Fatal Proxy Dev Log - Part I

We are approaching two years of Fatal Proxy development and I thought it would be nice to reflect on the progress thus far. A lot has technically happened, though it didn’t feel that way until recently (in the past few months or so). The reason for that might be due to the fact that I generally try to remain condensed and think in terms of bullet points, goals, and milestones. At any rate, I plan on providing a nice summary of how it began, the development thus far, and future plans.

Fatal Proxy’s inception began shortly after finishing the anime series Robotics;Notes. After all was said and done, one character created the spark that turned into the entire world that Fatal Proxy takes place within. In short, the world is set in the near future but along a different timeline in which traditional governments no longer exist and society functions as a peculiar mixture of meritocracy and netocracy. The vision seems like an interesting frontier now, but it wasn’t always that way.

The initial concept was pitched as an idle game in which players managed a lone hacker with the option to expand the team or remain solo. It was met with some interest, but it was quickly discovered that the real interest was in the hacker’s fantasy. People wanted to participate in the hacking process much more than they wanted to manage a team. The other concern was the lack of story and world building opportunities. Although there are some exceptions, idle games have much open real estate for large amounts of story.

The concept was revisited and turned into a gui-based mystery puzzle game in which the user is tasked to hack into other computer systems to gather information. This time, every single time I pitched it, the idea was met with overwhelming interest. The interest generated lots of questions and lead to quite a few good discussions.

I quickly began to work on what would become the game’s foundation: a desktop view. I wanted to craft the game’s environment in a way that is highly similar to a typical Operating System. Soon after that, I began working on the window positioning feature. This allowed users to drag featureless application windows around the screen. A lot of time was put into experimenting with and learning how to mentally break down my drawn UI concepts into Unity components and reconstruct them so that they looked similar while also scaling with screen size.

The next major task was to populate the desktop with the various applications that would give players twelve different types of activities to do. I knew that a significant portion of the game was going to deal with an email application. I wanted it to function as a loose guide for new players and one of the main narrative content delivery methods. As such, it became the first system and application to be completed.

After the email system was completed, everything seemed very possible. After sinking a large amount of time (six months to be exact) into designing and coding five additional in-game applications, I determined that a huge reduction in scope was in order. I realized that I would eventually have had to create a ridiculous amount of content (things like interactive websites, graphics, and hand-crafted puzzles) for each pending application. This problem led me to think of many confounding others and it really shook my confidence that day.

I took a few days off attempting to re-imagine a different direction for the game to take. After a while, I eventually found a way to salvage a good portion of what I had done - the rest is still in limbo. My focus switched to creating puzzles that either had random elements or were completely generated based on a set of rules. This increased the novelty of the game tenfold but, as per the rules of game development, there were still problems that existed.

A brief alpha testing phase was conducted as I didn’t wish to continue working within a vacuum any longer. A few playtesters helped me find unknown bugs and refine the new user experience enough to move into beta phase. The beta testing phase is, at the time of this post, still ongoing, but I am gaining valuable information about weak points within the game along with potential concerns and expectations of prospective players.

The biggest lesson that I’ve learned from comparing concept pitch reactions to recent player feedback is that people generally have a different definition of what a puzzle is. When you say puzzle game, players usually think problem solving games. Those that are not familiar with the difference between a problem and puzzle can watch this video (longer; directly game related) or read this article (shorter; not directly game related).

To fully capture the elusive hacker fantasy that conjures so much excitement and intrigue, I will once again need the core gameplay loop to change. I will keep the higher difficulty puzzles as optional or bonus content, but I need to come up with problems that can be randomly generated (which ironically is a major problem for me to solve).