DEV LOG #1

20th March 2024

Where to start?

Well – why not at the start?

My name is Sam Gray. I’ve worked in the creative industries for a long time – I recently finished at the British TV channel ITV as an Assistant Producer. I would make the adverts for the competitions that people could enter to win money or a motorhome or something. A few times I had to dress up like a cow. (Yes, I have pictures. No, I’m not going to post them. (Yet, anyway...))

But that’s just my job. What I actually love doing – what gets me out of bed in the morning – is writing.

I’ve written a bunch of screenplays. I’ve even got a short film script I’m going to make at some point.

And, about 12 or so years ago, I started working on my first video game.

It was called Pokémon: Legends of the Arena.

Yes, it was a Pokémon fan game.

No, it probably wasn’t the most legal thing in the world. I was a member of a bunch of fan game communities, and the ones that got really big almost always received a Cease & Desist order from Nintendo. So you couldn’t promote it too much. And I didn’t flinch from using pre-existing sprites and copyrighted music – i.e. all the things you shouldn’t do when it comes to making a game.

But I made the damn thing.

It took a long time – around 8 years of on-and-off development. I released it in stages, and the final one went out in 2020. I developed a loyal community across various forums, on Reddit and Discord, and it got a few playthroughs on YouTube. I was kind of proud of it – it was a full-length game (around 15-20 hours), had well-developed characters, good humour, some nice visual design, etc. I got more and more confident as I went along, experimenting with narrative design and how to tie gameplay into the storytelling.

I’ll give an example.

In the Pokémon series, you capture monsters of various different elemental types – Fire, Water, Grass, etc. In my game, there was a whole plot about a Cult that used Ghost-type Pokémon. So, the government in the world of the game had made using Ghost-types illegal. There’s some discussion among the characters about whether this is ethical or not.

Late on in the game, the player gets lost in a strange forest. They come across an abandoned house, and in the house they discover a Ghost-type Pokémon, Rotom. It’s the first time the player has ever encountered a Ghost-type Pokémon in the wild. The player can either defeat the creature – or they can capture it with a Poké Ball, to use as part of their own team.

The game doesn’t really guide the player one way or the other. But when they leave the forest, they suddenly have to face the consequences of this decision. If they captured the Rotom, they’re now in trouble for possessing an illegal Pokémon, and they’re forced to give it up.

This feels bad for the player. The Rotom was a useful Pokémon to use when facing the enemies in the forest, as it was particularly effective against them, and by taking that advantage away it feels unfair.

But that’s the point. It’s supposed to feel unfair. And that sets up the final section of the game, where the player has to make a similar decision in a much more public way – whether they’re willing to sacrifice their own interests for the public good or not. And the player is fully aligned with that decision – the player knows they’ll suffer the cost to their own player freedom if they make that decision.

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Consequence is such an interesting gaming mechanic. Whenever I’ve seen it deployed well, it can enliven even the most routine of narratives.

Think about the trial in Chrono Trigger, where the seemingly innocuous decisions you make at the fair in the beginning of the game come back to haunt you.

Or in Telltale’s The Walking Dead, where an overfamiliar zombie drama suddenly becomes much more urgent by forcing you – and you alone – to make the life-and-death decisions.

And yet, I still find it frustrating when games – even these good ones – aren’t willing to truly commit to consequence as a core mechanic. The story must go on, somehow, so often choices are less consequential than we might think.

Instead, we are offered the illusion of choice. We might get some different dialogue options; perhaps another path might branch out; perhaps a character might die. Or perhaps we might get one of three endings.

It’s the major argument against, say, Mass Effect – the thing that really doomed it by the time it came to conclude its epic trilogy. All our choices might feel crucial in the moment, but what did they actually amount to?

There’s a reason for this.

If you wanted to make a game where EVERY CHOICE MATTERS – you would have to do SO MUCH WORK.

You’d basically have to make ten times as much content for the game, which the player would only experience a fraction of.

Can you see where I’m going with this?

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With a few years distance from my last game, I started getting that itch again to make something. But something radical – something that drew on existing genres, the RPG, the visual novel, but pushed them into a new, extreme direction.

A game where every choice – from simple dialogue choices, to choosing which room to move into – has a consequence, obvious or not.

It’s an ambitious project. But that’s the best kind of project.

SAM GRAY

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NEXT UP - A new kind of game…