Monday October 11, the first day at BALTAN Laboratories in Eindhoven! We walked to the SWA building, through Phillips Complex S, and at the 8th floor gasped at the enormous space of the lab. After a grand tour by director Angela Plohman, we set up and started to write down the master plan for this week. Lots of decisions to make, especially after the playtests we’ve held. The feedback we received made sure we zoomed in on the parts that needed the most attention first.

First task was to make the interface more user friendly. Most playtesters were too busy trying to figure out what to type and how to type it, instead of discovering the game world. We decided to simplify the vocabulary, write more elaborate help texts in case of an error, and write a general “help” that gives an overview of the vocabulary, what each word does, tips to speed up navigation through the world and all this with clear examples.

Second big change is the layout of the page. In the old layout the input form was at the bottom, with the story being written above it and on the right a feed of messages from the game. The new layout is meant to look and function more like Facebook and Twitter, with the input form at the top, the story below, on the left a feed of messages directed at you, and on the right a feed of general messages. To match the social networks more closely, the story is now in first person perspective, and everything you type is a message. This way you can follow what other players are doing, get curious about how they found that pony or managed to enter a fishtank, all the while enjoying the fine feeling of transparency.

We also needed to think of ways to be more “in your face” with our narrative. Hints and tips were missed too easily. We will change the texts and use the Facebook data we have at our disposal in more elaborate ways. And hints a player needs to progress will be more obvious. We need to find a balance here.

Well, that provided us with enough work for two days. Wednesday we’ll do another playtest with game design students and researchers from TU Eindhoven. We hope to be ready for another round of feedback by then, so we can go through a second iteration of improvements on Thursday and Friday.

Oh and tonight at 19.30 we present Naked on Pluto at NIMk, during the Space Invaders event there!

Back in the 70s, early computer games were de facto text-based due to the obvious lack of graphical environment, yet they still survived through several generations of action packed arcade style games. This popularity can be explained partly because many of us are still using terminals to interface with our machines – maintaining and building upon a long and healthy tradition of command-line celebration – but mostly because text remains a very engaging way to build a narrative. Here, your imagination is used instead of a Graphic Processor Unit, in order to construct a particular atmosphere, extrapolating from the couple of words displayed on your screen (shocking concept and heresy I hear some say).

A particular advantage often mentioned for text-only environment is the little time needed to develop these, which is true as long as you keep the game engine rather simple. For example, many popular point and click web based games that are popular on Facebook and other online platforms are not necessarily complex, but heavily relies on addictive tricks and cute graphics. At the opposite there are many online multi-player text based games and interactive fictions that sit on top of rich engines, despites their lack of adorable color saturated farm animals sprites. In Naked on Pluto, we already have quite a few bots that are now inhabiting, processing and wandering in the server. But without 2D/3D graphics – in the most common interpretation – to represents and interact with these entities, we must find a way to transcribe this activity the best we can only using a Text User Interface.

In most text adventure games, also known as interactive fictions, the interface relies usually on two components: an input form where the player can type in some commands or possibly choose answers/actions from a quiz/list, and a feedback text area used to describe the result of the commands entered.

In Naked on Pluto, we rely on similar system but the difficulty for us is that we need to deal with much more data. For example each player has an inventory, an evolving list of possible actions and an overview of the space she/he is currently located, and who is around doing what. On top of that other players and bots are following their own plans that have an influence on your player’s status or on what can be available at a given place. All this data can be turned into text and displayed as some practical text-based interface, but we set ourselves the challenge to design the web application as if it was a book page. This choice is not gratuitous but I’m not going to spoil anything. In a classic text adventure interface all these elements are accessible via various commands, for example typing ‘inventory’ would display a list of the items that you are carrying. In our case we are trying to have these elements always visible on the interface, which is not easy when you need to deal with a growing list of items, or people standing in a room.

At the moment we split the interface in three zones: a “story” section, an input form and a status area. Concretely each action from a player or from another entity in the same location can be translated as a narrative element while allowing the player to get a constant overview of what are her/his options and what kind of entities are around. This still needs a lot of puzzling to make everything look nice and tight with the constraint that all must fit on a single page at fixed text/page size ratio (I probably need to explain that in the future). For now, we focus on tidying up everything as much as possible and I think we will be finally ready to run some gameplay test sessions very soon! :)