For only 5 of your human minutes, you can experience the glorious pulp horror comedy splendor that is Interview with an Ichthyologist Itch.io! (Did I mention that you can get a pet fish-puppy to smite your enemies?)
Ask not for whom the garbage fountain fountains, IT FOUNTAINS FOR THEE.
I wrote a simple game in Inkle as part of a writing test for a prospective employer, and I enjoyed it so much that I decided to cheat and make it my submission for last week's Garbage Fountain Day.
You see, I'm currently embroiled in Operation Garbage Fountain with my friend Lars Doucet (of ValueBase, Land Is a Big Deal, Fortress of Doors, etc. fame.) I had originally planned on making a Twine project for my entry when a job that I had applied to weeks beforehand invited me to engage in a writing test. As someone who enjoys both writing and being employed*, I obviously said yes.
*Actually, what I enjoy is purchasing unhealthy numbers of Lego castles. Employment is just a necessary evil.
Imagine my surprise when the writing sample was, in fact, game design!
The assignment was simple: download open source interactive fiction editor Inkle and create a simple narrative game. The stated target was roughly 300 lines or "what you can do in about three hours."
I had never used Inkle before. As I stated above, I'm more of a Twine man, myself – OR I WAS.
It turns out that Inkle is really, really, really easy to use, at least for the kind of insane little pieces of interactive fiction that I like to put together. I may never look back.
Now, I knew that I had to move fast. My creation needed to be simple but, naturally, AS OVER-THE-TOP WEIRD AS I COULD POSSIBLY MAKE IT.
My prospective employers were kind enough to include a couple of example games, one of which was a weird Pokémon battle system full of hitpoints and randomized damage. I quickly raided it for the appropriate variables and functions.
Once I knew that I could so easily have simple "stand and deliver" combat, ideas started popping into my head: What if, instead of a simple slugging match until one side or the other wins, the player was also running around in an environment trying to collect things to improve their odds of winning?
A vague emotional quasi-image began to form in my mind: A single, impossibly strong enemy chasing the player through a strange and exciting environment. (I guess all of those years working on Temple Run have warped my brain.)
Being a theme-first kind of guy, I quickly ran through possible narrative genres that could make for an interesting player fantasy:
– A hard-boiled private eye cornered by goons.
– A hapless guest trapped in Dracula's castle.
– A gentleman detective who catches the murderer only to discover that they are actually a horrifying monster.
"Dinner with Dracula" had a nice ring to it, but I couldn't help wanting to be just a little bit weirder. During my time with Temple Run, I had delved deep into the strange waters of Pulp Adventure and all of its associated genres of weird fiction. My bookshelves are now lined with esoteric 1930s stories of cursed treasures, mad cultists, volcano islands, monstrous beasts, cannibals, and all sorts of other mind-shredding supernatural strangeness beyond human understanding.
So, I thought, "Why not do all of the stuff that I couldn't do with Temple Run?" (Temple Run being, like any gigantic family-friendly brand, so nailed down that it was a massive internal argument as to whether or not a cartoon samurai character would be allowed to actually swing a cartoon sword.)
I grabbed the hapless guest trapped in a castle idea, smashed it into the "this guy is actually a monster" idea, and created Interview with an Ichthyologist, a five-minute 1930s pulp horror comedy adventure.
I had entirely too much fun completing the assignment. (My submitted project clocked in at close to 600 lines, as I recall.)
Well, I had so much fun that I haven't been able to put it down since. (We are at 1100 lines and rising. Every time I walk past my computer, I add a new ending or two.) Is it balanced and coherent? Absolutely not. But can you resurrect a stuffed swordfish and turn him into a mutant fish-puppy and then send him to wage glorious combat in your name? YES.
Not bad, for the garbage fountain's first geyser!
Also, if you haven't ever played around with Inkle, I highly recommend it! After spending years working with different companies' esoteric internal formats (and/or writing directly in spreadsheets), it's kind of incredible to be able to make a game just by writing plain text. Like, you just type words. And then they appear! IN THE GAME! You can test it as you write, which is – by game development standards – SHEER MADNESS.
Speaking of madness… stay tuned!
MORE GARBAGE IS ON THE WAY.
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