Why, What and How?

This is the nerdy, dull bit. Probably only of interest to other game authors and even then it's a push. Anyway here's the deets about AWITP (A-Witt-Pea).

Why?

Well I've always had a passion to write a game and I have tried on a couple of occasions but with a full time job, family, friends, hobbies etc I could never find enough time. I'd get excited about an idea, start work, then get bored and move onto something else. Then one day, pretty much out of the blue, my life changed. I was given the opportunity to have quite a bit of time off. So among other things I decided to have a go at writing a game. I didn't want to spend any money on it (I'm Mr Skinny SkinFlint) and I wanted something reasonably small so that I'd finish it (a.k.a a bit of a lazy arse). I've been a coder and software architect for 30 years, so didn't need to test my design and coding skills but story writing? acting? music writing? modelling? Hmmm, I wasn't so sure. These other skills were more of an unknown. I wanted to find out one way or the other.

As it turned out I didn't write one line of code for AWITP. More about that later.

But why a walking simulator? I HATE that genre name. It's just about the worst genre name ever. It conjures up the exact opposite of what these kind of games really are. Anyway, I'd played Dear Esther some years ago and loved it. About a year ago I played Drizzlepath and found to my surprise that I really enjoyed that too. Recently I played Drizzlepath Genie and guess what, I enjoyed that too. I then thought back to other similar "games" that I'd played. "Gone Home", "Everyone's gone to the Rapture", "Firewatch" and most recently the totally freakin' awesome "What Remains Of Edith Finch". I had to accept that I really like "games" where you don't actually have to do anything. You don't get killed, you don't manage inventory, there's no quicktime events, no FPS run and gun skills needed, no mind bending puzzles, no alternate endings, no branching story and it's never unclear where you have to go next, it's on RAILS! That's odd right? Sounds boring? Well I love'em and it turns out I'm not alone and these games are definitely NOT boring.

What?

So the game type was decided but what about the story? I wrote the initial story, i.e. the bulk of the dialog, in 2 sittings then set to work on the game and had a working game in about 3 months.

The story was reasonably straightforward. You were a guy, your girlfriend had been murdered, you were still grieving after 6 months. Your best friend decides to take you on a hike in some nice countryside, apparently trying to help you deal with the grief. However, it turns out that he can't make it and communicates with you via phone. It also transpires that he loved your girlfriend too and murdered her because he was jealous of you two. And further he's intending to murder you as well on the hike.

So, when I say straightforward I mean there was no deeper meaning, it wasn't trying to be too clever, just a standard love triangle multiple murder scenario, pretty standard stuff :)

I used the setting of a fictitious national park, inspired by many trips to the Lake District in the UK. I suggested that the park wasn't open yet and had your main buddy talk to you via your phone. This meant I didn't have to worry about animating or lip syncing NPCs. Something I knew would be time consuming and would look awful if done badly. It also meant you'd be alone...ooh scary.

I wrote and recorded some pieces of music. I'd recently bought a baritone ukulele and used that on two of the pieces. At this point I could see the end in sight. Sure it needed some polishing and testing but I was close.

Then I had 3 conversations which changed things.

The first was a chat with my Dad. He's 80 yrs old and has never really got on with computers, he certainly doesn't play video games! I was trying to explain to him what AWITP was about and what the future may hold for me and my professional life and for some reason he asked if games could help people with mental health problems and had I ever thought about that. "I dunno, maybe...probably..and no" is how I responded...or something similar.

The second conversation was with my son. I was telling him how I thought my story needed more depth and we started throwing ideas about. One of the things he said was "what if the person on the phone is you". I think I responded with something like "Huh? What, but you are playing the...you idiot..wha...oh..whoa...oh that could be cool, I need to think about this."

At this point I sort of rewrote the story. Well maybe not rewrote, I kind of added another layer. The extra layer was that you, the player was actually suffering from MPD (Multiple Personality Disorder) and the man on the phone was one of your personalities. And the entire game was about you attempting to commit suicide albeit via your multiple personalities. Now it was getting interesting and a little weird and potentially a little confusing.

The MPD idea gave the story an extra level of depth, although how you the player would know this I wasn't so sure. I needed to add some clues.

Then I had the third conversation. This was with a very good friend of mine whom I've know since university. He and I have talked about games, art, films, stories almost constantly ever since. I was explaining my new story to him and showing off about how clever I was being when he started to challenge me, on multiple points. He challenged the central premise i.e. MPD, he said he believed MPD had been debunked many years ago...he was right...sort of. He also challenged the clarity and content of my clues. He didn't think people would understand the MPD layer of the story because there were not enough clues and those that existed were not obvious enough...he was right...sort of. He didn't think it was obvious that the text that appears and floats away from objects is the player's thoughts...he was right. He didn't think it was obvious that the text that appears in quotes every now and then at the bottom of the screen was the player's thoughts...he was right. He told me about a whole bunch of other things that he didn't think worked quite right. It sounds like he was being a real git but not at all, he helped so much. When creating anything be it story, level, music it's very easy to become blind or desensitised to your creation. You need to take big breaks and get other people to review it!

As a result of all his challenges I decided I needed to find out a bit more about MPD. So I hit Google and started researching. It turns out MPD is actually know as DID, Dis-associative Identity Disorder, and there is indeed a lot of debate over whether it really exists and even if it does can it manifest outside of the therapists office. One suggestion is that it is the very therapy that causes the DID to manifest and subsequent therapy just strengthens it. I won't go into everything I found but I read essays from doctors debunking DID, I read blogs from patients who suffer from it, I read that diagnosis is part of the DSM (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association) , I read articles from psychologists, journalists and authors. As usual the results are inconclusive. But I felt there was more than enough content to give credence to my story.

HOW?

I wrote AWITP using Unity 5.6 personal. The only money I spent was on Terrain Composer 2 by Nathaniel Doldersum. It cost about £35 and was money well spent. TC2 takes a bit of learning but its layered approach to terrain building is genius.

I was sorely tempted by Horizon[ON] by Becoming and will buy it soon, perhaps for the next project. But I wanted to keep a lid on the costs.

All the models used in AWITP came from the asset store and they are all free to use. I'm so thankful to the companies and individuals that provide this content to little people like me. Now I don't want to start an engine war but this is one of the areas that I think Unity comes out on top above Unreal. It's just harder to get commercially usable free stuff easily for Unreal. For Unity it's easy peasy.

All the sound effects came from me or sites using public domain or creative commons licensing. Again, a big thankyou to all the contributors.

As I mentioned previously I didn't write one line of code in AWITP. I'd purchased PlayMaker a couple of years ago but never tried to use it in anger. Well I like to get my money's worth so thought I'd give it a try. PlayMaker is an add-on for Unity, it's an event based Finite State Machine. Drag, drop, wire up, job done. PlayMaker is awesome for doing little, uncomplicated things fast, just what I needed. It takes a bit of getting used to and it does have some idiosyncrasies (Audio fade up actually fades down and vice versa) and I did end up swearing at it more than a few times but it was usually my fault or I managed to get around the problem without a lot of hassle.

All the music was either created and recorded for the game by me or taken from some previous musical projects I've worked on.

I spent about another 3 months fiddling, testing and polishing the game. Not full time, just a few hours now and again. I didn't track the time I spent working on AWITP accurately. I wish I had...actually there's a LOT of things I wish I'd done, maybe that's a blog for another day. Anyway my rough guess is that I spent approx 6 man weeks on AWITP, you then get to experience that effort in about 50 minutes, how's that for a compression algorithm....it's a funny old world.