Posted December 16, 2022 by Melos Han-Tani
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Problems with the Clue Maps
Hello! Not much progress the past few weeks. There have been many friends in Tokyo so I've been pretty social lately, which I suppose might be overall better than working on a game, ha ha ha.....
The main thing I want to discuss is a problem that's been on my mind with what I outlined in post 2. The idea was that the Clue Maps would be valid and invalid solutions, and you'd use them to construct your own map. But wait a minute! You could just copy one of the valid clue maps and be done with it!
Hm... well, it might feel like we need to throw everything out. But I was doing research, and someone on Twitter suggested I check out Understand. It's a remarkably challenging puzzle game, but basically every puzzle has 2-4 secret conditions, and you have to experiment with the puzzle to figure out the conditions. It's certainly unique, but I found the process to feel a bit like debugging.
Here's an example...
The two conditions are (iirc) "Start on a circle" and "end on a square". (You have to draw a path, that's your 'answer'). Well, that's pretty easy to figure out, but some of the later solutions are tricky things like "path is a prime number length" or "path divides the grid into a mirror image". The circles on the bottom will turn dark if you've satisfied a particular condition.
The idea it gave me was if you had to combine the conditions of two clues, or you had to exclude something about some clues. If this was the case then there could be an 'satisfied conditions' interface like Understand, and you couldn't just copy the clue maps.
The other idea was to make the clue maps big, but limit how big you can make your map - so that you have to figure out what the important information of the clue maps is.
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However, this brings me back to one other issue on my mind, which is if it would feel frustrating to explore the Shuffled World, and barely fail to construct a valid world (due to RNG, etc). I think it's possible as a point of frustration, but it shouldn't take That long to construct a world, so a few failures is OK. A bigger issue is 'does the clue/key cycle feel repetitive?' Idk, to me it probably would after a few times, and I wonder if it's even worth the effort implementing...
But I think at this point it's worth bringing up that this is a pretty story-focused game - so you might not even need all that many instances of constructing Clue Maps. Further, there can be variations - to find a destination in the Shuffled World, there are all kinds of narrative ways to vary that up. Maybe a character guides you. Maybe you're given a different 'form' of a clue (as a commenter suggests, something like making an adjacent mountain/river room create a waterfall room, which hides a town). Maybe there's something that uses the interface of the map builder and shuffled world keys in a different way. Maybe there's a time where you just try to go as far away from the Shuffled World entrance as possible - etc. It often just takes a slight narrative reframing or restructuring to make something stay fresh long enough (such as Anodyne 2's later areas - although admittedly I feel there were too many levels in Center City Cenote), or in a more repetitive game (Sephonie) it can be enough to stagger things with significant narrative beats.
Mixing up the ways you explore the shuffled world feels good - ultimately I just want to do juuust enough to capture the feeling of "the route from Town A to Town B" not being memorizable. And since the game wouldn't be That long, varying things up - with occasionally some repetition - is probably good enough. I think I'm happy to use this as a base for prototyping but also building out the story.
On The Story
What's the story of this game? Well, a while ago - maybe last year? I had the idea for a short story about a studio of three game developers - one who is older, clearly the lead - dies. He then tasks the two younger developers to bury his ashes in the "most important place to him", which the two deduce as being either - something related to an unfinished game, or something related to some traumatic event. Anyways, I don't know what the ending is, but one of the main themes of that story was planned to think about the ways in which we might reduce someone's desires or 'life narrative' down to some single event that we perceive as being 'extremely traumatic' - how we might reduce someone's complexity to a single, driving event, a cornerstone of their life.
Well anyways I just didn't feel like writing about that theme so it never got written. As time passes, naturally there are a million other story ideas that come up around the Shuffled World idea (one of them being Aloesian Mode, a story which I did write this year, which uses some of the "shuffled world" ideas but instead to explore the process of musical composition in a fantasy setting), but that's a story and didn't utilize the game elements.
Current Story
The current story of Shuffled World still centers around a master (or leader) of these two younger proteges of some sort. The Master has died, and the Proteges are left to carry out his will: to travel to significant places from his life, returning certain objects.
In this fantasy world, towns and settlements are separated by this 'shuffled world' and people can only visit other places by foot, if they know the right way to travel. There is no online or instant communication.
In some ways it's a little akin to the relation of neighborhoods within cities, or discord servers. Finding new places - or having significant connections to them - is technically 'easy' - a matter of clicking a link or taking a taxi - but in practicality you often rely on social knowledge to join.
It's not considered dystopic that the world is separated in this manner - in some ways, it's made it impossible for culture to develop in a more generalized, mainstream manner. However, people still can't help but wonder what life could be like if the paths between communities were widely known and easy to traverse. People hold all sorts of opinions on whether this would be good or bad. This is not a particularly 'real' fantasy world, in fact, it's a bit obsessed about the notion of subcultures and cultural output and progress, perhaps like how everyone in Pokemon might talk about Pokemon, rather than their salaries.
The two proteges set out with some navigational tools, finding different landmarks/settlements and meeting significant people from the Master's lives - collaborators, friends, mentors, lovers, etc. During their journey - and as they traverse the 'shuffled' world, the two consider the implications of the world being 'reconnected', and reasons for both. The two even reconsider their relation to their home settlement, debating back and forth about whether they'd like to move elsewhere.
I'm not really sure what an ending would look like, or if I even want to escalate the stakes to something very big. I could see something working like "Maybe the master had a plan to unite the world" or something like the world has to be permanently separated, but to me those feel less interesting than the proteges' discussions with the Master's connections.
Well, these themes are interesting to me because they remind me a lot of how books, music, art, games, etc, are made. People often cut their teeth or flourish in smaller communities - but when people operate at a larger scale, even though they're reaching a wider audience, they might actually be more isolated from the wide variety of work being made. We can see this at the largest scale as mainstream works continue to entertain, yet in a predictable manner.
I've touched on this in some writing but it's kind of why a lot of games can tend to feel the same - they become more reflective of what might spread widely or sell - a guess at what people like, rather than a particular group of creators' concerns.
I'd like to take that general idea and look at it through a variety of characters/situations. If a world physically can't allow the accrual of fame, but humans live with the knowledge of fame having been a thing, then how do people make meaning for themselves? Would people want to move around a lot, or set down roots somewhere? What would it mean to have a lineage of family or proteges in this world ?Etc...