I always figured that reviewers treated the three acts as the Dunes, Metropol up until Clarity’s death, and then the “coda,” which would explain why the “last third” felt small.  But replaying the game, I realized that wherever you slice the last third, there’s almost no “space” added to the game: from learning Arbiter is dead until the credits, the game at most adds ten rooms, several of which are tiny: (1) the small area above the Factor overlook (tiny); (2) the overlook itself; (3) the lobby of the Council Tower; (4) the elevator (tiny); (5) the Council Chambers; (6) the emergency elevator area (tiny); (7) the roof; (8) the Calliope Station “hallway”; (9) the sealed doorway (tiny); and (10) MetroMind’s lair. 

By contrast, the Dunes contains 15 rooms: seven rooms in just the UNNIIC, plus another eight scattered among the other locations (the junkpile, the shrine, the dome and its interior, Goliath’s exterior, throat, brain, and stomach).  From entering Metropol until finding Arbiter, there are 13: (1) the tracks; (2) the station interior; (3) the station exterior; (4) main street; (5) the tower exterior; (6) the crash site; (7) the courthouse exterior (which also has a close-up), (8) the cul-de-sac (tiny); (9) the courthouse interior (which also has a close-up); (10) the underworks; (11) the drawbridge; (12) Clarity’s island; (13) the pathway leading to Factor.

If you count in terms of “new areas” rather than “new rooms,” the division is even more stark.  There are five areas in the Dunes: the UNNIIC; the junkpile; Goliath; the shrine; the and the dome.  There are five areas in “Act 2” Metropol: the train station; main street; the courthouse; the Underworks, and that doesn’t include some interstitial space.  But in “Act 3,” there are only three areas: Factor’s area, the Council Tower, and “Calliope Station.”

While I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad idea to have the final act more geographically confined than the prior ones, I do think that Primordia was a bit unbalanced in this regard.  And, in general, I think the game would’ve been better with more space.

(2) Design rooms with an eye to how they will function.  My biggest — really, only — regret with how Vic did the game’s graphics is that he concerned himself almost exclusively with each room’s painterly aesthetic without real regard to how the room would function for players.  This led to some incurable problems.

Most people complain about the hard-to-find hotspots, but (generally speaking) I think that problem is overstated.  The larger problems are more basic: many of the rooms use wonky perspective that makes the sprites look ridiculous.  First, there are things like the rooms of the UNNIIC, where the doors are like funhouse absurdities half the size of Horatio.  Next, there are character sprites that never match the room’s scaling.  If you play the game in DDraw mode (i.e., without the mixed-resolution scaling that D3D provides), you’ll see that — for example — the repairbot at the crash site and Leopold look horrible because even though they never move, the sprites aren’t scaled to match the room.  Very few of the rooms have the principal action taking place at a point where Horatio and Crispin are scaled to 100%; they’re often shrunken or bloated.

Another basic problem is that AGS does not have very good pathfinding, and the rooms — as a consequence of their irregular scaling and circular forms — cannot be easily handled by AGS.  Horatio’s awkward walking animation is actually not primarily an “animation” problem (in the sense of bad frames); it’s an engine problem because the game is stumped by how to play those frames.  Even over short distances, the characters stutter and get lost, and in large areas, like the Underworks, they sometimes break down entirely.

(3) Prioritize the things that matter most.  Here are some things that we spent a huge amount of time on: Crispin’s hint system including an automatic hint system for when you are stuck that I doubt any player ever saw; dozens of frames of animation for when Scraper’s arm melts the doorway to MetroMind’s lair; composing two competing soundtracks for the game.  Here are some of the things we did not spend very much time on: a final dialogue-check to ensure consistency for names (“Armstrong” vs. “Waldo”) and genders (Memorious, the greeter); animating the climactic Scraper vs. Clarity battle (the gun close-up used there was actually moved from the Clarity vs. shells scene!); making sure line readings of critical lines were done properly.

That is really bad prioritizing.  Throughout the project, each of us let ourselves go on Ahab-like missions without focusing on our large goals.  We had the luxury of a long development cycle, but even then we rushed enormously at the end.

(4) Don’t stand on principle in the face of testers’ actual experience of the game.  In various places, I insisted that even though the testers were all getting stuck in silly ways, it was important that players be taught to play games properly rather than be mollycoddled.  For example, the game treated differently using the plasma torch on the cable and using the cable on the plasma torch.  As well it should!  As anyone who does anything with any tool knows, using a tool on an object is not the same as using that object on a tool: using paper on a pencil might mean wrapping the pencil up, while using a pencil on paper is how you write.  Same with hammers and nails, and so on.  Many testers protested; I ignored their protests.

Then I watched Let’s Plays of the game, and invariably players got stuck there.  Indeed, the Giant Bomb Let’s Play — the most watched one, I believe — was completely derailed as a consequence, squandering an important opportunity for us to bring in new customers.

I’m not saying that everything should be homogenized by focus testing.  But derailing players simply to try to impose some logic on the way the game parsed objection interactions which had no gameplay consequence other than derailing players is bad design.

* * *

Anyway, I’m sure there are a million other lessons, but I’m out of steam, and those are the big ones!

James and I are nearing the end of work on the latest — hopefully last — Primordia patch.  I can’t say that the next version will be perfect, or “the game as it was always meant to be.”  For one thing, we can’t record new VO, add new sound effects, or add new graphics.  Where something was missing, we’ve sometimes found another part to slide into place — a sound effect here, an animation there — but some issues are irreparable.

But I can say that when this patch is done, the game will be appreciably better.

It’s been over a year since I last played the game, maybe longer.  I went in assuming I would hate the game and find the experience horribly unpleasant, but in fact I’ve been pleasantly surprised.  Many small details were unexpected: conversations between Crispin and Horatio that I’d forgotten, ways in which I’d anticipated player actions (e.g., using the printout of Metropol’s laws on Scraper draws a custom response).  Things that I remembered being really bad weren’t so bad.

Moreover, things that *were* so bad — for example, the Scraper vs. Clarity cutscene, which had no audio at all — turned out to be fixable.  For example, I also discovered what I believe to be the source of one of the major criticism of the game (i.e., the Crispin is a “tonal wrecking ball”).  I had always written that off as reviewers not really understanding the character and the scenario, but I found that there is a scene — when Clarity learns the fate of Arbiter and Charity — where Crispin’s quips are totally inconsistent with his general behavior (namely, that he has been more sensitive to Clarity’s dismay than Horatio was) and really do kill the scene’s mood.  Fortunately, they’re so off-the-wall and out-of-the-blue that neither Horatio nor Clarity reacts to them, so we were able to just cut them out without needing to change any other dialogue.  (FWIW, I also cut the infamous “99 problems” line.)

In hundreds of little ways, the game is tighter and smoother.  The hint system seems finally to really work.  Crispin almost always faces the right direction when talking.  UIs are more keyboard friendly; hotspots are a little bigger, sometimes, exits are a little clearer, the scrolling rooms scroll a little better.  A couple dozens animations that lacked accompanying sound effects have them; the effect is slight — no one is going to say, “Wow, there’s now a clanging sound when Horatio knocks on that door!” — but some of the strange hollowness that the cutscenes had is gone.

The cumulative effect is a game where — compared to either the release version or the first patched version — the flaws distract much less from the strengths.  There are endless things about the game that are still screwed up, ranging from slurred dialogue, critical lines that somehow went unrecorded, scaling problems, pathfinding problems, etc.   But it’s easier to look beyond them.

Out of the blue, a French Primordia fan contacted me about translating the game.  I’ve long thought that — notwithstanding the Russian translation — it would be very hard as a linguistic matter (technical challenges aside) to translate the game.  In particular, I’d always imagined it would be hard to handle things like Crispin’s puns or the word-puzzles in the kiosk.

Those may be hard themselves, but what we’re discovering (that is, the translator and I) is that there are ample challenges in the simplest of language.  Take, for example, “power.”  In English, power can mean energy (e.g., “power lines”), force (e.g., “a powerful blow” or “brain power”), or political authority (e.g., “come to power”).  The script uses these multiple definitions in various ways.  For example, Horatio says to Metromind: “Power, Metromind.  It doesn’t just come from generators.”  Horatio using a double entendre here: he’s talking about how MetroMind has conflated force/political authority with her monopoly on energy, while illustrating that his force — which derives from another source (avoid spoilers, somewhat) — is in fact greater.

But in French, these concepts are distinct.  Electrical power is “énergie”; force is “puissance”; political authority is “pouvoir.”  The greater precision here means that we can’t play with the word’s multiple meanings; we have to pick one.  Now, much to my delight, the translator is as much a word-nerd as I am, and so he’s come up with a clever approach: “La capacité, MetroMind. Elle ne se résume pas à une question de générateurs.”  This toys with the double meaning of “capacité,” which, like its English cognate, can encompass both the capacitance in a circuit and the ability to do something generally.  In this case, more than a little poetry was gained in the translation — but we still lose the echo of “power” that begins the game: the power core.  (Indeed, in a fevered moment of poor judgment, I thought the game could be called “Pursuit of Power”!)

“Power” is not the only challenge.  “Built” and how to form the fabrinymic -built has proven tricky to.  But it’s fun to work on these challenges, and the care the translator is employing gives me great confidence!

Incidentally, in a final point that makes me particularly happy, he works on the Paris Metro system.  That system was a partial inspiration for MetroMind.  When I was visiting Paris years ago, the city had just enacted automated subway cars to thwart the ever-striking subway drivers’ (conductors’?) union.  That seed eventually sprouted into MetroMind.

A random piece of Primordia fan art has trickled in:

James Spanos (the coder) and I are working up one last patch on Primordia to try to fix any lingering issues.  We think we’ve solved the ending / achievement related ones (Three Musketeers / We’re All In This Together / robots not showing up) and we’ve added sound effects into the showdown in the tower where sounds were missing (vague to avoid spoilers).  Is there anything else we should be aware of?  This is probably the last time we’ll tinker with it.

Three fun pieces of fan art:

(2) A poem about Primer, by the incomparable Esther CdL. At some point, Vic and I will put some proper graphic design together for it, but even standing on its own, it’s awesome.

Lord and Master Builder, Man all-wise,
Engineer of all on land and air,
Our five-one-eight to thee alone doth rise:
    Abort us ne’er!

Perfect machine, giver primordial
Of memory, of logic, and of spark,
Look down; see thy fragmented children fall,
    Failing, in the dark.

Behold how rust and virus do devour
Urbani’s finest fighters; how each bot
In city streets doth faint for lack of pow’r;
    Ignore us not!

Lord, Primary Master, format us anew,
That we, thy humble servitors, may live
Ever faithful to thy Code most true;
    Retry, forgive!

Esther explained to me that this is an patterned after an ancient form of Hebrew acrostic poetry.  How anyone could (1) adhere to these formal rules, (2) build in so much Primordia lore and jargon, and (3) actually make it sound poetic, I don’t know, but she managed it!

(3) A sketch of Horatio, Crispin, and the fateful power core, by Sed.

As is no doubt apparent, we’ve been quite slow to establish a solid company web presence.  During Primordia’s launch, Wadjet Eye Games was the hub for the game — website, Facebook, Twitter.  The team actively participated on message boards and answered emails and so forth, but we didn’t have our own headquarters.

As we’re moving toward our next big project, though, we’ve been trying to change that.  As the links to the right indicate, we have had (for some time) a Facebook page.  We recently set up this website.  (At some point, we’ll move to something snazzier than Blogger.)  And, just today, we set up a Twitter account @WWSGames.  (Someone appears to be cybersquatting on @WormwoodStudios; we are trying to get Twitter to free up the account, which is suspended, though who knows how successful we’ll be?)

Anyway, I’m not sure how much we’ll be Tweeting in the short term, but over time we hope to use it as a way to keep in touch with our fans.  So if Twitter is your thing, and you’ve bothered coming here, you may as well follow us over there as well!

Last month, as part of the 2013 Indie Speed Run competition, we made two small games.

The first, Like a Raisin in the Sun, is essentially a mood piece — it’s not really a game so much as short work of fiction about a robot who would like to bake a cupcake.  You interact with the game by pursuing various strands of the story to various conclusions. It’s quite short, and any given play through shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.

The second, Salt, is a traditional, albeit small, point-and-click adventure about the aftermath of a shipwreck in the Antarctic, loosely based on the doomed Franklin expedition.  It’s a somewhat longer experience, but — unlike Raisin — it’s only good for one play-through.

We’re in the process of polishing both games.  The polishing is basically done with Raisin; it just needs to be recompiled and uploaded.  The changes are minor and perhaps unnoticeable (conforming some text to voice over and fixing a possible looping path).  With Salt, we’re adding voice over and “feelies,” improving the animations slightly, fixing typos and some small glitches, etc.  Thus, while both games are currently playable, you may want to hold of playing Salt — though, of course, we wouldn’t mind you playing and rating the games for the competition!