I’ve always had a problem with the term “post-mortem” being used for videogame self-evaluation. it seems to imply the game is dead, and no one plays it any more. Well, Power Nap pretty much is dead, no one is playing it any more and I’ve done a bad job of letting go, hence I’m sitting here now, writing all about it. At the time of writing, I’m not even sure if I’m going to post this anywhere. I just thought it a good exercise to analyse the game and work out what I like and don’t like about the end product, so I can move on and bury the dead. Here is my Power Nap Autopsy.

Where’s the scalpel?

Knowing I had two weeks free in April, as I was in the process of changing jobs, I decided to take part in the AGS communitiy’s MAGS competition. It’s a month-long contest, but I knew I could only spend two weeks on my project. Then it transpired that the two-week Adventure Jam was scheduled to happen almost exactly during my fortnight off. So I decided to enter both, with the same game.

There was no theme for Adventure Jam, but the theme for MAGS was ‘Sleeping’ and after a scarily brief brainstorm I decided to make a game about power napping.

I had recently played Scriptwelder’s Don’t Escape 2 (http://armorgames.com/play/17657/dont-escape-2) which is kind of an anti-escape-game where you have to manipulate your surroundings so that you are unable to escape when you inevitably transform into a werewolf. When you think you have done enough to ensure you cannot escape you press a button to see how the rest of the night pans out. Do you escape and kill all the villagers, or do you successfully manage to keep your werewolf self locked up for another night?

This mechanic inspired Power Nap’s “Take a Nap” button, which was the first thing I painted (badly). When you think you have done enough to ensure a nice 20-minute power nap without getting caught by your boss, you press the button. The difference between Power Nap and Don’t Escape is that the latter has lot’s of different endings depending on which actions you had taken before pressing the button. I originally intended for Power Nap to have such a fun variety of endings but time-management issues forced me to simplify it. So in Power Nap, pressing the button will only end the game when all the tasks are complete and if you press it sooner you will just be reminded of what you still have to do to finish. I am happy with how that actually plays out, but in an ideal world I would have had a lot more endings and scenarios depending on a variation of various variables. The game does feature a good and a bad ending, but that is basically decided by one decision in a conversation and there is no clue given that this is going to affect the ending in any way. I think something that affects the outcome of a story should be more clearly signposted so that the player can think about the consequences rather than just randomly clicking any option.

The art is technically bad. I know that. I don’t even know how to use watercolours properly. My justification for using real-life paints over digital art is that I can’t do digital art either and I might as well do the one that gets me away from a computer screen for a few hours. However, in spite of my obvious lack of knowledge and skill with watercolours, I think the backgrounds, GUIs and inventory items came out reasonably well together and I have been pleased to receive some nice comments. Adventure gamers are too kind.

The player character is conspicuous because of his absence. I made the decision early on to call the game “first person.” This was just my way of saying. No, I don’t want to spend half of the Jam trying to make a walkcycle for a game with two screens. The problem is, those two screens do look like the kind of screens that a character should be walking around on. It should have occurred to me much earlier on that if I don’t have a player character then I can have any camera angle I damn well like, so why did I choose such a boring, face-on, one-point perspective?

The music is the best part of the game, and it’s also the only part of the game I didn’t do myself. “Nap” by Wimps is a great song I found on the Free Music Archive the night before the Adventure Jam deadline. It’s a great song, although I know not everyone likes the same brand of punk that I enjoy, so I did have the foresight to reduce the song’s default volume to 50%, though a number of people have still told me it’s too loud. I have since made it possible to toggle the music on or off by simply pressing ‘M’ on the keyboard.

One thing I am proud of is a complete lack of [reported] bugs. I didn’t have time to get the game tested so I did a good job of squashing the bugs on the fly, as it were.

Puzzles. I’m really happy with the puzzles. There are five puzzle branches that can be solved in any order, and they range from simply shutting a window (this was intended as a mini warmer), to creating useful items using a mixture of inventory manipulation and scenery interaction. I had more puzzles planned in my notebook, but I think I chose a nice blend.

Another time-saving decision I made early on was to eliminate the ‘look’ function. Or at least merge it with the ‘interact’ button, so that the character will still make observations about some items he doesn’t need to pick up or interact with. I decided that pressing the right-mouse button would bring up the Inventory. This is probably because I’d been playing Whispered World at the time and I liked the convenience of right clicking for the inventory.

I also ditched the ‘look’ button within the inventory GUI. Again to save time on writing silly comments about each item. This drew a couple of complaints, though, from people who understandably couldn’t tell what a particular item image was supposed to be, due to my art being terrible. So next time, I will either: a) include a look button, b) have some kind of label that shows the name of any item you are hovering over, c) improve my art skills, or d) all of the above.

I’ve left talking about the story til last. That’s because, embarrassingly, the story was the aspect of making this game that I left til last. I had been so gung-ho about making a kind of Power Nap Simulator, that I’d forgotten about having a story, which was one of the main intentions of the Adventure Jam. As a result, I had to shoehorn some semblance of a story into this piece of software. So the whole story of Greg having been kicked out by his girlfriend for “cheating” was (while it led to some funny[?] jokes) kind of unrelated to any of the puzzles.

All in all, I had a cracking good time making Power Nap, but I need to move on and start my next project.

-Stu