A Long Video Looking At/Talking About Plastic Spouse Interrogation And A Long Text Post About Design Philosophy

Hi! The above video is me in a somewhat structured ramble about some of the newer game features. I also go into a little about what I have planned and the flow of the game between the interrogation parts and the biological system parts. Below is a sort of long thing about what I hope to accomplish in the game in regards to creating a new system of values to explore. I separated these two things because it's definitely easier for me to explain things more in depth via writing, and I wanted to keep the video above sort of brief, or at least to have it be a merely cursory glance at the stuff that's coming.

While I have you here in this strange multi-facted post, if you haven't already please fill out the form regarding Patron credits information. If you don't want to be credited or if you wanted to be credited under a name that is not your Patron name, please fill out the form:

https://forms.gle/KJaVjnBS68qJiwmFA

For bonus points, I'd like to do another Question And Answer stream at some point soon. Those were fun! If you have a question about anything at all, please send it here :

https://forms.gle/1KE6cAjBzvWdhCnD7

And please ask me anything! It doesn't need to be game related.

Design philosophy talk :

I've related this game to Growing My Grandpa! a couple of times. They are pretty different games I think, but, as I've mentioned before, they mirror each other in a few ways. One way is in how I design their world to be one in which I really want the player to grapple with the information presented to them not just as flavor text but as a way that informs action. In Growing My Grandpa! I had this being which was caught up in all these different interpretations and reductions ways of understanding. My hope for the player was that they peer a little bit into all this and establish their own theory about what is going on and what needs to be done. It didn’t need to be accurate to my understanding of how things worked in Growing My Grandpa! of course, but just accurate enough to want to explore more and engage with the game. I wanted the "Fulfilled Contract" ending to be gated by this deeper understanding of things. So, if you played through the game without trying to “get into it” then you would get an ending that reflected this. If there’s a fail state to the game it’s playing it and sort of gliding along the surface without trying to dig deeper.

Despite all of my lofty ambitions I think it's totally possible to play Growing My Grandpa! and get the harder to get ending without having done a lot of what I would have liked. If you have only the most minimally honed adventure game intuition you can start to piece together what might be your next steps. There are only so many things you can do in the game, and so, abstracted from all of my narrative stuff, you can beat the game and get the “Fulfilled Contract” by trying different combinations of things until you make progress.

And that's ok! It was not in the scope the project to design in a way that was totally dependent on the sort of understanding I talk about above. With Plastic Spouse Interrogation though I think it is a little more true to this aim. I don't know if players will be able to survive without grasping some stuff. There is more than one ending but there is also a pretty definitive fail state where you know things have gone wrong and you can no longer play (or you have to start over and try a different approach).

The body of knowledge and collections of facts that I want the player to deal with is different from GMG!… with that game, the ambition was the player understanding the central entity. In this game things are a lot more diffuse. It’s more like there is a world and a system of values to that world the player will have to learn about. In the game you’ll be asked about these things directly, you’ll be judged by your responses. You’re waking up in a weird world in a weird body and have been accused of something very weird too. I’ve thought a lot about the weird values! I think the world I’ve created will be quite interesting to you, interesting and weird and creepy.

That was a lot! If you have read this far, thank you so much for your interest and also your support. It means the world to me that you have taken an interest in what I make and are willing to support me doing it more. I promise Plastic Spouse Interrogation will be awesome.

Yours In Games And Gratefulness,

Yames