Outcry

How to Play

Play the role of an "Open Outcry" trader on the floor of a commodities market. Use their special (real) hand signals to fill your clients' orders in a crowded loud trading floor.!

Controls

WASD & Mouse - Movement

Space - Jump

Mouse wheel (or number keys) - select trade amount

Shift - Toggle buying or selling

Credits

No AI was used for art, music, writing, or thinking. I used Claude and Gemini for research/debugging.
Art - tracing my hands and historical photos, level modeled in Blender
Sounds -Free sounds from Pixaby
Music
https://pixabay.com/music/synthwave-synthwave-retro-80s-491697/
https://pixabay.com/music/synthwave-a-hero-of-the-80s-126684/

Discussion/Devlog

This game was wildly hard to make fun. I think I learned a lot about game design from just trying and failing at so many different approaches.

Ideas that didnt work
- Market has a price and all the traders are rapidly flashing signals for prices spread around that - overwhelming
- Traders are already flashing quantity signals and you have to go fill an order. Initially too easy because you could buy from anyone (partial orders were allowed). Then too hard, because you were hunting for both a good price and the right quantity, and you might just be stuck
- You need to match the exact quantity but you can punch and kiss the trader to make them sell more or less - mentally overwhelming
- Call and response minigame to make an order - not fun
- Keep your mouse in the circle minigame to secure an order (simulating getting traders attention) - super not fun
- No orders, just buy low and sell high - created opportunities for turbo arbitrage by just selling among members of the pit
- Same but with a bid/ask spread built in - suddenly boring, nothing to do

So many ideas ended up with just sitting there waiting, or with 100 symbols flashing in your face and taking way too long to parse out. The thing that helped was relaxing my attachment to the real life subject (so many hand signals) and letting the hand signals be more of the "fiction" or fantasy of the game instead of the core mechanic. I rewatched the videos of the traders and thought about how what really feels cool is slinging hand signals, not parsing other peoples'. That's the motivation for this last iteration of the game. I really did want to add a mechanic where you can get in fistfights with traders when you have an out-trade.

The other big thing was taming randomness. I feel like I had a bit of an epiphany here! Games are fiction! They have only the rules we say they have! Initially I used perlin noise to simulate the stock moves and traders randomly picked quantities. That was very very bad, you could have a bunch of orders where all the prices were too high, or no traders offering the trade you wanted. Then I realized I could bring the market to the player: when the player picks up an order, the market's baseline price moves towards that order price. It still varies, but it is varying around the order price now. Same for the traders. They know what you're looking for, and there's a 50-50 chance they will offer the side (buy sell) you need plus a further 50 50 chance they will offer the quantity you need. Between them all the probability of not seeing the trade you need is quite low (not zero but oh well).

Cutting room floor ideas
- Ability to punch other traders if they made an out trade
- Some kind of rivalry system, if a trader keeps getting the better of you they become your rival
- Going to the bathroom to "powder your nose" for some kind of slo mo powerup
- I wanted a much more bustling trading floor, with lots of faces, palette swapping the clothing colors and skin tones
- A house that filled up with all your purchases (eg ferrari in the garage)

For Nerds: Documentary on open outcry at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0DxNDU1xW8