Greetings from Puzzle Spy International HQ! We’ve been busy putting the finishing touches on the last puzzle you get to solve in the game. We had been stuck on exactly how to make it work for a while but a change of perspective and approach made it come together really nicely. We’ve had people playtest it on paper but this week will be our first live playtest of the coded up version and we’re excited to see how that goes. Meanwhile, I (Mike) have been producing a bunch of background art for the big scenes at the end of the game to make sure that the final locale is really interesting and rewarding.
This month I’d like to talk about Talia’s and my collaborative process. How exactly do two people work on a game together? In some places, of course, not at all: I do all the art and RenPy scripting, and as we aren’t high-level coders, we work with SypherZent who does all of the heavy lifting for puzzle programming. But the puzzle designs and all of the writing are done by us as a team. Every plot point, line of dialogue, puzzle hint or clue are all a collaborative effort.
For us, teamwork is the entire point of making this game. As a couple, we love solving (and making) puzzles, and writing. So while at times it would be more efficient to let one person work on something without the other (generally me as Talia is now in grad school and tight on time,) the whole point of the thing is to do it together. So we end up sneaking co-working time on the game into odd places: Discussing plot points while we’re brushing our teeth at night, or refining lines of dialogue when we’re driving together somewhere in the car.
For the writing part, we’ve found that an incremental approach helps a lot: We’ll spend some time discussing the rough outline of a scene and what needs to happen in it and jot that down. Later we’ll go back and refine that more. Once it’s solid, at some other point we’ll start fleshing out lines of dialogue. We’ll toss ideas for lines back and forth, with one of us sometimes word-smithing what the other person just suggested. We have some scenes that we’ve worked on for weeks or even months, gradually picking away at them when we have time or are struck by inspiration for what a character should say. This is especially true for the sections with branching narrative, as sometimes we have to write the same conversation multiple different ways. We’re working on one of those now where we’ve got some paths that we think are hysterical (we hope you do too!) but that ups the pressure on making the other paths just as funny. We’re currently rewriting one that was “finished” but then the other paths turned out to be much funnier and that one no longer matches up.
We use the same process for designing puzzles too, except that they require more dedicated time for sitting down and focusing on them, not a brief conversation while in the shower. As we both work day jobs, these most commonly happen on weekends and the occasional holiday. Once the general idea of a puzzle is scoped out, there are lots of small elements that can be iterated on during smaller interactions: How exactly should the clue to this line be worded, or what should hints for this puzzle be? PSI has several puzzles where there’s something hidden in a sentence and coming up with those individual sentences is a nice small manageable task to pick away at, possibly while getting ready for bed!
It’s a slow, collaborative process, but we wouldn’t have it any other way. We love working on it as a team, just like we enjoy solving puzzles as a team. And we hope you like what we’ve come up with, whether you play it solo or work on it with your own team (which we highly recommend, although not necessarily while you are brushing your teeth!)