During the jam, the name of the game was to get levels, world's, art and UI interfaces done as the primary focus. The story, although extremely important to us, was taking a bit of a back seat it must be said. Ben would be thinking about it a lot obviously, eager to make something memorable, and we would be brainstorming ideas here and there every so often. But ultimately, the plan during the jam was to build an intro to the story, let the themes of each planet organically form through game design and then place a story over the top. In other words, game play first, story second. The jam was very much forcing our hand with its time constraints in this regard. 

There were some exceptions. In Devlog 2: Research & Prep, I described the idea of building a colony over time by completing puzzles. The colony would eventually build a launch pad enabling the player to leave the planet and travel to the next to find more puzzles. 

When we realized a more interesting story would be to have our protagonist Max alone out in space, this system for game progression ran counter to the story and we scrapped it very early in the jam's development period. 

Another idea we had that would also be scrapped in the end, was that of a projected work calendar. At a very early stage, we figured a working class engineer, one that worked for a large space mining company, would suit the premise of the game play. Max would be providing for his family who was living back on earth, and all he wanted was to get the job done in order to get back home. This would form the crux of the emotional drama of our sci-fi story. 

This calendar system would serve to show the players progress, and the more puzzles the player did, the sooner the projected time of arrival back home on earth would get. When the player finished the game, they would get a particular ending depending on how many par scores they achieved during their time playing (if you have played The Machine, you would be quite familiar with Ben's enthusiasm for multiple endings). If the player didn't manage to complete many par scores by the games end, maybe Max missed out on his children's birthday, or maybe his wedding anniversary. The player could then return to puzzles, trying to beat the par scores and work the projected time of arrival back even sooner, thereby getting a relatively happier ending.

This was a really nice concept. It provided an incentive through the story to go back and replay puzzles. It also added further drama because Max would now be getting disgruntled at his employer (DMSR) as they threw more work at him as per his contract, forcing him to risk missing out on his family life for the good of keeping a steady income. 

As we started to implement this system, we began worrying about whether it would actually make much sense. The idea of reducing an estimated time of arrival based on the work done kind of works, but would it be a little confusing for players? Going back to puzzles and spending more time on them just to reduce the amount of time spent on the job as per a calendar schedule doesn't make much sense once you start thinking about it. So this concept was eventually dropped, too.

But it wasn't a total loss, we now had Max working hard to provide for his family back home and we had manufactured a tyrannical faceless corporation named DSMR that Max could throw passive aggressive insults at as he toiled away out in space. In particular, Ben would follow this line of thought and put a friendly mask over the face of DSMR with Manager Kitty Ultra (MK Ultra for short).

MK Ultra is the mascot of DSMR, and would act as Max's artificially intelligent supervisor while on the job. Keeping Max in line, constantly reminding him of contract stipulations and to tow the company line, MK and Max don't always get along!

Not only is MK a fun character, he is also the perfect conduit for in-game hints and tutorials. He is an AI in the image of a cat so he can be condescending and not even know it. Perfect for telling the player what they need to know as they learn the game but importantly, as Max has been doing the same job for years, in context, MK just comes off as an annoying micro manager that still doesn't trust Max to do the job right. It all just works!

Ben worked to finalize the story of the full game over many many months.  It's gone through many changes as the game has evolved and we want it to be just as surprising as it is memorable, so I won't spoil much more here.

In the next Devlog, I'll take you through some of the many difficulties we have faced during development and how the project has had to adapt to suit them.

Happy Gaming!

Tom (Gumpy Function)