Fifty Days of UFO 50: Day 5

[You're not even ten percent of the way through this blogging project, and there you are, narratively trapped inside of a point-and-click haunted house, being chased around by some sort of fungus man with a meat cleaver...]

Night Manor (1P, Adventure, Puzzle) "Trapped in a nightmare where you must use your wits to survive and escape!"

[Thankfully, prior to that fictional car accident and waking up in a terrifying, pixelated escape room, you fell into a bit of a WarpTank hole, so we've got access to the following un-edited notes to tide us over.]

OMG WarpTank (1P, Adventure, Puzzle) "Use your tank to regain control of the station and sever all ties to capsule world!"

-much ado about how this is the first game to get a little "favorite" heart applied to it (I hope there isn't a Steam achievement for hitting "like" on 10 games or something like that)

"Master Blaster driving meets Solar Jetman platforming inside the guts of an R-Type factory"
The occasional use of monstrous organic creature corpses as regular non-threatening level geometry rules; sneak in a prediction about how this is a brilliant way to set up an unexpected boss fight...

What's the achievement situation looking like?

  • To give a "garden" gift...
    • Defeat Renegade
  • For "\./..." (are these terminal passwords?)
    • Defeat Big Tank
  • Strongly implies that there will be boss fights, potentially need to push for at least one of those before gushing about how chill and relaxing this one's been

rarely are the real time games so thinky/chill, and rarely are the thinky games so kinetically engaging
among the UFO 50 gamut, blah blah at this point, it takes a special blend of 

  • Do a lil breakdown of how many games fall into each of the filters that count as "gameplay types?"
    • Thinky Play = 25 games
    • Reflex Play = 30 games
    • Interestingly, WarpTank is one of the overlaps, falling into BOTH categories!
  • Would it be emotionally rough to do a breakdown of what % of the library remains untouched against what % of the blogging project remains?
FIGURE OUT WHAT THE TEAL/PINK SWITCHES ARE CHANGING

If this was a stand-alone indie game on Itch.io, it would have a TON of narrative content about how the WarpTank technology works and why your plucky science pilot girl, (with nerdy waifu vibes) has to pilot this prototype against the industrialized results of human/corporate greed; fighting fire with fire, as it were. I'd be sitting through little cutscenes at least every set of three levels. A helpful NPC would have locked out my controls and tutorialized me on the damaging potential of the WarpTank's lateral exhaust jets. Instead, clever level design rigs the odds of accidentally toasting enemy turrets by warping next to them, and the resulting epiphany feels so much more satisfying!

For all I know, there's totally a lore bible backing this, explaining why the station exists and why you need to sever all ties with capsule world, but showing the player anything resembling that level of story attachment is a choice. I find myself returning to that axiom of less feeling like more at every turn.
What does it say about me as a designer that I prefer to be narratively left in the dark about most things, rather than appreciating earnest, high effort attempts to give me the tools to build a wiki?
As a player, I do find myself wishing for the production of 50 tastefully distressed, high resolution scans of the physical instruction manuals that would have come with each of these titles were they actually shipped in the eighties, and to be authentic, those pages would almost certainly contain a lot more lore than we've got, so these aren't simply quibbles of the modern game industry just because the scope of storytelling inside the games themselves has exploded.

"Capsule World" speculation zone:
-----

-capsule-shaped level entrances, capsules as progress
-development theme originally inspired by capsule toys? (what if there's a master blaster tank capsule toy just sitting on someone's desk?!)
-pills & coffee feature prominently; themes of addiction? ("sever all ties")
-eva-like giant corpses lying around, meaning the station capsules are likely teleporting you down to capsule world to break the link in each level

[Fates willing, you'll have found your way out of the Night Manor in time to flesh out and edit the next entry...]

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