Arvi Teikari has taken Ludum Dare game Officer Alfred and made it to be an even greater experience. As an editor I can appreciate his attempts to iterate and refine the game experience, but knowing what and where to change can be a challenge to an already tight experience.
Officer Alfred’s puzzles and presentations were already impressive, but Hempuli sought to distill the experience for IGF judges. Upon observing the Ludum Dare playthrough and beating the IGF build, I decided to ask about the changes made and the reasoning behind them. Of the many highlights, Arvi shared the reason behind Officer Alfred being so blue and the difficulty of implementing the unfreezing tactic.
In the Ludum Dare version, the game seems to start while some disaster (explosions) are occurring, but in the IGF build, the action takes place after the explosions. What made you change how and when the game started?
I wanted to start the story after the incident to add more ambiguity as to what the disaster actually was; this is because I changed the nature of the disaster entirely. More on that later.
The dialogue in the LD version addressing cloning directly, but I don’t think it does in the IGF version. What made you change that?
I think it adds to the feeling that the cloning isn’t directly adressed, but instead the players have to work it out by themselves (though realizing it isn’t a big deal even as it is now, I guess). More about that later, as well.
Everything is so blue except for the dangerous items which are red. Red usually signals danger, was blue chosen for some reason?
The original Officer Alfred was fully blue because I had been playing with limited palettes and saw a really inspiring piece of pixel art at TIGsource forums. That piece was done in different shades of orange, but I consider blue the coolest colour overall so I used that instead; also I think blue hints more about the desired atmosphere than other colours.
After I had finished the Ludum Dare version, I thought it to be smart to somehow colour code things to make them more visible; in the IGF build interactive things are orange, dangerous things are red, and other things are blue. I think it works pretty well!
The LD version plays with shrapnel/explosive bits getting frozen in time, why did you get rid of this?
I was going to add a bomb puzzle but didn’t have the time. I decided to leave it last due to 2 reasons – firstly, bombs would better fit the “security depot” area introduced in the end of the IGF build, and secondly, the shrapnel puzzles were quite luck-reliant and I hadn’t yet quite worked out how to make them less so. I wanted to make these IGF puzzles as ‘solid’ as possible, so I tried to leave most of the luck-basedness out.
Jumping on the explosion from the rockets is brilliant. What inspired this?
Riding on bullets/rockets is something introduced in the Ludum Dare build as well, but there the movement of the bullets/rockets (or glowing red balls; go figure) was much simplier, to make it easier to use them in the puzzles. Here however, since the idea was that rockets would be used, I wanted to really work on their movement. I think I managed to implement them quite well, even if that meant that it’s harder to complete the puzzle due to the less predictable movement of the rockets. (After reading I noted you specifically mention explosion; I guess that was just a logical step considering that they indeed are rockets.)
The unfreezing and refreezing of time and the orange/yellow(?) nonfreeze areas seem to be the biggest changes. Could you discuss where these ideas came from?
The unfreeze ring is something I actually had in mind even when I was working on the Ludum Dare version. When I first started thinking of the concept, I wanted to add more ways of interaction that just freezing everything, and the possibility to only unfreeze specific objects seemed quite logical and useful. Implementing it is very very difficult in comparison to the original method, so I left it out of the Ludum Dare version. To be honest, I made a prototype that had this unfreezing ring using the Ludum Dare engine, but ultimately scrapped that version due to coding problems.
Will there be a longer version of Alfred?
Yes, I think so. I’d want to tell a full story in the Officer Alfred gameworld, and I tried to set up the setting in this IGF build, hence the ambiguity about cloning and the disaster. My intention is to make a shortish (maybe something like the length of Limbo or shorter) game that emphasizes puzzle solving, but gives various hints about what is happening and has happened, and then reveal something new about the situation in the end.
Anything else you’d like to add?
Here’s some bonus info: if I ever get the game done, I think I’ll try to get it to Steam for some lousy $profit$.
Ah, I suppose an IGF-ish question would be, what inspired you to turn your LD project into an IGF entry?
The facts that I didn’t feel like I was done with the concept yet, wanted something to send to IGF and thought that the IGF would be a great motivator to work on such a game. I don’t think there’s more to it than that.
[Read our preview and go play the clever Officer Alfred. Be sure to tell us what you think about it! Thanks, Arvi, for the discussion!]