I accomplished my 2022 goals and then some.¹ Ideally I would’ve finished a few more in-progress games, but I got the big one, ProtoBound, and did my fair share of new games. But this post isn’t about that—that’s the retrospective, out sometime.

This year, I want to focus on games with a heavy emphasis on writing. While that will likely manifest in a bunch of twine games, I’m not limiting myself to that engine² nor to text adventure-like games. A game where you walked around a neighborhood and just talked to people would also count.

The Projects

Same disclaimer as last year: my motivation is fickle, and it’s likely that most, if not all, of these projects will not actually be ones that I’m working on. Even worse since I’m writing this list in late November of 2022, not even in 2023. I also fully expect to work on non-writing focused games,³ especially for miscellaneous jams I join.

In-Progress Projects

Games from my unfinished list that I’d like to get back to.

Fighter’s Guild

This game is modeled after a quest line that you’d see in an Elder Scrolls-like game. For more details, you can see my 2021 retrospective.

Between my work for NaNoWriMo 2021 and my work on it in 2022, this has a lot of effort already put into it. There are still some chapters that need to be written out, a battle system to be integrated, and a lot of UI work, but it’s probably at least 30% done. This is the project that I most want to finish in 2023, as I’ve already done a good amount of writing for it, and I like it for its unconventional flow.

Sacrifice Game

This game is unapologetically inspired by I am Setsuna, in which you play as a mercenary hired to kill the sacrifice to some god. Naturally, since writers are cowards, you don’t actually go through with it, but it did make me think about a game where you did kill the chosen one.

It feels weird for me to put this in the in-progress projects category, but I did last year so it’ll stay here again.⁴ This was the game I was going to work on for NaNoWriMo 2021 that got pushed aside before I did any work in it. I was thinking of doing it in RPG Maker, but I think I’ll stick to my strengths⁵ and implement it in twine, which will make the battle system more difficult but everything else easier. I don’t see this one having a very long script—most likely fewer than twenty thousand words.

Potential Projects

Between some new ideas this year and some old ideas I have in my game idea doc that are writing focused, I have a few concepts for other games I can pursue. I’m dumping them here to remember them. Original ideas,⁶ do not steal.⁷

Trust Sim

The concept for this one is lighter on the writing side: you arrive on an alien world and have to figure out what is actually true and what is misinformation/incorrect things people believe. Probably twine for this one as well, depending on how well the mechanics mesh with it. For some of the questions you will be able to run experiments, but for others you’ll have to depend on the opinions of other people.

In the end you’ll be graded on how well you managed to divine the correct answers. There will be plenty of chance involved, as you won’t be able to figure out everything for yourself.

Robot Sim⁸

In this one, I’m hoping to model out a small neighborhood⁹ and populate it with some NPCs that do different things on every day. The player would be a robot that was recently powered on who could only communicate using “yes” or “no”. They would interact with the various people in the neighborhood, who would have different reactions to the player’s presence. At the end of each day, the player chooses whether or not they want to be deleted (stop playing) or continue (play the next day). Eventually, the NPC reactions would loop (out of necessity, if nothing else), and the player would choose to be deleted.

Once the player was deleted, each NPC will give a eulogy based on their interactions with the player. The current plan is to use ink in conjunction with Unity.

Alien Language Sim

This game has been kicking around in my head ever since I saw Arrival in 2016. You’d be exposed to another alien civilization, whose language you’d need to decode by some timeline. As in the movie, you’d need to attempt to determine whether or not the alien race was hostile to know whether or not to mount a pre-emptive strike. This one is tricky, since it’d need multiple different alien languages that were randomized, which seems like a hard thing to do.¹⁰

The mechanical complexity of this one is why I put it at the bottom. I also feel like there was another indie that did this a year or two ago, probably better than I ever could, but that’s fine.

Conclusions

I’d thought I had six ideas, but the last one eludes me and I didn’t have it written down anywhere,¹¹ so five it is. To be honest, I’m fairly bearish on the idea that I’ll accomplish this one, but it’s all about managing the scope.

There should be nothing stopping me from doing six games of similar length to Pedestrian Protestations, and I wouldn’t be upset if that’s all that I accomplished. I enjoy writing, even if the games I’ve written are the ones I get most anxious about when I think of people playing them.