(2020-04-05) Sloan Week1 Overworld

Robin Sloan: Week 1, overworld. I’ll always begin these newsletters with a snapshot of what I’ve got. Right now, I have got: a prototype game that, although excruciatingly minimal, has all the things: a branching story, a map, text presentation, audio playback.

The total work

I’ll begin in the most basic way: why make a video game?

Some days—not all, but some—I think video games must cerainly be the 21st-century version of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, the “total work of art” that draws upon and integrates all other forms. For Wagner, ca. 1849, opera was the Gesamtkunstwerk.

There’s a lot in this whole formulation that’s questionable, but here I will just plainly confess that, for me, its allure is not. In video games, you get to deploy story and prose and graphic design and moving images and music—you get to “play all the keys on the keyboard.”

In video games, you get to deploy story and prose and graphic design and moving images and music—you get to “play all the keys on the keyboard.”

Deeper still. Video games offer a critical infrastructure comparable to the kind available to books, music, movies, and (maybe more recently) TV. Why does this matter?

produce a lot of odd-shaped digital projects

but/and I am often frustrated that the only “critical response” available is what I’ve come to think of as the “nod of approval.” I like nods, and I like approval—but I like real engagement even more. When you’re producing work in a genre that consists of… only that work… it’s a tall order to expect people to like, invent a whole new way of talking about things… just to talk about your thing.

Just by calling something a game, you give people the framework—the permission—to evaluate it

You’ll see, as this project progresses, that it would have been perfectly reasonable to call it “an extremely enhanced e-book” or a “super-duper interactive digital story.” I struggled with this for a long time; I am now over it. This is a video game.

I believe that almost all video games handle text very very badly

in the sense of typesetting and text presentation

In each newsletter, I’ll include a bit of the game’s music and its production. The composer Jesse Solomon Clark

The game’s core, its branching story, is handled by Ink, a format developed by Inkle Studios in the UK.

The presentation of text on the screen is handled by a simple JavaScript framework I built myself, about a year ago. It extends some of the display ideas from my app Fish, but instead of a linear “one text fits all” flow, it plugs into Ink’s branching and weaving. ((2012-10-01) Sloan House Of Cards)

The game’s map is handled by THREE.js, a flexible 3D engine.

As implied by the tools above, this game runs in a web browser. There are a few nice things about this choice.

First: the browser is a really good development environment

Another nice thing is that a game that runs in a web browser doesn’t have to be a game that’s distributed via the web. You can easily wrap it up as a standalone desktop app or even an iPhone app.

Here’s the whole idea behind Perils of the Overworld.

In the game Final Fantasy II, released for the Super Nintendo in (could it possibly have been) 1991, there was a moment in which you boarded an airship and the overworld dropped into thrilling pixelated perspective. This airship opened fresh swaths of the game, revealed whole new continents

This feeling of new regions opening up is the soul of overworld, and, by extension, the soul of these games.

The classic structure of an RPG (as well as its fantasy novel antecedent) has the character questing across the world

This structure overlooks an important emotional reality: When you help people, you get attached to them.

What if you arrive at a tavern, offer to help out in exchange for room and board, then discover you enjoy the work? What if, thirty years later, you own that tavern? What does the passage of thirty happy years look like in a video game?

The idea is that you’ll play Perils of the Overworld over and over, starting fresh each time, an appealing loop.

You are on a quest: make no mistake about that. In this game, there will be monsters and dungeons—but they won’t ever be what ends it.

A minimalist, monochrome map seems like a good place to start. Here’s a snapshot of my current POTO prototype; it looks like shit, but/and, that’s the point. In a month we’ll flip back to this edition of the newsletter and go “oh WOW can you believe how far we’ve come??”

But of course: this isn’t just paper. It’s a screen, and there’s a 3D model lurking behind the glass

Above, I dwelled a bit on the video game Final Fantasy II. The experience of playing it was formative for me—nearly as formative as any book. This was also true for my friend Matt Thompson, whose deep appreciation of FFII has lingered in my mind for many years

He replied with this single, multi-paragraph, essay-quality text message: FFIV (for us purists) was the first time I ever got the power of epic storytelling. As the story progressed, it just layered on theme after mythical theme, using every new character as an opportunity to explore some of the deepest challenges of humanity.