Design Notes
History
This game is a confluence of disparate interests of mine. Maybe all those interests were inevitably related, or maybe this game is my attempt to fit all my favorite tchotchkes in some wrong-sized luggage.
An image which has bounced around in my head for a long time is a mad scientist’s wall filled with an uneven grid of gadgets, panels, latches, knobs, switches, etc. An unending plane complications. I wonder if I’ve ever seen it or if I’ve pieced together the image in my mind’s eye from tropes. See Dexter’s Lab, Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Strangelove.
I wrote a short story about a pilot who gets drunk, hops in his training mech, destroys his commanding officer’s building, and watches the war playout from a prison cell. I wrote another story of a pilot who wakes up in a bed of jelly-like tub of micro-organisms. I wanted to explore “different mechs for different folks,” as opposed to a world where the big robots are one-type-of-thing. See The Matrix (APUs), Gurran Lagann, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Macross, Gundam, Pacific Rim.
For visual aesthetics, I searched Pinterest for “anime UI”, “fantasy UI”. I watched a YouTube video “Evangelion UI, Sound Designed” by Yuta Endo 遠藤ユウ タ. “Anime UI” search on CodePen yielded a fun example. “Futuristic” was a better search there, yielding more good stuff like [1], [2], [3], and [4].
This game is also inspired by incremental idle games. The kind where there’s an simulation happening and the player manages some abstract interface for some part of the interface. The most recent one I played, Crank by FaeDine. See Universal Paperclis, A Dark Room, Kittens Game.