to allow the page to play music in Firefox and some of my friends who did some testing reported they couldn't even detect any option to allow sound on their systems. I added an MP3 link in my title screen so people could download it and listen, but I realize not many people would do that. I put the song up on SoundCloud after a few days and linked to it on my ldjam.com game page, just to give people another simple option. I really should've investigated how to get it to play without putting the burden on the player.

3. An actual bigger picture

⚠ Big spoilers below. ⚠

The story is pretty open-ended. You die at the end, but the only reason the loop gets broken is that you save two people, simply out of order than how it's presented in game. Let the first person die, save the second person and die, so you may save the first person again in the next loop after which you die having done some good deeds. I feel this reveal at the end is a little weak, and could've used some supporting foreshadowing earlier on.

The other big picture regret is that I set up several characters, histories and ongoing mysteries that do not get resolved. Now I don't mind that I have written questions that I don't answer in the story, but I also haven't answered them to myself. I honestly do not know what these characters will do, who they are, or what's going on. As I wrote the story, I wanted the player to get into something bigger than their own little adventure. A mysterious and powerful stranger offers help when the player is in deep shit, but needs help in return: an innocent woman needs rescuing and is familiar with this stranger. As I was writing it, I wanted to know the answers... But I don't know them (yet).

The End

As always, time runs out. Right now I don't think I will continue this story. The loop has been broken, our friendly courier is dead. The bigger picture is a different story, but without a reason to write it I don't think I will. That said, I am working in a concept album based on the story of LD47's Confined right now, so who knows--I might just... try again.

If you made it this far, maybe you should play Try Again and see if anything I said makes sense.