Post-Mortem: "The Check-Out Line" - My First Ludum Dare

I thought it might be fun to do a little write-up of my first Ludum Dare, and my first solo project as a game dev, and itch.io gives me a place to do that. I'm also not good at keeping my mouth shut about the sneaky things I try to do in the things I write, so this is too big of a temptation to pass up. I'll be discussing spoilers for the game, so if you don't want that then I recommend you click over and give the game a play first. It isn't really a long game, depending on how closely you read the text. And I do recommend you read closely. There are things you can miss if you let your eyes glaze over too much.

---HERE BE SPOILERS---

I'm a narrative designer. I understand coding to a point, but it's not my specialty at all. I wanted to create something that relied on story and showcased my ability to design and tell a story within a pre-determined framework(the LDJAM theme). I also wanted it to be a good story, which is tricky to do in a weekend if you want the game to last for any significant amount of time. If you're really good at code, you can make up for pretty hefty lackings in your story in a game. And I also think that if you're really good at telling stories, you can make up for a lacking in ability to code. Hopefully that's what I achieved here. If it's at least interesting, then I did a good job.

The Check-Out Line is not what it seems on the surface. I think that design choice may have deterred some of the judges in the Ludum Dare, but I don't know if I could have done it differently and achieved the same effect. Let me start by saying that The Check-Out Line is a psychological horror game. It doesn't read that way for the first couple of loops, and that's supposed to be the sinister effect of it. This admittedly is the pont where people started turning the game off, but for those who stick with it I think it has a good effect.

The game's structure consists of 14 "loops." I actually don't even view them as real loops, because they are not the same every time, and because I didn't design the game as a loop. In Twine, my layout of the different passages looks like this:

You can see here that it's actually more of a spiral descent. I broke it into two pillars to avoid one gigantic spiral that would require even more scrolling than this version already does. Each wide block is the beginning of the next "loop." I borrowed this idea from the visualization someone created for the structure of the "loops" in Hideo Kojima's PT, which shows each lap around the house as a slow descent due to the small staircase you descend at the end of each lap. A like this idea of a slow, spiraling descent into madness, and the concept of being stuck in a loop facilitated this structure. Every lap wears away a little more of your resolve. Every lap exposes you to things that make you feel more and more like you're going crazy, and all the while you're reliving the same couple of minutes over and over and over and over again.

These 14 loops can be subdivided into categories to create a rising and falling action, like a traditional three-act story structure. Those subdivisions would look like this:

Loop 1: The base intro to the game.

Loops 2,3: Apparent loops, but with subtle, odd changes, intended to make you wonder if you misread something.

Loops 4,5,6,7: Clickables let the player alter the text, misbehaving and eventually acting violently toward NPCs, simulating the realization that one's actions don't affect a loop, so why fear consequences?

Loop 8: Midpoint. The player character attempts to escape the loop, but is stopped. It's suggested that things are not as they seem, and the one thing you are not allowed to do is leave.

Loops 9,10: Another descent into madness as the NPCs become monstrous and the text itself starts betraying you, hinting that your perceptions can't be trusted.

Loops 11,12,13: A collection of puzzles, one for each loop and a larger puzzle that requires manipulation in all three loops to get through. Each puzzle provides text that hints at different aspects about the game world and its horrors.

Loop 14: The last loop. The player character is ragged. Their body is taxed and their mind is drained. Thus prepared, they are finally allowed to approach the cashier. The cashier is revealed to be an eldritch being, and explains that all of this is inside of them. The player has been slowly worn away and consumed through each loop of the game, and now the creature offers the player the choice to be consumed and end the torture, or to walk away. It's unclear which choice is the good ending, and only one of them truly breaks the loop.

You'll notice that most of this structure is completely linear. That was partially by design and partially because of the theme. You can't exactly have loads of branching paths and still call it a loop, can you? So the only options I came up with would just send you back up the loop, or let you descend further down into the darkness. I didn't want to fill the thing with puzzles because I felt that would become too meta and potentially frustrating, since the result of failing a puzzle is being forced back up the loop. And also because I'm not the most skilled puzzle designer at this point.

What I did wrong

If I were to do anything differently the first thing would probably be to add one puzzle earlier on to prepare the player sooner for that kind of engagement. All four puzzles occure in Loops 11,12, and 13, with an overarching puzzle encompassing all three. That's admittedly pretty late to introduce a new mechanic, but at the time of design I thought it would be a good curveball to add to the anxiety of the experience, but after actually getting players to test the game, it looks like the more likely choice is too just give up and assume the loop was never going to end. That's one of the downsides of participating in a weekend jam and not having time or resources for beta testers.

It's also clear that the first few loops don't make it clear that something deeper is going on. Maybe I could've highlighted the changed text to make things more clear, or found some other reason to give the player to push forward and not quit during the first three loops.

I also would have cleaned up my code and implemented some features in a cleaner way. It's not like there are that many features, being a Twine game, but I'm sure I could've made them more enjoyable and illict the mood I was going for more efficiently. I just didn't feel like I had the time, and I've only been using Twine for a couple of weeks at this point, so I restricted myself to features I already knew how to create or could easily figure out from the documentation. I would've enjoyed prototyping some fancy tricks for this one, but this just wasn't the project to learn that stuff.

I also would've slowed down and taken my time. I initially uploaded a broken game due to the above-mentioned lack of testers, and because I didn't test as thoroughly as I thought I did. I had to scramble to fix several bugs that an acquaintance found shortly after the release. I can probably forgive myself for this one though, with it being my first game. But I've launched projects in other media before and had similar problems, so at the same time I probably should've learned my lesson by now. I get excited at the end of a project and don't always take my time where I should.

What I did right

I honestly think I made a pretty good story. It may not be the most engaging text game or the best-written piece of interactive fiction, but I think it's at least an interesting idea, and the right kind of player would have a good time with it. It's not a game for everyone, but that's okay. These days it's better to have a small and serious fanbase than to get mass appeal. As long as somebody had a good time with this game and its story, then I'm happy with it.

And despite my lacking in coding ability, I at least was able to build a complete experience that was functional from beginning to end(ignoring the bugs I had to squash after the first attempt). That's an accomplishment on its own. Just getting a game built to a point of playability is something to be proud of.

This is maybe a dumb thing to put in this category, but I think the decision to commission custom music was the right call. The track I ended up with was much better than the copyright-free music I was going to settle for, and I made an industry acquaintance in the process. That on its own is worth the price of admission, even though I paid to have something made for "just a free jam game." It gives the game a little boost, in my opinion.

Closing the loop

All in all I'd probably rate myself at a solid 3.8/5 on performance, relative to what I had to work with. I can do better, but that's what next time is for. And for a dinky little IF concept I came up with on Friday night and designed and built in a weekend, it could've been a lot worse. People have said nice things about the game, and I'm happy with that.