Originally published at: Author Interview: Joey Jones, Lies Under Ice - Choice of Games LLC
Lead the first settlement on Jupiter’s frozen moon, Europa! What alien life lurks beneath the ice? Who is sabotaging your mission? Who can you trust?
Lies Under Ice is a 200,000-word interactive science fiction novel by Joey Jones. We sat down with Joey to talk about his work. Lies Under Ice releases this Thursday, December 7th. You can play the first three chapters for free today.
Congratulations on your second title for Choice of Games! Obviously, the setting for Lies Under Ice is vastly different from your first game: Trials of the Thief-Taker was set in eighteenth-century
London, and this one is in twenty-first-century Europa! How did the different setting and genre
affect your approach to writing this game as opposed to your first one? Were there any
unexpected points of similarity between the two settings?
Thank you! For both stories, I started with a period of research, but that looked quite
different for each one. Trials of the Thief-Taker, I holed up in a library for a few days poring
over history books, plays and stories on the early 18th century England to provide a wealth of
details and situations that I wanted to include. I read up on highway-robbery, masquerade
balls, smuggling, prison breaks, and, of course, the institution of thief-taking. I clearly
couldn’t take the exact approach to writing about the future, but for Lies Under Ice I also
began by reading around the subject. I read an excellent book on Europa itself, Richard
Greenberg’s Unmasking Europa, which gave me a grounding in what the moon was really
like, and what scientists were arguing about (like the academic dispute over how thick the
ice really is). I was inspired by recent social and technological trends, and I imagined how
they might be taken further. I read up on artificial therapists, gene-editing, next generation
3D printing, and the theories of xenobiologists on the conditions for life outside of Earth.
The settings were quite distinct, but one point of similarity is having a pressure-cooker
environment. Both old London and the moon base environments are places where a lot of
different people from all over are thrown together; people with conflicting goals and few
avenues to escape.
What about the process of writing your second ChoiceScript game? What did you find different
about that?
I learned a lot from the first work and had a list of things I wanted to do different the second
time over. (If I made a third, I’m sure I’d come up with another list entirely.) Lies Under Ice is
much bigger, perhaps twice the play-length, and there are a lot more world-shaking
outcomes of player choice to account for. I had to use a different plot structure too. In Trials
of the Thief-Taker I could organise the plot as a series of cases. It was always
straightforward to add another case if I felt it needed it (and in the years since release I’ve
had a lot more ideas for other cases I’d love to put in if I have the time). In Lies Under Ice,
the base faces a series of challenges, crises, and discoveries, but the player is also pro-
actively shaping the direction of their settlement, so I had to think of new ways of framing
the scenes. Where the game takes place over a ten-year time span, I ended up having short
interlude chapters between the main chapters to help smooth out the passage of time.
The big writing difference is where the variation comes in. In Trials of the Thief-Taker, the
player often engages in challenges that test their skills, and often there would be gradations
of success, with around five different outcomes based on skill level, to reward different
ways of roleplaying through the game. Such variation only becomes obvious to players if
they replay a lot. When I came to writing Lies Under Ice, ChoiceScript had actually improved
in a number of ways, and one of which was the introduction of ‘multi-replace’, which made
varying text within a passage much easier. So now, in Lies Under Ice, almost every scene has
a high degree of internal variation based on the player’s earlier choices, giving the player a much more direct and constant reflection of their choices. Both games were quite branchy,
but Lies Under Ice takes it to a whole new level.
This game includes a lot of science fiction, but it’s clearly informed by present-day science fact,
especially the idea that there may be life under the ice on Jupiter’s moon Europa. What’s the one
thing you most want readers to know about the real science that’s included in this game? Were
there any facts that you had to leave out that you’re just dying to talk about?
Some people have asked me why I picked Europa over, say, Ganymede. Europa is the best
candidate for life outside of Earth. Like our own planet, it has a rocky core and a salty tidal
ocean. Europa is covered in a layer of ice at least a few miles thick (possible much thicker).
It’s comparatively smooth (there are no real mountains or valleys) and unlike the dead
surface of our own moon, Europa’s ice surface steadily remakes itself through tidal
pressures. Still, it’s a dramatic and alien landscape, and not just endless flat ice sheets some
people might imagine when they think of an icy-moon. The features of the moon all make
an appearance in Lies Under Ice: the cracks that interlace it with a series of parallel ridges
(the lineae), the spires that surround the craters, the chaos terrain. Probably most things I
was interested in make an appearance somewhere in the work, but one thing didn’t. I
recently discovered that some researchers think that instead of protecting us from
asteroids, Jupiter has actually been flinging them towards Earth!
Your academic work also focuses on branching narrative. Can you tell us a little more about that? How did your research inform the process of creating this game, and vice versa?
That’s right, there’s a considerable overlap. Working on games like these informed my
research, as did speaking to other writers. I’m interested in the strategies writers of
interactive fiction use to manage the scope with long projects. In an interactive medium,
there’s a tendency for the workload to keep expanding the longer and more complex the
work gets. Choice of Games have a good house style for keeping a lot of this in check:
breaking the work down into more-or-less self-contained chapters that always happen in
the same order helps a lot. I’m interested in these kinds of structure-based approaches.
Throughout Lies Under Ice, I tried a few different techniques to give the player a lot of
options that really change the outcome of the game, while not increasing the workload
exponentially. I don’t recommend doing a PhD while also making a huge game, everything
takes much longer, but it has given me an opportunity to write about the process of actually
making something real, and not just a proof of concept.
What’s next for you? Do you have any other games in the works?
In the short-term, rest and recuperation, and then finishing my thesis! In the longer run I’m
definitely going to keep making games. I’ve got a few smaller projects in various states of
completion, including a game where you’re trying to build a coalition of animals for a
revolution in a zoo, and an urban fantasy puzzle game where the protagonist has the power
of psychometry. But the next game in the pipeline is a much overdue rerelease of The Chinese Room, a philosophy thought experiment text adventure I made with Harry Josephine Giles nearly half a lifetime ago.