Last week saw a bit of a milestone for our new project HRO: Adventures of a Humanoid Resources Officer — we completed a working draft of all the branching narrative content for the first “episode” of the game. This first level will serve as our playtesting prototype, so getting this on its feet has been priority for us. Part of drafting the first episode included outlining all six planned episodes in the first season so we could know how they fit together and what we’ll need to include to accomplish all our narrative goals. 
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This process provoked some interesting questions about player choice and what, exactly, makes a choice interesting for a player. One seemingly obvious answer is that interesting choices are choices which have big results. World-shaking, make-or-break, put-it-all-on-the-line, life-or-death types of decisions. I don’t love this answer. If everything is a 10 on the drama scale, nothing seems particularly important. And life isn’t made up of one earth-shattering choice after another. It’s also tough to build genuine human stories out of nothing but technicolor fireworks moments. 

Traditionally, player choice and the impacts of those choices have either been cosmetic -- ultimately landing the player in a pre-determined spot regardless of choices made -- or consequential in the short-term (usually as side-quests) but leaving the base experience "on rails." We're looking at linking all the episodes in a "season" of HRO modularly so player actions unlock different stories, puzzles and potential interactions across the entire experience. So completing Episode 1 by sending a critical crew member on vacation will give the player a different set of given circumstances at the beginning of Episode 2 than if the player had chosen to forge the navigational records to hide the Captain's crime, for example. 

One of my favorite things about our last project, Austen Translation, was a conversation I had with a player at the last Boston Festival of Independent Games (BFIG). Austen’s a strategy game dressed up like a dating sim, and this player was making terrible choices and losing — like really obviously losing. After he finished I asked him about it — to make sure our game mechanic wasn’t too obscure or he hadn’t misunderstood the tutorial. He assured me that he knew he was losing, but he was making choices which seemed right for his character. I loved that. His sense of character was so strong that he preferred to play and lose the game in character rather than min-max the strategic options. Those kinds of emotional connections between a player and a game experience are gold, and we’re looking at ways to foster a similar sense of control and consequence for an HRO player. 
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This may be the time lots of folks are gearing down for lazy, hot, barbecue-filled summer afternoons, but here at Worthing & Moncrieff, we’re hard at work generating all the assets we’ll need for a playable prototype of the entire first episode of “HRO: Adventures of a Humanoid Resources Officer.” As part of that process, I sat down last week to put together the art for the locations which will appear behind the characters when the player is talking with them via video link. In keeping with our television series frame, we’ve been calling them “sets.” Below are some of the original sketches, and farther down then there’s a set of first-draft art to show how they’ll look — in the prototype at least. 
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Part of the challenge is volume — as in quantity. In episode one alone there are something like 16 different locations, mostly aboard the spaceship Endeavor. Of course, like any budget-conscious serial, we’ll be re-using sets (since some locations like the Captain’s office are bound to be seen again). The other big design challenge is the context. The player will only ever see these locations behind a character’s head, so all the visual interest and all the animated bits have to take pace at the extreme left and right of the image, while still being recognizably the places they are supposed to represent.

​We spent a lot of time looking at the sets the early 1960’s/70’s science fiction series used. Most of these were (not surprisingly) terrible. But there were tricks we could benefit from — the random piece of “technical-looking” panel applied to an otherwise blank wall, for example. And the charm of the randomly blinking light. Some basic animations (like the aforementioned blinking lights) will be added when the sprite sheets for each location are put together. 
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​And then there were considerations of the other kind of volume — the kind you get from using depth and perspective technique. Originally, the sets were conceived of as relatively “flat” — really just a decorative horizontal plane slapped behind the character. But by exaggerating and shifting the perspective, we found we could achieve some fun variations which suggest camera placement at odd angles and imply some larger spaces. We also spent some time with unifying all the spaces which appear in the same general locale — like all the ones on the Endeavor, or all the spaces on the enemy ships — through consistent color palettes and furniture styles. 

We hope you enjoyed this behind-the-curtain glimpse into our process. Stay tuned as we get the prototype on its feet. We’ll share some screen grabs as we go. In the meantime, why aren’t you out there grilling something? It’s officially summer!

We were really excited to officially announce earlier this week the newest large-scale project Worthing & Moncrieff has been working on — "HRO: Adventures of a Humanoid Resources Officer." You play the underappreciated Humanoid Resources Officer aboard the SpaceArmada flagship Venture— whose crew has a long history of questionable behavior. When the ship is thrust into the middle of dramatic and universe-shaking trouble, can you harness the power of the bureaucracy to rein in their worst impulses and survive to the next episode? 

​So last Friday night the W&M team, along with programming powerhouse Brian Jordan whom we borrowed for the weekend (thanks Brian!), headed in to the Bose facility in Brighton to get our hands on Frames of our own. Which are beautiful, by the way. The finish and feel are really lovely and the sound quality is (as you’d expect) brilliant. We’ll have much more to say about the game we built over the weekend soon.

​But I wanted to take this opportunity to note how clarifying a punishingly short deadline can be. We made big decisions at the drop of a hat. Issues were brought up succinctly, discussed by whoever felt connected enough to the issue to look up from their laptop, and a definitive choice got made. Every time. Not that they were all the best choices, or that we won’t go back to fix any of them, but a merciless schedule removed the temptation to dither. The natural tendency to hedge. A lot of decisions were suffixed by the shorthand phrase “...it’s a GameJam” which gave us permission to pick something and move forward. 

I loved it. We got so much done. So on this Valentine’s Day let’s raise a glass to the Tyranny of the Ridiculous Timeline and all the freedoms it brings with it. 

When we started this blog in 2016, it was expressly to open a window into the development process of Worthing & Moncrieff's second title "Austen Translation," which launched last May. It was a wild ride and some of our most productive ideas and best ah-ha moments came when we sat down to condense our progress into a dev blog post. Nothing clarifies an issue like having to explain it to a third party! Since Austen's launch, the W&M team has been hard at work on a new game (which will be our third). We hope to make an official announcement about the new game very soon. In the meantime, enjoy this teaser photo from a recent paper playthrough of one of the concepts under consideration. 

We also wanted to take a moment to announce that this blog will be repurposed to follow the development of the new project, so stay tuned. We're excited to be embarking on a new journey and we hope you'll all come along for the ride. 

Austen Translation released on Steam at 3:00PM EST today. Heartfelt thanks to our programming team who knocked themselves out to get us over the finish line. You guys are the best. 

​Once we had the houseparty multiplayer version of Austen up and running, it prompted us to take another look at the way we were structuring feedback to our players. Originally, after each “chapter” of the game the player was given some information about how they were doing with their bachelor. Which was fine. But the addition of multi-player meant that there were new, more useful and engaging functions for these information rounds. They weren’t working hard enough for us. 

​We’re continuing to tinker and polish in advance of Tuesday’s release. Tuesday! We’re so excited! Thanks for joining us. 

But in a  good way! We were really excited (and a bit relieved) to announce the official launch date for “Austen Translation.” The game will release May 1, 2018 on the Steam platform. We’ll be launching with a celebratory sale, so if you’re interested in picking up a copy, it will be only $5 for the first week. ​

​Sometimes, the solution to a thorny problem is right in front of you. Like, sitting there on the sofa in front of you. Recently, our tech team’s been struggling heroically with the daunting task of getting “Austen Translation” to run as a networked multi-player game. The systemic requirements are arcane and the documentation often less-than-helpful. When the issues were mentioned to a colleague at GDC, we were asked why Austen’s multiplayer wasn’t being built in hotseat mode instead. It was an epiphanous moment.

In hotseat mode (also known as “couch co-op” style) up to five human players can compete in real time. This, of course, is how the original paper versions of the game were play tested early in the process, and it reminded us of the fun of sitting in a room with your friends while everybody scrambled to marry the very few available bachelors. There is laughing and finger-pointing and all sorts of interesting emergent play behaviors -- like the tendency to help rivals who just helped you. The game really does seem to shine a bit brighter when the players are themselves scheming against and competing with those around them, just like their on-screen heroines.

​In the end, hotseat turned out to be an all-around more effective and appropriate play style for this particular game. And we just needed a well-timed question to shake up our perspective. 

​We’ve been playing using a large-screen TV for the display and a Steam controller and the group experience has been pretty seamless. We debuted the new multi-player mode at the MassDigi “Made in Mass” Pax East party last week and the crowd seemed to really get into it. It seemed a much more raucous, much more social experience for the players than the more cerebral, intimate single-player mode. The photo below is courtesy of the MassDigi folks.

​We’re especially excited by the success of the new multi-player model because it was our last significant technical pre-release challenge. So watch this space for the announcement of the official “Austen Translation” release date. And a big thank you to our programming team for their brilliant execution of the house-party multi-player idea. You guys rock!