Alright, it looks like it’s not going to work

I’ve clearly lost this fight over the user interface, so I’ll do it the way you’re used to. Right up to the point where I delete the creatures and turn it into a fucking platform game, if I have to. You win! I thought you might, but I kept my fingers crossed.

I’m sorry if that sounds resentful, I don’t mean it that way, but I really don’t do these things just to be awkward. I really don’t. I do them for reasons. Damn good reasons. Often reasons that nobody knows about yet. Nevertheless, if it doesn’t work, then it doesn’t work and that’s that. Even if I make you live with it for a while to see if it settles in, it’ll just spill back out next time you see something you’re not used to. Despite what people seem to assume, I worked in the games industry for years, as both a developer and an executive. I know how the psychology of it works, and I know when I’ve lost the battle. So I’ll think again. It’s fair enough. I’m quite okay with starting again, normally, but I really am terrified that I’m going to go bankrupt before I can make this project work, right at this moment, so I’m feeling a lot of pressure to make progress. I’m probably not going to sound as chill as I’d like to. I don’t mean any harm – I know you’re all really nice people – but I’m stressed. Quite seriously stressed. I can’t help it and I can’t afford to get any help for it either. Also I’m autistic, but I’ll talk about why that matters another day.

Just as a general point: this is what software DEVELOPMENT means, though. We developers develop things. We try things out to see if they work, and if they don’t, then we either adjust them or abandon them and start again. This has happened inside every single game you’ve ever played, but you don’t normally see it – it all happens on kanban boards in fancy offices where you’re not invited. You don’t see the working out, just the final polished product. But you’re here to watch over my shoulder, and so you’re seeing it. That’s all it is – normal software development. Even in other software industries things need experimenting with, but it’s especially true with games, because they’re fundamentally much more of a creative endeavor than, say, a business application.

What I’ve made is called a diagetic interface. It’s a thing. I expect you’ll find plenty of academic papers on the subject. The main reason you don’t see many of them out there in game-land is that games have become fast food. There are more than FIFTY THOUSAND games on Steam alone. Most of them are inevitably going to be very much like the others. People have started cloning existing game genres and designs at a hell of a rate, and you get to “have it your way” nowadays, purely by picking from the menu at the drive-through. You want ketchup with that, or relish? A hamburger chain may sell the odd salad (mostly to give the impression that their menu is healthy), but hamburgers are hamburgers. They’re all different, but they’re not very different. They don’t take very long to make, they don’t provide us with all that much satisfaction, but we’re addicted to them anyway. This is not how senior game developers wish things were, and I imagine it’s not how gamers wish things were either, but it’s how things are.

It’s been like this even since the 1980’s. I’ve sat through plenty of product pitches that ran along the lines of “Our idea is to do a version of Quake, but with a bit more of a Doom vibe, except all the baddies are women. Cool, huh? And, get this, we do it all in pink!!!!” The same thing happens with game journos – “What game is your new one most like? Which genre does it belong to?”

Anyway, a diagetic interface is a legitimate thing – it’s an interface that exists inside the virtual word, in world space, rather than outside it in 2D screen space, like 99%+ of all UIs do. It’s just not the kind of thing you’re used to, because of all the fucking clones. It has consequences, most of them good, but some of them not so good. One consequence in this case is that I can’t rotate the character’s body to turn in space, because then the user interface parts would turn with it, and so you wouldn’t be able to point to things on it. The solution to that (I thought) was to behave like actual human beings do: you turn the character’s head, and then the body turns to catch up, as you move forwards. That seems to be the thing that has everyone telling me I’ve done it wrong again, and so that’s a clearly real sticking point. It’ll have to go!

I don’t know how far that means I’m going to have to fall back towards familiar territory. I really want this notebook idea to work, because I have plans, and the notebook helps make those plans possible, whereas other conventional UI devices, like menus and buttons, don’t really fit. Again, a command-line interface, like I’ve done for the notebook, is already a thing – it’s well-known to its friends as a CLI – but it’s not a thing you’re going to come across in many games. Because most games are clones. The conventions you’re used to arose from a set of constraints back in the 1980’s, and then people wrote more games using those same conventions, so as to piggyback on the success of the earlier games (or because they didn’t have any genuinely new ideas of their own), which meant they were stuck with the same constraints. Now you have 50,000 choices of this, all with a bit of dead cow stuck between two slices of bread, only this time some of them are pink!

So I’m going to stick with the notebook idea, because I have plans. It looks like I have to change the way we turn, so that the whole body turns, which almost certainly means we can’t have that notebook in diagetic form, because it would turn with the body and always be in exactly the same place on the screen. So it’ll probably have to be in screen space. VR is then right out the window, because there’s no screen space in VR, or if you try to use it, it really pisses people off and makes them feel sick. But nobody plays VR games anyway, so I’m okay with throwing that option away.

Is there any point in having a body now? It was a massive pain in the ass to do, so if it no longer serves any purpose then I’ll just delete it. But it was kind of cute to actually have a shadow, and potentially reflections, if nothing else. It situates you in the world. Virtual worlds that you don’t feel immersed in aren’t much fun. But then again, 3D avatars aren’t very realistic, yet, so if we’re not going to turn our head, there’s not much point in having a body either, since it was mostly there to help provide a reference frame for head movements and to stop the diagetic notebook from floating in space.

I’m going to have to think about it all – again! – including how it affects all the plans you don’t even know about yet, so DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES SAY TO ME ‘WHY DON’T YOU JUST MAKE IT WORK LIKE GAME X?’ If you want a game like X, then just play game X, or one of its doubtless many clones. I’m not writing game X. I’m not even writing a game – I’ve written several things that were published as games, and none of them were games!

I’ll go away and think about it. But just consider the current downloads to be moot and wait for the next build. I’ll get it right eventually, I swear. The user interface has always been a real sticking point and I always get it wrong. But I assure you that it’s not just that I need to look at a few games and copy the way they do it.

If you don’t hear from me for a while, it’s just that I’m working on this AND something else, which is what I was hoping to get on with next. There’s a limit to how much I can take of damned user interfaces, so I’m going to try to split my time between both.