A Long Rest post-mortem

Now that A Long Rest has been out there for a few months, it feels like a good opportunity to reflect. In this post I’ll talk about the project’s background and the goals I had for it, the opinions and comments I have about the final piece and the lessons I learnt from creating it that I’ll take forward for the future.

This analysis will spoil the events of A Long Rest. You have been warned.

Background

Playing and exploring Sayeth’s games piqued my curiosity. It touched on a longstanding passion of mine to understand rules systems and the underlying model of a thing. The games, even aside from being exciting romps in their own right, were rich and enticing without appearing inscrutable. The matter was settled: I’d have a go at making my own.

I dove enthusiastically into the deep end. I downloaded Twine, saw the Harlowe manual like a menu and thought I’d plump for one of everything. I decided that I would devise a thrilling 3rd-level adventure, in homage to the 1st- and 2nd-level stories of The Saint’s Tomb and A Miner Problem, and that it would offer a compelling, literary and very personal tale.

In short order, the ridiculousness of my overambition came clear: both in the size of the eventual gamebook and the unfounded expectations I was placing on my creative writing ability. The project needed some drastic reining in. I ditched the 3rd-level aim, sketched a new story and consciously shrank the concept down to 2nd- and then 1st-level. And, yet, the scope was still too big.

If I was going to deliver anything, then I needed to abandon the idea of making “a proper game” (whatever that means) and instead shoot for just “a proof of concept”. It now became a matter of asking myself what the most deliverable project I could conceive?

Goals

Content-wise, I drew on my experience running, and very occasionally playing, TTRPGs. I also prevaricated enough in making A Long Rest that Sayeth brought out 5e Arena, from which I could draw influence. In then end I settled on the following objectives.

• Must-haves:
  • an interesting combat encounter
  • a puzzle not based on words
  • some role-playing
  • character customisation
• Nice-to-have:
  • treasure hunt/easter eggs

Opinions

I’ll evaluate my goals in turn below. Beforehand, let me underline that each feature I added to the game increases the amount of code and/or prose I had to write. I have to continually interrogate whether I think the game was better was for these additions and, if so, whether that improvement was proportionate to the time I’d spent on it.

Combat

The other concessions I made to non-combat characters was to allow them to move, and to interact with the environment in different ways. You could run rings around the viper, confusing its ability to locate you. You can could cast floating disc and attack the viper with impunity. You can consume the mushroom clusters for some risky healing (of a sort) or you can uproot them and thereby end the combat encounter without actually having to attack.

I wanted to empower the player to make interesting choices and to approach the scenario as their character would. I think I did a mediocre job of this: really, this is a tabletop encounter artificially squished into a gamebook medium. There’s so much text to read and so many UI elements all competing for your attention.

I also invited the player to co-create the encounter by explicitly allowing them to supplement it with aspects of their own devising. But am I not contradicting myself, having just also given them lots of details to have to worry about? I think this was poorly executed. It felt glued on at the last minute – which, hand on heart, it was.

Puzzle

I like that it’s visual. The adventure as a whole involves a lot of reading; it’s nice to take a break from that. The slate blue is also a welcome change from the orange background I chose.

I strongly dislike that you can’t make incremental progress on the multi-stage puzzles. You can’t be 10% or 50% or 99% of the way there like you could with, say, a wordsearch or crossword or sudoku, or even the key-hunting element of the game. Your combination either works or doesn’t; that’s it, and you essentially need to brute-force your way through the combinations. Imagine I’d made a 5- or 6- stage puzzle, wouldn’t it be somewhere between a chore and a nightmare to solve?

I also strongly dislike that this is a puzzle for the player, not for the character. Your high Intelligence score will do absolutely nothing for you here.

Overall, I think the puzzle is fine at best. I’m glad it’s as brief as it is, and I wouldn’t use this again without an incredibly compelling reason.

Role-playing

For those players who struggle with words, there are defaults pre-filled so they can just click through without inputting anything themselves. For those who input words that don’t scan quite right in the final story, there’s Undo functionality to give them a second chance. (Although in the cases I’ve seen, I think the little rough edges makes that final story all the more jolly and playful). Both of these measures add to the robustness of the game element.

I’d happily use a mad-lib activity again, but I wonder whether it would work as effectively if it wasn’t disguised as child’s story, being spoken aloud by the player character?

Character customisation

Treasure hunt

The domestic setting, the small scale and the low stakes of the setting (climaxing I suppose in the viper fight) were meant as deliberate artistic challenges to both the planarverse-spanning fantasy operas, and also the capitalist/colonial notion of treasure, that I’ve seen elsewhere. I wanted a little story that still felt impactful, and small rewards that still meant a lot. So, with this treasure hunt, I think it benefits greatly from being an optional extra. Players who want the (ultimately a little saccharine) reward will have to have bought in to pursuing it.

Other comments

Lessons

• Add a prominent skip button to puzzles, to make game content accessible.
• Choosing to do something makes you buy into it more.
• Less is more: simplifying the UI reins in the number of choices presented to a player, making it clearer what to do and how to do it.
• Accept that this is a gamebook and not a tabletop adventure; there are, and should be, limits to what the player can do.

Conclusion

I really enjoyed building the game engine. In the future, I’d like to create something more involved and simulative, to create the feeling of some dynamic world that the player’s interacting with.

Thanks for reading. If you have any feedback you’d like to share for the game (that you haven’t already shared as a comment), then let me know below. I already have plans for a 2nd-, a 3rd- and a 4th-level adventure. Watch this space!