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"If you were to lead a revolution, how would you do it?"
With such a simple question, we began our work on one of the most ambitious games we've ever worked on. Projekt Revolution has taken more than a small amount of blood, sweat, and tears, but here we are with our final version - and we sure are proud of it.
The Code
As you probably have noticed by now, Projekt Revolution is a web based game. This brought with it many interesting challenges, not the least of which is actually working with having essentially no player state available. We used MySQL and PHP to write a fairly simple, customized backend for the story we wanted to tell. While it started more ambitious, we quickly realized that with our limited ability to really code effectively, we had to cut back to ensure we'd get things done by our deadline. While neither the code nor the database are particularly secure against a player tampering with their character, we're not terribly concerned about that. This isn't a multiplayer game we're securing against cheating, if you want to warp your character to some other room, the only thing you're ruining is your own experience of our narrative. With that in mind, we did our best to ensure that the story was never hampered by the code, and we ended up making more than a few 11th hour changes and improvements to ensure that everything worked smoothly.
The Story
The story for this game came into my head thanks to a series of different factors. One of the biggest influences was the Flobots’ album Fight With Tools. The ideas expressed in those songs resonated with many of the ideals that I hold. It was also influenced by the movie Fight Club, which is all about questioning the society that we live in and, if we find it to be unsatisfactory, rising up against it. From there I just let my mind run rampant, and we ended up with the final story.
Pulling it Together
The story, as originally concieved, could only be described as ambitious. As we progressed, we ended up cutting down on planned features in order to meet the relatively pressing deadline, and tensions really ran high in the middle. As the deadline loomed imminent, however, we realized we had more time than we thought. As a result, we fleshed out elements that had seemed impossible earlier. The greatest challenge at the end was processing the more than 1000 lines of story text (over 15,000 words!) in our game, across the many possible outcomes of each situation. Lines of description written at 4AM after working for hours end up with hilarious typos, and we end up writing sentences that simply make no sense (then again, this is being written at 3:20AM by my watch...). As a result, we've had our work cut out for us finding all of the hilarious grammatical errors that seem omnipresent in our narrative, and for that, we really owe a great deal to our playtesters for playing through the game, giving us great feedback, and telling us when they find truly horrible sentences and typos. As with any narrative this long, only finalized for editing 24 hours before it's submission, there will still be errors, but without them, I doubt this narrative would even be intelligible.
Credits
| Story: | Evan Hudson |
| Code: | Will Lassen |
| Playtesting: | Paul DiPastina
Nick Korn
Stephen Labombard
Adam O'Toole
Lincoln Tahara |
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