AN OUTCRY POSTMORTEM #2: Mechanics & Schematics. How to gracefully fall and get back up as a game designer.

 Thematics || Mechanics & Schematics || Economics

Most of you are already aware, but it bears repeating: An Outcry was the first commercial game project that I was "game designer" for.

LEVEL DESIGN

While it's true that I wrote a small Twine adventure called "Ah" several years ago (you may remember that one if you've been following my Patreon a while), An Outcry, as it was started in 2020, was really my debut in that way. It added what pure hypertext doesn't have: A visible space to traverse.

...or get lost in. This really was the very first hurdle in making An Outcry: How do I design a small, intimate space that multiple people live in that can support being traversed multiple times on the way between points of interest? How do I make players intuit their way through a - to them - unfamiliar apartment building out the gate?

Above is a quick mark-up I did that I sent to a friend for feedback; it shows the ground floor map in An Outcry, in the first 2020 demo for the game we threw together. 

• The arrow in the upper left corner leads to the post box and City Belt map, where you need to go first. 
• The arrow in the lower middle leads to the Courtyard (where the titular Outcry happens); the place where you conclude the scene,
• And the "START" arrow is where you first enter this map.

The above was the first moment in my video game career where I had to stop and admit to myself:

"Oh god. I don't know what I'm doing."

There are level design problems APLENTY in this map. The place you're supposed to go to is not even visible when you arrive, and a long walk away from where you will more likely be drawn to: The Courtyard exit. There is nothing visually interesting going on, nothing to look at, nothing to do. It's a dead space, going mostly unexplored by the majority of players.

Also, the City Belt map was, at this point in development, optional. This, in turn, meant that players were a lot less familiar with who the Unnamed is as a person, and much less likely to find them interesting or likable.

That sucks! Not a great start for this narrative game.

Well- this, from the second demo of 2020, is better- but not perfect, still. The City Belt is now mandatory, but there's still not much to look at other than the post box (which is at least visible now). The tile pattern looks weird and wrong. What's with all that empty space on the wall?

Okay. This is the release version (simplified for easier capture). Very similar, but at least there's a bulletin board to check out, and the tile patterning looks more believable for a real space while still subtly pointing the player to the City Belt door.

Some problems arose from this though: Now the player would first be drawn to the bulletin board, as it's the shortest distance away from them on arrival. This is fine, there's just worldbuilding on there, but the next thing the player will think is "Ah, I'm close to that exit there! Let me try it" - leading them AGAIN to the Courtyard map, which this time, they'll be turned away from.

As you can tell, this... is functional. Players didn't get lost, and players didn't give up on the game, or go without seeing an important part of its content. However, in order to guide the player, I needed to use what amounts to a sign:

"They should be stern with themself, and get the mail first."

What a weird message. Yes, it shows a bit of the Unnamed's character as someone who chides themselves for small indiscretions; but it's also a bit nonsensical. Why would the Unnamed lose all motivation to get their mail after they've smoked a cigarette??

It was a band-aid solution; fixing this problem in a more elegant way was optional, so rather than wasting more time on it, I slapped a hack-fix on it, and moved on.

VELOCITY OR ELEGANCE?

And that was, for the most part, the way An Outcry's design process went! If something was busted in a way that couldn't quickly be fixed, or in a way only extensive playtesting would reveal, I would apply a band-aid fix instead.

And yes, on one hand: That kind of sucks. I aim to be a lot more thoughtful and methodical in how I design spaces and encounters in future. (Hell, thinking about it now I immediately see a bunch of possible fixes for this situation I wish I'd seen 2 years ago).

On the other, more positive hand: Rushing design tasks meant that the game was finished at a good pace. Creating a 4-5 hour game in a year and a half is a tremendous feat! Any project with a proper budget and a larger team wouldn't struggle with this, but An Outcry was created on a shoestring budget, with myself as its main programmer throughout the majority of its devcycle. By the end, I was severely out of money, and if I had hesitated on certain tasks for longer, we might not have successfully shipped.

Do I have regrets about that?

...

I mean, yes. Obviously I do. It's why I've kept An Outcry continuously updated to fix bugs, and add new content.

A bunch of cool ideas and elegant design solutions fell off the wagon at this brutal travel pace. I had less time to consider things, and, in ways big and small, that hurt the game.

However, there is one thing I do not hold any regrets about: The Experiments.

THE EXPERIMENTS

Every so often, myself and the team at large would just try out-there solutions to problems to see what would stick. These experiments could be aesthetic, design-based or writing-based.

The photo-bashed mug of Sebastian Schrei was one such experiment, as was the real-world photo I took of a train station, and of a weeping willow tree. Oscar put those together for the game, after my instructions, and did a great job.

Another was the "Text adventure scene" in the "FOLLOW" route. I wanted this bit to be in a first-person perspective effectively since the start of the project, but using 3D pre-renders was a spontaneous idea that Bryce Bucher and Kitet helped make a reality.

Most serendipitous of all was the "Fugue state scene" in "IGNORE". I knew that I wanted the Unnamed to pass through the City Belt on a dissociated walk away from their problems, freed from the player's control, but I had no clue how to do it.

I asked my brother to drive me to the City Belt, and that's when I found out that my phone has the ability to take serial-snapshots.

Those would prove perfect for the horrifying indifference and dissociative look of the cycling backgrounds in the "WALK" scene.

But how could I forget! The most famous of these experiments is what we internally call the Refusal Mechanic.

NARRATIVE DESIGN OR: THE REFUSAL MECHANIC

Since the game's Twitter account is now gone, I can't point you towards this original post- while making the Haunted PS1 demo in 2021, I found myself unhappy with the fact that Anne would force the Unnamed to drink alcohol. It seemed like boundary-crossing behaviour on her part; so I implemented a very easy to execute option that would allow the player to exit out of a visible decision in order to choose something invisible.

This really fit the Unnamed as a character: Anxiety can, among other difficult things, make you lock up in stressful or awkward situations. If your friend asks you: "What's your poison?~" Will you worry that it would be rude to decline? Would you choose an alcoholic drink even though you wouldn't even enjoy it? 

For many people who suffer from anxiety, the answer is: Yes. There is a social pressure associated with consuming alcohol I wanted to point out as well. So, for those in the know about this mechanic, you could instead ask Anne for a non-alcoholic "Cuddle in the Sand", and would be rewarded with a secret drink, more dialogue and an Unnamed who is actually happy with the drink they've received! Wow!

It didn't take long for us to realise that this mechanic held a ton of potential in the game's narrative design. But it wasn't me who started implementing it in other places:

It was Parsely.

Parsely was the second programmer that I brought on board after the HPS1 demo had released. A lot of the scenes that would becomenecessary to program felt insurmountable to me at that stage of my skill development; so eir offering me to help in an e-mail ey sent was a great opportunity. Ey're a fantastic programmer and designer, and have more than earned eir keep on this project.

It was Parsely's idea to hide helpful actions and resolute choices behind instances of silence or inertia. 

After watching people play the HPS1 demo on Twitch, we saw that many of them preferred to choose the "IGNORE" option during the big, full-screen Outcry choice first. 

Knowing where that path leads, we felt it would set people up for a harrowing first playthrough they didn't necessarily deserve; so we attempted to push the player towards choosing action.

This was done through the Argument Scene. I wrote that one in a day or two. Mr. Schmitt and Mrs. Yıldırım already held a decent aggressive tension in their dialogue trees, so letting it boil over felt natural. 

Only thing was that I would have made just as large-scale a choice menu for the decision on whether to help Esma out or not as we did for the Outcry choice; it was lucky that the task of implementing the argument fell on Parsely, because ey were dissatisfied with this angle-

and instead, hid the option to help Esma behind what felt like a mandatory silence the player would have to exit out of.

This was hugely influential on the game's narrative design. In an alternate universe, An Outcry would have been a dry visual novel/RPG hybrid with very little to keep you interested.

This changed things. We weren't only conveying the seductive convenience of inertia and apathy through writing; we weren't just showing the scared helplessness associated with being faced with another person's public harassment, we were making the player experience it directly, and, through the scene in the Space In-Between later-on, learn that they could have done differently and better.

It did wonders for the players' perception of the game; it made them feel like these situations weren't inescapable! Some people have said that An Outcry has given them hope. And this, more than anything, is something I treasure deeply.