Rover Over - GGC Final

Shane Cagney, Spring 2021

I decided to base my final project off of my dérive. The combination of that walk and you showing us decreasing variables inspired me to make a game where you are always draining resources, like fuel. The first thing that popped into my head was a rover, and I loved that idea so much. I wanted to make the game sort of lonely, and just be a rover exploring and picking up fuel and stuff. I changed pinecones (my original dérive trail) to shiny rocks because it felt more space-themed, but the placements are roughly the same. In fact, the entire map is designed to follow the path of my dérive, even in the Twine node view. Even though I was already kind of inspired, I ran through all of the required generators hoping to fine-tune my idea. I started with Oblique Strategies, and got:

Faced with a choice, do both: I couldn’t decide what I wanted the goal of the game to be-- find your crewmates, just explore, get off the planet, etc etc. Using this oblique strategy, I decided to make the game have plenty of optional paths. Beyond little passages you don’t need to see to beat the game, you can also finish the game without saving a crewmember if you want to. It’s pretty flexible.
Accept advice / What would your closest friend do?: I got both of these back to back, so I decided to use them both and ask my girlfriend Ava for help. I did this once I was a little more than halfway through. Because of some other prompts that I’ll explain later, the ending was originally going to be that there kind of is no ending-- you would just go around trying to do these tasks until you ran out of fuel and died. Originally, most of the crew had been murdered by some kind of moon beast. The whole thing was very existential. She thought that was really sad and insisted I put a good ending in the game. So now, there is one. Also, the fate of the crew members changed. That really helped me figure out how to move the story forward, as I had to build towards the conclusion.
Do we need holes?: Given that my game takes place on the moon, the first thing I thought of was craters. Because the game involves a lot of backtracking, I added a giant crater/hole at the end of one of the paths that takes you back to the middle of the game, so players don’t have to waste fuel going back through stuff they’ve already seen.
Go slowly all the way round the outside: This one is kind of nebulous, and also appears in two ways. First, this and a real moment in my dérive inspired me to put in an optional path where you can do donuts around a cul de sac. It doesn’t help you at all, but you can do it because it makes the rover happy. Also, the game starts and ends at the same place on the map.

Next, I put the first paragraph I had written for the game into char.ng to see what it would spit out. I got:

you will be forced to
find
out
whether or
not Sentient.

This influenced the more existential nature of the game. There isn’t an explicit moment where you find out if you are sentient, but I have the character wonder if it can die and its feelings get hurt at some point. You also watch another rover die, which isn’t exactly sentience, but definitely skirts around the same existential boundary. Next, I got "Finish exploring crew left" and "forced to find the crew mean", which were really helpful when I was rewriting the ending. I decided to make it that two of the crew members left you behind after the ship failed, so you are “forced to find the crew mean”, but you can still “finish exploring” and continue in the game. Finally, I got:

Boop. Boop.
Boop. Boop. Boop. Boop. Boop.
Boop.
Boop.
Boop. Boop.
Boop. Boop. Boop. Boop. Boop.
Boop.
Boop.
Boop. Boop. Boop. Boop.

And so on for three pages. I thought it was very funny, so I took it and made it a poem that the other rover had written.

After that, I went to the Anagram Generator to make character names. I knew I wanted to find a crew member in a casino, so I entered “Casino Gambler” and got “Bargeman Coils”, which I turned into Commander Coils Bargeman. The second crew member was autobiographical, but I didn’t know what the third would be, so I wrote “Third Crew Member” and got “Deb Mercer With Mr”. Deb Mercer is a dope name so I took that for the pilot, and you find out she left with me, so she is “With Mr.” Cagney.

Next, I went to N+7 and messed around for a while. I ended up with “exploring the poem yourself and grace” and “you will be forced to find out whether or not romantics can die”, which is what gave me the idea to put all of those boops into a poem. I used that to make the character more romantic and sentimental. “robust justice of sentiment-disposal” was another phrase I got back that sort of comes through in the end, when the rover declares that it no longer matters to him whether or not he sees the crew members who left him again. I also used this awesome phrase to inform the ending in general, as I made the robot very at peace (even if you die).

Next, I used Botnik, and the “Carl Sagan’s Cosmos” keyboard because it seemed fitting. I ended up with:

There must be matter for life. Nobody can be understood by accident. This is the great idea: you could determine that earth is turning but only because it seems to. To understand it would not be very good. Observe sunlight craters and every tedious system in this world. Why should we expect our lives to be logically consistent in a world that is fascinating? Paradise is a coiled king that rejected and forgotten the other lives in this cosmic billiards.

This ends up being the first half of that dying robot’s poem. It… almost makes sense? After that, I used googlism with “rover” and “ending” and got back:

rover is lonely
rover is not just a vehicle
ending is the beginning
ending is left open
ending is a depressing
ending is usually not a positive one; a positive ending is tenuous
ending is the best ending possible to receive

This led to me emphasizing the loneliness of the game, which was already sort of present. I also leaned into the humanization of the robot as time goes on, allowing it to drink drinks and make friends and wear clothes and such. I wanted to have people really root for the robot and feel bad when it turns out his friends left him behind. Also, the ending ends up back at the ship, so it comes full circle, and the ending can be different depending on what you do leading up to it. It was originally much more depressing, but I changed that after consulting with Ava.

Then,I used Otter.ai, mainly to organize my thoughts and say everything out loud just to sound it out. While sounding it out, I accidentally compared it to the Curiosity, the sad rover that sang itself Happy Birthday for thirty years until it died. I decided that I would imply that the old rover you meet is the Curiosity. I also used that emotion and attachment people felt to that sad rover to influence the mood of the game. The rover became a lot more sympathetic in my mind after that.

link to otter recording

After that, I went to my Instagram and put posts on my story asking for cocktail names, adjectives, things that taste good and things that taste bad. I compiled all of the answers into an array for the special cocktail the bartender at the casino gives you.

I wrapped up by playtesting with Ava to see what bugs we could find and fix (a lot, turns out. You may have noticed I updated this page and the itch.io entry several times.) Overall, I had a really good time working on this project and working in Twine in general. I could very easily see myself using Twine a lot going forward, as well as keeping all of these creative strategy websites in mind when brainstorming for projects in the future.