Two Words

Edited February 8, 2023

Another genre fiction finite-state machine, one of the 2020 20. This one's kinda middle of the pack. I like it, but it doesn't really break any new ground. Click the image up there to play, or see it in its original context on itch.io.

Original devlog / post-mortem:

For this one, I had an idea I wanted to try and found a jam that it would work for. Is this cheating? Is it even possible to cheat when you haven’t established any rules? I’m a little behind schedule, so this probably isn’t the last time this will happen.

Five years ago, I submitted an entry to a 200 word pen and paper RPG contest, and this game is based on that. I wanted to see if I could actually pull off a decent length game with those constraints. I took it a little further with this one, by deciding that I’d try not to use the “word word colon word word period” construction to cheat extra detail out. I also forbade myself from using things like gore-splattered or… I dunno… Once-in-a-lifetime.

This turned out to be more like Spooky Mountain than I expected, which is a little bit of a bummer, but I think it was worth the experiment to try to deliver an entire game in this writing style. I don’t really feel like I developed any new programming skills or techniques, either, but I guess practice is always good. On the design side, it was an interesting challenge to thread so many secret paths through it.

Simple game. Short postmortem.