Excellent game Montoli... I love these meta-commentary things. I posted a thread about it recently and I'd love to hear how you approached the idea and the process for executing on it. SUPER COOL.
I'm glad you liked it!
I can talk a little bit about the writing process. [edit: Apparently I can talk for AGES about the process. Warning, wall of text about process incoming...]
The basic original idea was just "Groundhog day: The dating sim." I thought the flow would be something like this:
- Try playing
- Lose a lot
- Play groundhog day tricks and feel clever
- still lose a lot anyway
- Realize death is inevitable, even with foreknowledge
- go back to the first option "don't have a date at all" and realize that it's not a bad ending after all - it's the best ending.
- pick that, and quit.
That seemed easy enough to write. I'd just write a couple of awkward conversations in restaurants, followed by some over-the-top death scenes, and call it a day. It would be a game about lowering your expectations. Realizing that something you initially dismissed as a bad-ending was actually the good-ending. I liked that, and felt like it had a good symmetry.
But then when I started writing it out, I realized that I had a bunch more I wanted to say. I REALLY wanted to expand on the conversation where you've told Felicia "hey, the world isn't real, you're not real", and the two of you had a chance to talk through what that meant for both of you. That seemed like an interesting conversation to me. They touched on it in Groundhog Day (which as you might imagine, I liked a lot) when Bill Murray tried to explain it, but Andie MacDowell never really believed it. (Which worked really well for that movie, since it helped to underscore just how alone Bill Murray was, but loneliness wasn't really what I was going for.)
I wanted to have that scene, except where she actually believes it and comes to terms with it, and tries to help think through it and brainstorm ways to use it. So I knew I needed more than my initial outline.
But then when I started actually WRITING that part, I realized I needed more endings too. Because I tried to keep it honest - Any time I could think of a logical problem or interesting implication, I made sure Felicia brought it up. (My basic writing pattern for Felicia was just to think about the last thing that was said, and decided how
I would respond to that, and have her basically say that.) And in the process of doing this, I realized that there were a few more implications than I had thought at first. Once I got into the flow of writing Felicia, she would just start suggesting things, and I had to leave them in, because they were good points. And some of them suggested other ways out.
This was confirmed when I tried play-testing it with some of my friends - Twinbeard got to play it first, and actually did exactly what I had hoped, and went back to the beginning, picked the "let's not go on a date" option, and then quit. But later play-testers did other things. One suggested that they almost felt like they should decompile the files and change the ending manually. One just quit and walked away while Felicia was musing about stories, but complained that it was hard, and they expected the game to give them more of a "push" to leave. Etc.
Around this point, I realized that everyone was reaching different conclusions about what they needed for closure. And I realized that trying to magically guide everyone to the same ending through my inexperienced writing was probably a long shot. So I went for the other approach: Every time someone suggested how they wished it could end - I made the game give nudges in that direction.
People looking to modify files directly? HOW_TO_BE_A_HACKER.TXT was born. People wishing the game gave them more of a push to walk away? That's when I wrote the tirade, where Felicia gets angry about the fact that you are putting your curiosity over her life.
(That part was fun as heck to write by the way. I really liked how it highlighted the difference in points of view: If the player is playing like a normal player, then they see nothing wrong with saving and reloading repeatedly to "see everything." But from Felicia's point of view of course, it's madness. Or at least I know
I would be upset if someone was telling
me that I was going to die in a moment, but they didn't want to try to stop it because they wanted to watch and see how it happened, and it was cool, they'd just bring me back later, probably.)
So after enough playtests, I stopped having to add new endings, since people tended to find one on their own. In hindsight, I think this was exactly the right approach: Not to provide a definite "ending", but to make a definite ending-shaped-hole in the game, and then leave a bunch of vaguely ending-shaped pieces laying around. It's been really fun watching people construct closure out of them.
(Another fun fact: Most of the people I've watched play it, are ASTONISHED when I tell them that there are other endings. They can't imagine anything more fulfilling than what they ended with usually. Because for them - there isn't. People tend to make the ending that works best for them, and ignore pieces that don't seem useful to that.)
Now I want some mango salsa.
The Fiesta Salad (it has mango in it!) is basically my standard lunch at the taqueria down the street. I was having trouble coming up with realistic-sounding things to order at a mexican place of all things. Eventually just said "Screw it - I'm trying to make this part feel believable - I'll just use things off the menu of the place I like!" So... yeah. Writing pro-tip: When in doubt, steal from real life.
See, I'm a sucker for interactive fiction with meta themes. This feels like you took some of the themes from the Infinity series VNs, put them into a Western setting, then greatly exaggerated them while squeezing them into something compact.
Not intentionally, but we could be doing the same theme! I haven't played those titles you're talking about, but I wouldn't mind seeing how other people have treated the same topic! Can you give me any specific names I should look into? (I was actually paranoid through most of the creation process that I was just duplicating something that some clever interactive-fiction author had made years ago. I kept expecting one of my friends who is more into IF than I am to say something like "oh, I get it, it's just like [some obscure IF title] except without the clever bits!")
Also, that fail sound effect is now my new go-to SFX to play in my head whenever something comically disappointing happens.
Heh. We actually had to go back and forth on it a bit - I actually wrote Francisco (who did the music and is super talented) an email at one point that read something like "this sounds too epic! The game-over sound needs to be more like 'aww, she dumped you, you have to spend the weekend home alone!' and less like 'The aliens have triumphed. Earth has been destroyed!'"
At some point, I may post the other ones for contrast. They're great sound effects! Just a bit too serious-sounding.
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