A brief self-review

Hey friends! I know I start off every post like this, but: I'd once again like to thank everyone for playing my weird little robot games. The feedback has been amazingly helpful. <3

Now that we're a few months out from release, I thought it was probably time for another post-mortem. I wanted to a quick write-up about the game, looking at what worked and what didn't, and talking about some things that didn't make it in. Plus, future plans. 

Hits

I planned this game well in advance. For example, I had a rough story outline done before I started actually making the thing. Turns out that's actually a good idea when doing a game jam! Funny how that works.

This is a very story-driven game, and I think I've managed to hit the right tone this time around. Drone kink often strays into a bit of a moral grey area, which can be troubling. The usual justification for this is that the player gives consent and can withdraw it at any time - "your safeword is Alt-F4" - so it's okay if the player character never explicitly does so. But I still wanted to be nicer this time around, and I think that worked to the game's benefit.

In Reset Day, there's no dronification scene, so the "in-story consent" issue doesn't apply. There's also a lot more genuine affection to go around this time, so the game ends up feeling rather more kind, despite the much more involved plot. It's admittedly less spicy as a result (reflected in the lower kink rating), but I'm more comfortable with it this way. Plus, hey, praise kink is a thing. You're a good drone, yes you are.

The length is about right, I think. It's still on the short side, but it tells a full actual story this time. The walkaround segments give it some breathing room. Some things could be expanded upon, but it's already kind of a slow burn - maybe there could've been an additional half-chapter in the second half.

The visual style works well, I'd say. Better than last time. Despite the lower resolution, it's - ironically - a lot more detailed this time. Fun fact: The game natively runs at 480 x 270 pixels, which is kind of a weird resolution! But we all started using 16:9 screens in the last two decades or so, hence not a normal retro resolution.

On the technical side, I'm proud that Reset Day actually (sort of) works on smartphones and (kind of) runs in the browser without (too much) trouble. Godot does most of the heavy lifting here, but I also made sure to design the UI in a way that allows it to function in a touch-only environment. 

Also, savegames. And settings. Those aren't strictly necessary for a game like this, but they make it feel like more of a finished product.

I think the UX worked out well in general. The "press TAB to highlight interactive objects" trick is something that should probably just be in every game, especially adventure games. You do always need two clicks to walk/examine/interact, but it works better than the other approaches I've tried. You could probably hack in those old-school inventory puzzles if you wanted to.

Misses

Speaking of puzzles: There could be more of them still. I like the overall format, but I probably could've asked a *little* more of the player. Maybe throw in more scenes like the one at the Plaza. As it stands, this is about a 70-30 split between Visual Novel and Adventure, maybe 75-25, and I think I want to move that ratio closer to 60-40.

As discussed above, I wanted Reset Day to be less overbearing about the horny content than Transubstantiation Synthesis. It might've ended up slightly too subtle? The, uh, "appeal" here is mostly in putting yourself into the robot mindset, and being treated as one. Some people like that, right? Or some creatures who specifically aren't people? Well, we've got the thesis and the anti-thesis now, let's see what the synthesis ends up being like.

Finally, the problem with multi-screen scenes. Oh boy. There's no justification I an make for those - I made a really bad technical decision near the start, and it screws over the game engine something fierce. I ended up having to re-implement some basic Godot features by hand, including scene transition and camera controls. This is why scrolling and walking across multi-screen areas is so weird, and why it sometimes breaks.

That's not really fixable without rewriting a lot of the basic game engine, unfortunately. Lesson learned, though! Next time around I'll take a different approach.

The cutting room floor

Turns out a month isn't actually a lot of time to make a game! Even if you plan ahead. I had to prune back some of the more ambitious plans for the game's structure, so here are some interesting things that didn't make it in.

For example, there was originally going to be yet another viewpoint character. This would've been a police robot, one of the ones seen boxing in the protesters at the Plaza. The plot was going to keep jumping back and forth between the riot and the "main" stories, showing the protest and the rapidly worsening situation, with the viewpoints of a771 and c4f3 eventually "catching up." Those scenes were actually the first things I wrote for the game. 

In the end, I decided that the plot was dense enough with themes and characters already, so I cut one narrative arc and restructured the story snippets to be a little more linear. The military robot does end up having a small cameo in the post-game walkaround scene, where it's getting grafitti painted on its armour.

Something similar happened with the election and the newspapers and stuff, actually. This was the original backstory of the spambots. Political tension is great for engagement, see, and all that procedurally generated journalism was inflaming all sides of the political debate. That was going to be another factor in the goal conflict presented in the Plaza Riot chapter. The fact that the flashpoint for the crisis ends up being something seemingly inconsequential - a protest over copyright reform - was part of the joke there.

In the end I only kept the basic elements of that subplot. Politics Are Happening, the newspapers we see are Not Helping, and the proto-cyberpunk society is heading towards an inflection point. I think the idea gets across as it stands. The spambots stuck around because I love these dorks way too much.

At one point, briefly, c1f3 and a771 were actually the same character. The "lab" scenes happened before the "apartment" ones, and the presentation (the stage thing) was a fake auction of a "used" robot (you). This version of the plot presented Kat's and Mia's weird improvised infiltration plan in more detail. This took way too long to get to the point, though.

All in all, I think that the game ended up better for the reduced scope. The plot makes you do some thinking work already, and fracturing it further would've made it kind of hard to parse. The cut themes are still in there, anyway.

Odds and ends

The game is chock full of pop culture references, most of them centering around sci-fi and/or web culture from the 2000s. Some of them are fairly obvious, others are a bit more obscure, and many are hiding in plain sight. See which ones you can spot!

#SaveYourInternet was a real campaign. This was a series of protests that aimed to stop the EU Copyright Directive. Despite strong public opposition, the European Parliament and the European Council voted to approve anyway. I'm still bitter about that. The cops were nice enough, though some MEPs *did* accuse us of being robots.

There's also a fun thing going on with the construction drones. They're physically large because, well, they're construction equipment. But the working class is, of course, also the largest social class - and "robot" does literally mean "worker." I amuse myself sometimes.

Finally, the "plaza riot" chapter contains a stealth pun. What do you call it when the robot soldiers lie down their arms and refuse to follow orders? A drone strike.

Closing thoughts & future plans

I think there's material for a third game in this setting. I want to get real weird about the state of planet Earth a few decades in the future. What does a society actually look like, if it's managed by a confluence of transhuman robots and cybernetic humans? Get a slice of that horny solarpunk demographic.

Could be fun to do something about the decommissioned robot soldiers, also. Because of the cut arc (see above) I've got some material written up, and I know there's a bunch of combat doll enthusiasts out there.

We'll see! The plans are less concrete here than they were for Reset Day, but I still want to poke at the setting another time. Maybe something that has more of a gameplay focus, this time around. Let me know if that's something you'd enjoy, and if there's anything you'd particularly like to see. In fact, let me know any feedback you have, it's very valuable.

In the meantime, if you want to do a fan thing: You've got my blessing.* Feel free to ask for any assets you need. Design your own utilikin OC, if you want to! Pick a profession and an item that indicates it, assign yourself a four-character identifier or ask me for one, and you're golden.

(* Unless you want to make an NFT thing, in which case go straight to hell.)