Hi everyone, this is Andrew Schaefer. The author himself. I would have posted earlier but I was having technical difficulties. I’ll try to leave a few coherent comments:
First off, thank you to everyone who bought/played/talked about the game, whether you ultimately liked it or not. I’d love for everyone to love it, of course, but barring that at least people gave it a look. Any comment (except, perhaps, “you suck, Andy”) is a helpful one. This is all a learning process for me. The worst thing would be for nobody to care at all.
Secondly, I’d never written anything like this before, and holy crap it turned out to be a lot harder than I’d expected. I have all the respect in the world for anyone who can put together a fully-formed, seamlessly operating game that gives the players what they want. PQ was beta tested early last year and I used the superb feedback to make it about 50% bigger and to add a whole bunch of scenes and ideas. I could have continued adding branches to the story tree forever. At least now I’m getting feedback on the finished product which is, what, omega testing?
On that score, however, bear in mind that my philosophy going in was a little unorthodox. (Apologies in advance if I’ve told any of you this before.) If the game plays a little differently than people are used to, that’s not necessarily unintended. If it were up to me, for example, I probably wouldn’t have a stats screen at all. If you’re playing PQ trying to get a certain trait up to a certain number, for example, or even worrying about that number at all, you’re sort of missing the point. There are different storylines and a hard-to-find “good” ending, but the game also strives to just let you see how different approaches result in very different outcomes. It’s meant to be played multiple times and to operate through trial-and-error, as a couple of you said. The pages and pages of text are the point. There’s a lot of stuff in that text, a lot of nifty little ideas and images and turns of phrase if I do say so myself, and they vary quite a bit depending on your choices and even on random variables. If that approach doesn’t work, then that’s my fault.
I only first learned about CoG when I stumbled on Broadsides for my shiny new iPhone a couple years ago. I knew a bit about the subject matter going in, so the first time I played Broadsides I made the “right” choices and retired an admiral. Then I never played the game again because I’d “won” it the first time. (I know, I know, blasphemy. It’s a great game.) I didn’t want to go that route. There’s somebody on iTunes who hated PQ because he played it once – once! – and wound up a nobody farmer and concluded that the game must be flawed and that the outcome is always the same no matter what choices you make. Besides being nonsensical, that criticism sort of missed the message the game was sending him (you made poor choices and life passed you by as a result).
One of my favorite Star Trek: TNG episodes is the one where Q gives Picard a chance to go back to the Academy to avoid getting into a fight where he’s stabbed through the heart. The whole story revolves around Picard trying to do this (so he won’t die of mechanical heart failure in the present) and he’s ultimately successful. Then we go back to the present but, to his horror, Picard’s not the captain anymore. Instead he’s a lowly science ensign because, as Q tells him, by backing down at the Academy he became the guy who never stood out, never took chances, and “never, ever got noticed by anyone.” It’s a great scene and just as powerful a message as some happy ending (which, btw, the episode sort of provides when a laughing Picard is stabbed in the heart after all. Yay being stabbed in the heart!). There’s real value in being shown that.
So PQ tried to do something similar. Create a realistic universe you could really explore, with storylines you could pursue or opt out of and hidden nuggets you could discover to your delight. Making it work is, like we all seem to agree, a different matter entirely, but at least I’m heartened that many people liked the concept and the writing. I’m proud of it and believe anyone who buys the game gets their money’s worth.
I’m already well into my next game and I don’t plan to take the same unorthodox approach. It’s about a World War I infantryman at the Battle of the Somme. You’ll spend six months at the front lines doing whatever you can to survive one of history’s most relentless battles of attrition. I think it’s going to be ab-so-smurfly phenomenal but unless others agree that doesn’t get me anywhere. So I’ll be posting for comments and looking for beta, gamma and delta testers and generally soliciting advice and suggestions from anyone who’s interested. It’s really tough to do these games without a lot of help.
Thanks for reading and thank you again for playing Planetary Quarantine.
A.
I was intending on it, anyways, but I’ll probably do it sooner, now 