Howdy folks! We’re four friends from Canberra, Australia making some weird little indie games. This is the first in a series of monthly blog posts where we’ll share what we’re working on, as well as any cool stuff we’ve got going on over at The Mailroom Conspiracy. Back in 2023, all four of us were in very different places. Ronan was doing VR contract work for a university, Rhys was working on serious games and teaching, Blake was working on immersive learning simulations, and I was coming off the back of a design gig at Uppercut Games. Then one night, Rhys invited Blake & I out to Siren’s to talk about his crazy idea of starting up a studio together. The next night I was chatting to Ronan about it while we were playing games and kablooey, The Mailroom Conspiracy was born.
The game we’re working on right now is something that started as a big lovecraftian fishing game I wrote up a game design document for a few years ago, and has since evolved into a leaner, more focused experience, a commentary on preemptive grief where you trudge along the ocean floor in a big clunky diving suit. The game is about trying to come to grips with the fact that someone you love is going to die. You’ve got a harpoon gun you can use to shoot and pull things around, and the whole game revolves around you taking on more and more weight, so you’re heavy enough to pull bigger and bigger things. In trying to stop the inevitable, you’ll make pacts with long dead gods, chant out occult rituals, and traipse through temples long ago lost to the sea.
Currently we’ve got the skeleton of the game up and running, and we’re moving towards getting some good hunks of meat onto it for playtesters to start sinking their… teeth into… ahem anyways. Well going forward we’re going to put one of these out at the start of every month, and you might find some different voices weighing in month to month. Things may be a bit rough and tumble as we get these off the ground, but we’re very excited to be able to take the time to reflect and share what we’ve been working on.
I hope you enjoy being inflicted with our wondrous words of (dubious) wisdom.
Jibrill
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Hello grey-mane gamers, welcome to the wonderful world of Jibrill’s corner of the blog. Here you’ll find such wondrous joys as: Dragging Things Around, Furniture Acquisition, and the rough GUTS of one of our up and coming levels. February saw the beginnings of this rough and tumble operation starting to come together in a great way. While the team was hard at work constructing the very foundation of our game, I was busy drawing pretty pictures and writing even prettier words 😎
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The Meat & Potatoes
So this is a game about burden, weight and using your harpoon gun to both move and be moved by objects. So, one of the first things we needed was to decide how those themes would manifest as mechanics in the game. We decided early on that we wanted 3 things to underpin how the player interacts with the world around them:
- How heavy the player is should change how objects in the game work.
- The player should always interact with things by shooting them with the harpoon gun.
- If something can be occult and spooky, it should be.
And with those things in mind, our first mechanic was born: Altars.
Chants For The Sea
Now that we know we want weight to play a big role in how the world works, I got stuck in and started thinking about how players were going to be able to change how heavy they were. Initially, we thought it would be cooler if players only ever accrued weights, slowly getting heavier and heavier over the course of the game, until eventually it’s too much, and they’re crushed by their burden in a very thematic and theatrical manner. That would fit pretty well with the themes and ideas we’re exploring… but makes it much harder to design fun and interesting puzzles. Never needing to vary how heavy you are in a game where everything reacts to how heavy you are, means the solution to most problems would be the same: find the thing that makes you heavier so you can proceed.
So players need to be able to vary their weight, they need to do it using the harpoon gun, and it should have an occult-y spook-y flavour to it. I also wanted to retain the idea that the player is accrewing some kind of permanent weight that stays with them throughout the game so I could explore the ramifications of that later on. And so I landed on (drumroll please 🥁🥁🥁…) altars. These would be statues that when shot and tugged on by the harpoon gun would activate with some sinister VFX and do one of 3 things:
- Chain Altars manifest a shackle around the player, increasing their weight.
- Vortex Altars remove all shackles from the player, reducing their weight.
- Maw Altars stab a huge spike into the player, permanently increasing their weight.
With the spooky statues squared away, it was time to figure out how using them would help players affect the world around them.
From left to right, beautiful depictions of a: Maw Altar, Chain Altar, Vortex Altar.
To Pull or Be Pulled
How the harpoon interacts with things is pretty simple:
- If the thing you shoot is lighter than you, you can pull it around.
- If the thing you shoot is heavier than you, you can pull yourself towards it.
See a pile of rubble blocking your path? Shoot it with the harpoon and drag it out of the way.
See a sturdy pillar on the other side of a bottomless chasm? Shoot it with the harpoon and slingshot yourself over to it.
The hope is that this is a simple premise we can build on to do some cool stuff.
Shoot a heavy thing, then pull back until you hear a click.
Shoot a light thing, then pull back to pull it towards you.
Release to slingshot yourself to whatever you shot!
Flo
This month I also drew up some designs for some underwater currents players can use to launch themselves around the level. If you’re super heavy, you’ll be able to pass through them without getting pushed around, but if you’re light you’ll be at the whims of the water. They’ll also launch you further the longer you’re in them, that way we can set up some puzzles where you’re trying to navigate your way to the ‘back’ of a current so you can ride that bad boy all the way to… wherever it’s going to shoot you out.
Aquisitions Inc
On a less game-related note, I was also able to snag some more furniture for our new (and still bare) office! Equipped with new lights and a little coffee table, we’re one step closer to making the space super swish. It’s pretty crazy how big a difference the new lights make, the room is so sad and sterile without them:
New lights off: sad, sterile, bad times.
New lights on: happy, will to live restored, peaceful bliss
Future plans include: couch, bookshelf, wall decor, rug and more! As they say in the corpo world: watch this space.
Our rough plans for the space going forward
A Stage Yet Set
The bulk of my time in February was spent designing and blocking out a big ol’ level. This is planned to be the first level in the game, and to showcase all the cool stuff you can do with the harpoon gun and draggable objects.
The spawn room has a large heavy door, and a small pile of rubble you can drag out of the way.
Whatever it ended up being, I knew I wanted this level to end with you finding an old god that looks like a pit full of stars. All of our levels are going to end with the player finding some kind of long lost deity that represents an aspect of the grief they’re trying to work through. The god of this level (preemptively dubbed, A Sea of Stars) is going to focus on feelings of being small, helpless and like nothing you do to help is ultimately going to work. With that in mind, I want the whole level to have moments that evoke these feelings, or ones adjacent to them. So as I build the level I’ll try to:
- Include large objects and spaces that dwarf the player.
- Have lots of things that the player’s not strong enough to move.
- Have puzzle solutions be small when viewed on a large scale (i.e. have a whole puzzle that ends up moving a tiny part of a giant statue, creating a bridge).
An initial idea for what the Sea of Stars god might look like
After chatting with Ronan about it, we came up with the idea of having the entire level built around an enormous, black pit in the sea. As you progress around the level you’ll get glimpses of it, and you’ll be able to see a figure slowly falling in. The level would be based around players trying to get to them before they fall in, but when they finally reach the pit, they’re a second too late. The pit then starts to fill with stars, becoming the god you speak to at the end of the level.
A walkway stretching over the pit in question
With that, it was time to get designing the spaces themselves! Now, this is going to be rough as guts, but I started out with a basic bubble map:
The very first iteration of the level (Ew)
I then took this horrendous beast and made it a… less… horrendous beast.
The second iteration of the level (Trust the process)
Next I started to refine the bubbles and add in details to the spaces I was envisioning:
The third iteration of the level (Ignore the scribbled notes)
And then I ripped it apart with some coloured markers, getting it ready for some more refinement, and a detail pass.
The fourth iteration of the level (I promise this goes somewhere)
I then took my absolute mess of a map and started making some refined versions of individual rooms:
Some cleaner, more detailed designs for individual sections of the level
And finally, I started to block out the level using my mad scrawlings to stay my heart, and guide my wavering hands:
Some snippets of the greybox in-engine. Can you decipher where these parts of the level are in the sketches?
That’s a Wrap
Aaaaand that’s all from me folks! Hopefully you enjoyed this tour through this month’s scrawlings, and hopefully you were listening to Loonboon while you did. We’ve got some cool stuff coming down the pipeline in March, so look forward to more of this in a month’s time.
Catch you later skaters,
Jibrill
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