Mods are asleep, post mortems.

Friends, Lithobreakers, Virtual-Countrypersons, it seems almost hubristic to be writing this postmortem. I am flattered by the reception of unhand.me. Now it falls upon me, apparently, to write about the making of it, about the process of creation which to me remains a thing utterly arcane, and if I have made something worthy of compliment, it seems to me by accident and some small measure of literary talent. Oh, and the deliberate exploitation of the worst thing that ever happened to me. I suppose I can talk about that.

1 - Why?

I set out into my first Lithobreakers - hi, by the way, honoured to be here amongst such a wealth of creativity and talent - without the slightest premonition I might make a game like unhand.me. I first wanted to work collaboratively, if I could, but saw fairly quickly that writers were in good supply, and nothing else I can do holds a candle to my ability to arrange words in interesting ways. So, then, on my own. Unhinged group dynamics. Around this time I was watching S.A.S. Rogue Heroes, which is better than it should be, or better than I wanted it to be, given the obviousness of its utility as a military recruitment tool (it is many things beyond this, of course, and not this primarily or even secondarily). This threw me into mind of pulpy, fantasy, commando unit escapades. Vampires behind enemy lines. Romantic tensions between arcane explosions, the slow sacrifice of human dignity in the name of war; the slow collapse of pretense as soldiers turn into animals. Let fly the dogs of war!

So, uh, why didn’t I do that? That’s the meat and bones of the TTRPG game I wish I was running (and a lot of it made it into setting/world design for TTRPG use nonetheless). The answer was unbidden. I realised I could make unhand.me. The structure emerged from the mists. The scenes I could use, the back-and-forth of tension, drama, and mundanity. The climax (alas, innuendo), characters, mechanics… It came together before I knew I had made my decision. By that point the easiest thing to do was to make it. I knew I’d regret it if I didn’t.

A few other things flew in favour. I wanted to work in Narrat, and I had an idea I thought terribly clever about making it lie to you. I also wanted to keep my scope limited: running TTRPGs I build scenarios, not stories, and I place a high value on agency. There is a time and a place for this, but not now. This could be a linear narrative, and I wouldn’t need to feel bad about compromising my principles because the whole point would be about lack of agency. I pat myself on the back and get to work.

2 - How?

A few (two, it seems) things to mention here. I don’t claim much innovation, but I’ll lay out my artifice such as it is.

1. Fake rolls, anti-agency

Narrat lets you customise the dice it rolls for skill checks, i.e. the amount of sides on the virtual die or, practically, the range of number generation. A 1d10 roll yields a result of 1-10. But 1d1 is a number, and whilst such a die in realspace would be a sphere, and never stop rolling, Narrat simply generates a number between 1 and 1, which is always 1, which gives me total control over success and failure of checks by adjusting the difficulty / target number. Hooray. Add in the ability to re-label the difficulty description text and I can lie to a player by telling them an impossible task is easy and then guaranteeing they fail. “This should be easy! Why am I failing?” - Welcome to the intended player experience. 

Having taken away the choice-consequence-agency from players when they “roll” “checks”, the climax (alas, innuendo) needed to go one further. So I took away the choice-of-choice-agency, which someone else might appellate better, and you’ve all seen before, but bears mention. I increase the frequency of choices, slow down the progression of the scene. You have to be there, moment by moment. It’s uncomfortable even before it really gets bad. Good. And then, it gets bad, and you stop having choices, because in those moments, you don’t. It also, I think, signals to the player that the story isn’t about them anymore - that there isn’t a them - there is the character, and the character isn’t them. Incidentally, depersonalisation is a thing. You get three not-choices. Three felt right. Magic number. Something something.

2. Humour and The Hand

There are a lot of jokes in unhand.me. A lot of it is just reference humour, and a lot of the references are couched very specifically in me, but I genuinely don’t think the game would work without it. It’d be too one-note. Too unrelentingly distressing. The Hand - which if you’ve played you know is the weight of trauma hell-bent on suffocating you until you die - was one of the characters I’ve most enjoyed writing… ever? I think? It’s almost cartoonish in its villainy, absurd in its certainty that it will kill you. And on its way about doing so it bastardises quotes from Dune. And Albert Camus. Its ramblings are borderline poetic, and implied to continue when the “camera” isn’t on it at all. And, like all the best villains, it loses. It talks and talks and talks and does very little, and then the hero wins out the day. Hoorah!

An honourable mention also to a line that made me laugh a lot when writing: “Biblical, kaleidoscopic  /  Be not afraid, dude”. Savannah Brown has described, for beginner purposes, poems as thematic venn diagrams, and you move imagery around trying to find interesting overlaps. I think I took more from that metaphor than was intended, but I like this as an example of the technique.

3 - Hown’t?

Or, what didn’t work so well.

Here I verge again on hubris. The writing worked. The design worked. Even the aesthetic considerations, simple though they were, worked well enough. 

That said, I released a game that was, at first, fundamentally broken. Reviews were good… so I didn’t realise the game was cut at halfway. Would this have been solved with literally ONE playtest of the release version? Yes, absolutely. I won’t even claim that the subject matter disproportionately exhausted me - emotionally or such. I am writing about the hole from sufficiently far from the hole. Probably via drone imaging. Fact is I was- I hate the word “lazy”. I was insufficiently motivated. There was a sense of “doneness” when I had finished writing, a second “doneness” when I sorted the visuals. So I was “done”, and didn’t playtest. I apologise - genuinely - to those who didn’t get to play the game properly. I hope you have had time and inclination to revisit.

Next time? I would like to work in a team. Really. So many games had beautiful art, or music, or were programmed in ways that are not my strength. I have words, but mostly only words. So many talented people! 

Anyway, that’s been something I’m calling a post mortem. It’s very late. I apologise. But here it is / has been / will be.