Anthology Of The Killer (2024): Treasures of the Speech Balloon

Anthology Of The Killer on Itch.io

Hello everyone. My name is Stephen Gillmurphy and i would like to make games that feel both dense and breezy. Writing is a big part of this, somehow.

Text in videogames is an odd thing - often not something we read as prose, approached more as "functional writing", like VCR instructions. A vehicle for clues about the inner workings of some other system, the videogame system itself. We scan it quickly, rifling the text for relevant seeming nouns - gold key, northern cave - and it's only if we fail to turn up any that we resign ourselves to reading these things as though they were sentences.

Yet, the junk language of videogames is still language. It still has a certain presence, a visual weight which can pull our eye towards it even on a screen packed with icons and gauges. Text is older than videogames and has wider tendrils - it can swiftly make connections between things, places, styles, ideas, that the "language of videogames" proper must far more laboriously spell out. Writing in games can feel like too much and not enough, and I like the slightly unstable feeling this can have. And in no-budget videogames, you use every effect you can find...!

The last game I was working on was called Anthology Of The Killer, collaborating with Tommy Tone and A. Degen, a collection of little narrative horror games. I am not much of a narrative person, so while I wanted to play things as "straight" as possible - relatively consistent characters, setting, plot machinery and so forth. But in the process it felt like a lot of the out-of-the-box approaches for handling text in videogames weren't working for me.

At first I stuck to the most frequent approach for a third-person game: outside of cutscenes, your player character explores in silence, and only comments when interacting with people or distinctive objects. But I had a hard time getting used to the rhythm - I think this approach works best when very slowly building up a narrative across many small interactions, a kind of narrative pointillism, so that the text doesn't feel like it's overwhelming the game. Balancing playable and text segments felt difficult for the kind of quickly paced but narratively twisty feeling I was hoping for, and the text limits meant the main character felt like more of a blank slate than I'd pictured her as.

What worked best was actually going back to something I'd tried out in another game. Goblet Grotto was a kind of travesty dungeon crawler I'd worked on a few years back - the permanent onscreen UI contained a little description box, pastiching old CRPGs like Wasteland or Dungeon Crawl where dialogue and room descriptions were contained in the same rolling textbox as combat information and battle events. These games in a sense demoted their descriptive text to rolling updates, a grab bag of sensory impressions and status updates that you could flicker in and out of paying attention to.

For Anthology Of The Killer I put the rolling textbox in the player character's own voice, rather than as neutral descriptive text. As minor a change as it was, having the text onscreen as you explored immediately made her feel more present in the narrative to me, and less like an impersonal cipher. It made it easier to feel like exploration and narrative were happening a bit more fluidly in tandem, rather than one always needing to be paused to allow time for the other. It also changed how I wrote the main character herself - narrating at a slight remove made her seem scattered and detached in ways I thought were funny for a horror game protagonist. (And convenient, since there are only so many times you can write "Aiiieee!")

The last thing I had to work out was just how this box would update. In Goblet Grotto the description text is overwritten by walking into invisible room triggers, or enemies, or system events, in order to keep things feeling chaotic. I felt like that would get annoying in a slower narrative game - you had to know how it was going to update, or you'd have no choice but to stand stock still and read as soon as it changed.

In the end the solution I went with was perhaps the worst - having a generic "speech bubble" kind of icon littered around the levels that you could walk in to trigger a new textbox. I was worried it would feel too much like breadcrumbing, but in practice I was surprised not to find myself hating it... I think it's because the game doesn't keep track of which text boxes you've seen, or make them disappear when you've read them or require a button prompt to activate them - they're almost framed as totally ignorable and optional within the game system, which I hope helps them feel like environmental texture rather than an obligation.

I'm not really a perfectionist, but the rhythm of the writing in the game is probably what I tinkered with most. I tried to get it so the textboxes would always "read" clearly, even if their meaning wasn't clear - most of the textboxes are about three lines high, not too sprawling, and usually consist of one or two descriptive observations with a little twist or joke mixed in. I feel like if you laugh at something you feel like you understand it, even when it's saying other things you're not sure how to interpret... I'd like to feel like this maybe adds a sense of mystery to the game, maybe even replayability. The sense of something straightforward but carrying an odd and buried set of associations, that you glimpse but don't have time to explore... The secret treasures of videogame language call to us all.

GAME DESIGN BOUNTY: Cocoron (1991) style character creation but for a 3D videogame. I will never make this. But someone could.

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