Postmortem (and small patch)

First, the small patch:

• Fixed a few typos (but only a few, a longer edit pass is needed, one day)
• For events with disqualified options, allowed both options to be disqualified simultaneously without soft-locking the game.
• Lengthened the period that the stat update is displayed. If I'm honest, I was low on time and just reused the same timer as page transitions previously.

Now, on to the postmortem:

If you've followed my work, you might know I have an absurdly long-in-development main project. You might also know that my life situation has changed significantly this year. I'll have more to say on that soon in the appropriate places. Anyway, the long and short is that the one thing I cannot find at the moment is big blocks of uninterrupted time. (Well, the other thing I cannot find at the moment is money, but that's a different discussion.) The old chestnut about a context switch costing 45 minutes is almost certainly bullshit, but the cost is most assuredly non-zero. This has made it very hard to make headway on a big, complex project with a heavy simulation and too many moving parts. Thus, here I am doing game jams to prevent skills from atrophying.

Part of how I allow myself to do these things at all is that I experiment. My tech (which is shameless stolen from my main project) leverages the web stack, but I had hitherto only targeted the desktop. One of my goals with Latter-Day Pamphlets was to go from "theoretically works in the browser" to "actually works in the browser." I additionally noticed that itch.io had provisions for uploading a game as a single HTML file, so I added that to the list as well. Insofar as that experiment goes, the game was a smashing success. I additionally wanted to definitively prove that the frankly weird SVG abuses I use on my website would work in a narrative game. Again, a resounding success.

The game itself wasn't quite as good as I hoped it would be. It was a joy to write; I have spent so long in 12th century Anglo-Norman England that a quick jaunt to the Victorian Era was a treat. Alas, it lacked both the depth of the previous jam game as well as the systems and replayability of the subsequent jam game (for those keeping score, that's two games in as many months, and I'm going to endeavor to make a third). In my defense, I was particularly time-starved in October, and the technical work took more time than I imagined.

When looking for these jams, I've been trying to find mostly medium-sized, narrative-focused jams that last around a month. I actually did not know that ECTOCOMP was quite as big a deal as it is when I joined. I'm now in a strange situation in which what is most likely my weakest completed game has more views and engagements than my other completed games (though still orders of magnitude lower than DGR). If I had know that it was a serious thing, I might not have been quite as cheeky with my entry. I do stand by tagline of "Victorian horror of decline and ruin" though; that it is a horror game is a hill I'm willing to die on.

Beyond that, my biggest regret with the project was that there was essentially no discussion. Casting the player in the role of the disembodied spirit of the empire was a bit of a choice. Would people try to keep their empire score as high as possible, as the game systems tacitly suggested? Would, instead, people try to intentionally lower their empire score out of moral duty, even if it harmed the people who lived under its rule? How would people react to a game in which the score inexorably and unpreventably declines rather than increases? How much Carlyle, Kipling, etc. could I toss in before someone complained? These are questions asked by the game and which I will never see answered. Obscurity and silence are, of course, the defaults, so I'm not particularly fussed.

For those of you who did see what I was trying to do though, thank you. I see you; I appreciate you.

With luck, I will complete the third jam at the end of the month. It will be very different, just as all of these have been very different from one another. If you're interested in that sort of thing, check back in a month or so!