What follows below is the text of my Master's Thesis, a piece of non-fiction prose that recounts my experience as a fledgling game developer. It also serves as a postmortem for a project called Hyperline Operator which is still currently in an early beta state and not ready for a general audience yet.

A cursor blinks away in a code editor window displaying a default script template in eye-soothing muted tones. It is February of 2021 and I am at home contemplating the first 3D game project I will ever attempt. The pandemic is no longer fresh trauma in our minds, but still exerts its daily psychic pressure on everything we do. People wear masks for brief, frantic grocery runs and only the very brave or the very foolhardy try to spend time with their friends and family. This is the backdrop for the first game of my master’s degree: 3 Minute Walk. At this time, everything was new territory. I’d spend days bouncing from task to task: constructing crude 3D models, editing and re-editing audio files, and writing kludgy, inefficient scripts to realize an inner world that I’d been struggling to explain with words for a year now. The design doc for 3 Minute Walk was a text file with a single fragment of a sentence: “transitory spaces are dangerous”. Thus, the game illustrated this reality. Leaving the bright, comfortable atmosphere of the initial apartment space, the player is shunted into dingy, freakishly lit corridors full of  cardboard cutout people with very wrong faces. Straying too close to them narrowed the player’s vision and created an electronic buzzing that still sets my teeth on edge when I hear it. After playtesting this nightmarish vision of the world I’d designed, I sat back in my chair with a paradoxical excitement, knowing this was only the first step on a journey that would last for as long as I had hands and eyes. The next game came only six months later; a dark, brooding piece of work that had lived inside me for so much longer than it ever should have. All of my games were autobiographical, but Anchors came from a part of me that didn’t want to be seen. Although it ended up being my most simple piece from a gameplay standpoint, it was by far the one that meant the most to me. A quiet contemplation of an entirely too real bout of passive suicidality I experienced as a teenager, its story told through a text that I hand wrote and digitized, my anti-suicide letter to myself. The third game I made dealt with a less extreme, but conceptually deeper topic: the conversations that occur between the external mind and the internal one. INTERNAL/EXTERNAL recreated a one-sided argument between two halves of the same person and is the only game I’ve ever made that inspired someone to say “this is fucking art” to me. Each of these three games was not only a work that I needed, in the most fundamentally artistic sense of the word, to make, but also a six month curriculum that I created for myself to learn a new skill in game development. This foundation of learning is where the design of Hyperline Operator began.

August 8th, 2013. The one-man band equivalent of a game designer, Lucas Pope, releases his indie smash hit Papers, Please to critical and public praise. The game presents players with a deceptively simple, but wholly nerve-racking task: acting as a border control officer for an alternate universe’s idea of East Berlin. Gameplay begins simply, entry is permitted to citizens of Arstotzka only. Players are shown a desk onto which they must drag passports and stamp them “denied” or “admitted”. The feedback for this interaction is pleasant, the stamp is suitably weighty and clunky and invites players to revel in the small amount of power they hold over the hapless digital immigrants to glorious Arstotzka. Lucas Pope’s work set a precedent for a new kind of game: a simulation/puzzler where the interaction comes from viscerally satisfying interactions that the player must memorize and repeat as necessary. These “button simulators” are almost purely feedback driven experiences, producing fun gameplay not from watching a character on screen respond to your inputs, but rather placing the inputs themselves at center stage. Later games such as 2018’s Not Tonight by Panic Barn, and 2020’s Not for Broadcast by NotGames would expand on this idea, ironically both about a dystopian hypothetical future Britain, the former casting you as a bouncer and the latter as a propaganda broadcast controller. Other tangentially related inspirations include 2016’s VA-11 Hall-A by Christopher Ortiz and 2020’s Coffee Talk by Mohammad Fahmi. These two take the relatively low interaction/high story genre of visual novels and inject moment to moment button simulator gameplay about serving drinks into them to help maintain player attention. Thus, these games effectively have two very different gameplay loops occurring in tandem with each other. The first and slower one of choosing conversation options and learning more about the characters, and the second faster one of paying attention to what is said and making the correct drink using that information. While these games situate you as a mostly passive observer to an ongoing political or character drama, a narrative structure I borrowed for Hyperline Operator. Thematic inspiration however, was derived more from the horror genre. Two related entries in this regard include 2019’s Nauticrawl: 20,000 Atmospheres by Spare Parts Oasis, and 2022’s Iron Lung by David Szymanski. Nauticrawl places the player at the helm of an esoteric undersea machine that they must experiment with to learn how to pilot, usually through myriad deaths and restarts. The button simulator gameplay here is aided by a roguelite structure which means that the machine in question can be very complicated with minimal time given to tutorialization as failure and death are both part of the formula already. Iron Lung, on the other hand, is the only game listed here which allows the player character to move from their workstation, although the cramped coffin-like interior of the submarine they pilot does not allow enough freedom for me to hesitate in also calling it a button simulator as well. Paired with a truly horrifying soundscape, Iron Lung is carried by its audio work, a quality that I replicated in Hyperline Operator.

A decade ago, I clunked the heavy “admit” stamp down on an Arstotzkan passport for the first time and fell in love with the sensation. I knew that somewhere in my future, a button simulator game lurked, I just needed to give it time for the idea to calcify. Fast forward to a year and a half ago, considering what my thesis project would be, my first idea was considerably different from what Hyperline eventually became. The first iteration was mainly designed to be a VR experience, wherein a player would have to physically lay down on their back to participate in some virtual stargazing. The story idea that I was working with back then was that you’d be able to physically point at stars and draw lines between them to form constellations around what your stargazing partner was telling you. Over the course of the game, a short story about a first love would have developed as you draw constellations representing an imagined future life with them. Eventually when it came time to develop however, VR had mostly fallen out of public favor as the equipment was expensive and restrictive, so I opted for a more standard kind of control scheme. This is when the idea of the button simulator reentered my mind. Hyperline Operator was born while l was looking at images of early telephone operator rooms. Today, much of our communications technology is handled automatically and digitally instead of in the analog manner of this earlier time. This presented an excellent opportunity for button simulator gameplay, but it was still missing a story and thematic setting. This came afterwards upon a rewatch of Ridley Scott’s 1979 movie Alien. Alien presented a unique vision, a far future imagined in a time when technology was just starting to reach mainstream appeal. Computers in the Alien universe are big chunky things that hum and chatter. Text-based interfaces are displayed on mono-color CRT monitors that light up a room. Nowhere can you find a touch screen and very little is automated. This is the setting that I wanted to use for my project. A science fiction world where a button simulator would feel right at home. This was where the phone operator inspiration fell right into place. It is a well known fact that light does not travel instantaneously, especially not across the vastness of space. Thus, for a galaxy-spanning civilization to flourish, they must discover a way for communications to travel faster than light. Frank Herbert solved this problem in Dune with tachyons, Dan Simmons solved it in Hyperion with the fatline, and Larry Niven did it with the hyperwave. Whatever the method used, extensive detail is generally not given as to how each property’s particular brand of hand-wavy plot hole filler works. It just works. I wanted to place this ubiquitous background aspect of science fiction into the center stage and try to imagine just how something like this might operate. In my mind's eye, I saw a tiny, one-person space station suspended in the blackest of star lit voids. An interstellar lighthouse, the logical evolution of those telephone operators of old in a universe where monitors are still glowing green CRTs, everything is analog, and the cheapest commodity on the market is the average human being. Starlance Communications, a galaxy-spanning telecoms corporation that exclusively uses identification numbers instead of names, would be the player’s employer. Your title is Hyperline Operator. Your work is tedious, unappreciated, underpaid, and you are so very easily replaced, but money is money and at least it’s not dangerous, right?

With a premise set, my first task was to figure out what the player would actually be doing in Hyperline Operator. What sorts of actions would an operator be required to perform? I began by laying out a list of possible things that a message would need in order to be relayed properly. These things included a distance, a direction, and a bandwidth. Additional parameters were also envisioned but not implemented such as message encryption and translation services, an ultra-wide mode that would allow for certain messages to request a max power message to be sent in all directions at once for things like distress beacons, and a 0 latency mode which would briefly engage a switchboard-like interface on the operator’s desk in order to directly connect two points for real time communication. Also designed, but ultimately cut was a “startup sequence” that the player would have to perform in the correct order at the beginning of each workday at the risk of their little one man space station blowing up and instantly ending the game. With these parameters determined, I needed to decide how the player would know where to route messages. Many options were brainstormed including a starmap that would require players to calculate the degrees of rotation they needed to use based on their relay’s location in relation to where the message needed to go. This was also scrapped for being likely quite a bit more annoying than I wanted this process to be. Eventually, I settled on a system where you are told the name of the relay or communications hub that the message needs to be routed to, but you must consult a chunky tablet device on the desk to get the exact rotation and power to set your relay to. At this point, I also became aware of the fact that the idea of sitting at a desk looking at what amounted to a space phone book was going to be boring in a bad way. Thus, the idea of having a “message preview” was added so that a player could see a little bit into the universe they were inhabiting in a way that didn’t break game flow. This, however, presented another problem. What would the message preview say? There was no way I could realistically write hundreds of unique messages, so I opted for an in-universe explanation. A user of Starlance’s services could request that their message be marked as private, rendering it hidden from prying operator eyes, so of course everyone does this, meaning that I’d only need one message saying something like “marked as private”. This did not seem like a fun thing to play either though, so I again had to think of something that would work in-universe to create a selection of messages that were different and interesting, but could also realistically be seen several times by an operator during a playthrough. The answer came from a stack of mail on my desk: spam advertisements. This way, I only needed six or so messages for each bandwidth type, displaying the contents of the non-text messages as audio transcripts instead.

With my overarching game design in place, all that was left for me to do was to figure out what the point of all of this was. What story was I trying to tell here? My mind flicked back to Iron Lung and Nauticrawl. Snippets of horror glimpsed through foggy glass, a shadow moving in the treeline, the fear of the unknown. I would bring my interstellar lighthouse back to its eldritch roots by making the object of that fear something unknowable and ancient. This neatly tied into my existing universe: who would put it past a gigantic corporation like Starlance Communications to not know how their own technology works? Yes, they may know that the relays use N-Space injectors to send messages through a layer of reality beneath our own, but do they know how that works? Or why messages appear at their destinations in the same moment that they are sent? Of course they don’t, nor do they care. But what if N-space wasn’t just empty? What if there was something there? Something that was listening? My initial idea for the finale of Hyperline Operator was that you, the player, would unknowingly initiate an invasion of our universe by some kind of outer god or other Lovecraftian thing, but this ended up not making sense upon scrutiny. Why would an outer god need the help of something that it would realistically consider to be an ant to do something like invade our universe? Why would it deem it necessary to communicate with us at all? After some time, I decided on a monster that I ended up finding a great bit more disturbing. A neurophage. A creature that feeds on the psychic processes that make sentient life possible. An all consuming entity that finds the idea of a creature that is capable of language to be incredibly enticing. When you are first contacted by the neurophage, they are friendly, almost in awe of humanity. They claim that they want to help us to become more beautiful, to further evolve our powerful minds. But this ultimately proves to be a trap. Upon entering the parameters the entity provides the operator with, they force open a path into our universe, presenting themselves visually to the player as an enormous gaping eye in space. With visual contact, they invade the operator’s mind through the neurological connections in their eyes, consuming the operator’s consciousness and supplanting it with their own. As the player’s screen is flushed with red it promises them that humanity will make for the greatest feast it’s had in a very long time. Cut to black. Roll credits.

As I have previously mentioned, each project I have done over the course of my MFA here at UTD has been a learning experience for me. Hyperline Operator gave me the opportunity to try out a visual scripting language called Playmaker that is used professionally in the games industry frequently, with some notable examples including Hearthstone and Hollow Knight. Teaching myself an entirely new way of building game logic for my final project proved to be a perfect opportunity for me to expand my skills and a worthy “final exam” of my game making prowess. As with all artistic practices however, I do not think that my work on Hyperline Operator will end here. Many aspects of the game’s interaction could be tuned up, more message variety could be added, and the visuals could be improved. 3D modeling is my weakest skill and I have been in contact with a long time friend who has been working with hard surface sci-fi models for over a decade now. I am excited to continue this project after my MFA with his help to realize the game’s visuals in a much higher fidelity. Additionally, many of the pieces of cut interaction such as the encryption could be added to make the gameplay experience a richer, more engaging one. 

The first game I ever made here at UTD was a crude, ugly thing I cobbled together during my undergrad back in 2016. It was a simple premise, walk over the messes to clean a house. I could have never imagined where I’d be nearly eight years later, making stuff I was genuinely proud of. Growth is a frustrating thing for me because it does not happen consistently or quickly, but my time here earning my MFA has taught me that it is indeed inexorable. I want to personally thank all the faculty that encouraged me and gave me space to work. It is by your hand that I have come to this realization. All I’ve ever wanted to do was make cool things, and I am so thrilled and excited to see what comes next.