Amnesia Fortnight 2017: A Primer & Early Impressions

Way back in 2014, I was enraptured with Double Fine's Amnesia Fortnight. The premise is simple: For two weeks, everyone at the studio forgets whatever project they were working on and divides into small groups to create prototypes, based on pitches from members of the Double Fine team. While Amnesia Fortnight was originally a private game jam, started during the production of Brutal Legend and with pitches selected by studio head Tim Schafer, starting in 2012 the studio decided to give the public the opportunity to choose which prototypes got made, watch the teams make the games, and play the final products. I didn't really pay much attention to the 2012 Amnesia Fortnight, but in 2014 I watched every single video, tuned into the livestreams, the whole works. As the highs and lows of development hit the four teams, I was fascinated with this vertical slice of game development.

Ever since AF2014, I've been looking forward to its return. To be honest, it had been so long that I was worried they weren't going to be public anymore; Despite the years being "2012" and "2014", the releases were actually less than a year and a half apart, with the 2012 jam occurring in November and the 2014 jam happening in February. From this, it was easy to assume Amnesia Fortnight was an annual tradition of the studio, so when 3 years passed with nary a word, I had more or less figured that it wasn't happening anymore. But lo and behold, earlier this month Amnesia Fortnight was announced once again. I actually didn't partake in voting this year; I was short on cash and also Persona 5 had just come out. But now that the event is well and truly underway, and episodes of the documentary are being released (much more slowly than previous years, unfortunately; more on that later) I'm back in it and I gotta say, it's looking to be a good two weeks.

One of the purposes of Amnesia Fortnight is to give members of the studio a chance to see how well they do in a leadership position, and it's always fascinating to see how each project leader handles their position. And this year, there's a good variety of experience among the winners: For starters, there's Zak McClendon, a recent hire of Double Fine Productions brought on to be the project lead on Psychonauts 2. McClendon has worked on a variety of projects, and is a Bioshock 2 alumnus, working as the lead designer on the title. McClendon is clearly used to a leadership position, and his experience shines through in the documentary. He's very clearly aware of what he wants his game, I Have No Idea What I'm Doing, to be: A virtual reality minigame collection with a focus on collaboration between the person wearing the VR headset and outside observers. That may sound like an odd thing to note as a positive, but even in the last Amnesia Fortnight, one of the projects spent several days nailing down what the primary gameplay was going to be. McClendon has also already considered the difficulties the team may face: He specifically notes that a multiplayer game will be difficult to playtest on account of needing more people, and developing for virtual reality presents all sorts of new challenges to developers. The aesthetic of the game is chosen to allow a quick asset creation process, and McClendon is clearly optimistic and confident, but realistic about how far the game can get by the time the 2 weeks are over.

Derek Brand is the sole returning Amnesia Fortnight project lead with his game, Kiln. In AF2014, Brand pitched Mnemonic, an adventure game where you pieced together memories using various odd sights and sounds to draw attention to and remind you of details in other scenes. It was Brand's first time leading a team, and it took him quite a bit of time to get used to the role. Mnemonic had, or at least was portrayed as having, a rough start, but ended up being my favorite game of the bunch. So I was excited to see Brand get another opportunity to lead a game with Kiln, a competitive multiplayer game where you form your body on a clay throwing wheel and charge into battle. Compared to 2014, Brand comes off as much more confident in his role. In 2014, Brand had to be encouraged and guided to take control of the project and steer it towards his vision when the designers got the wrong idea of what was intended in the game. This year, he's taking charge wonderfully, leading team meetings with confidence. He knows what the game is, and has done a much better job communicating that to the rest of the team. The difficulties from the previous Amnesia Fortnight seem to have all but vanished, and I'm very excited to play Kiln even just from three days worth of documentary and assorted preview images on Twitter. Maybe it's too early to be asking this, but honestly I'm just curious: when Derek Brand gets to lead a full game, will it be a full version of Mnemonic, or a full version of Kiln? Either way, I'm looking forward to it!

Devin Kelly-Sneed is something of an enigma to me. His game, Darwin's Dinner, is a fairly simple concept that is likely difficult in practice to create: You play as a hunter going after various wildlife, but at the end of each stage of the game, evolution occurs, and traits that you leave in the populace will become more prevalent in later generations. So, if you only kill slow animals, the following generations might be too quick to be able to catch and you'll starve, etc. The team leader himself, however, doesn't feel quite so easy to get a grasp of. He certainly comes off as calm, and isn't cracking under the pressure of being in charge of a project, at least not in the starting few days. The documentary hasn't been showing much of his team meetings, so it's hard to get a handle on his leadership style. It's even been difficult finding out much of his game development history; I assume he's another relatively new hire, given the fact that he's not credited on any released Double Fine project and his most recent credit is as Lead Gameplay Engineer on the game CounterSpy. As far as the doc series has gotten so far, we've yet to see much of Darwin's Dinner, and not much seems to have been posted online either, so we'll just have to wait and see how it ends up.

Finally, we have the surprise leader and something of a wild card: Asif Siddiky, Director of Photography and co-founder of 2 Player Productions, the documentary team which has done all of the doc work for Double Fine since the Double Fine Adventure kickstarter way back in 2012. You will note one important thing from that: Asif Siddiky is not a game developer. He has never worked in video games in his entire life, besides filming the people who make them. He has no experience with anything he is expected to do as part of Amnesia Fortnight. And in every interview, he is very nervous. In his very first interview, he says,

Why is anyone letting me do this? Uh...I don't know. I don't know what to do! Uh...

He's in high spirits, make no mistake, but Siddiky's nervousness never really seems to subside. He's working in a medium almost completely unknown to him, trying to lead a team of game developers who know far more than him. He notes the difficulties in working in a new medium, in working with a team that has so many skills spread between them. But like all the other leaders, Siddiky knows what game he wants to make, and between all the leaders in all the Amnesia Fortnights I've seen, a clear vision of what the game should be is the most important thing, and Siddiky has it. He may always seem like he's fretting one thing or another, but his game, The Gods Must Be Hungry, seems like it's going to end up great in spite of this. It's unfortunate that his involvement in one of the prototypes is delaying the release of the documentary, as 2PP has confirmed on the Double Fine forums, but from what I've seen, The God's Must Be Hungry may be well worth the wait.

The project leads end up as the focus in Amnesia Fortnight, but seeing the difficulties each team faces is an important part of the process as well. In 2014 alone, Mnemonic had difficulty finding its core gameplay, Dear Leader had a large portion of the planned prototype cut, and Little Pink Best Buds faced numerous difficulties stemming from its ambition of being able to talk to 16 distinct personalities via keyboard-entered speech. Again, it's still early in the development of this years games, but we already see some difficulties: The Kiln team has trouble deciding how the pot sculpting should work, Darwin's Dinner has some trouble making its evolution work as intended, IHNIWID takes time to become playable along with getting a view for both the player wearing the headset and those who aren't, and figuring out the scope and an appropriate level of ambition is a bit difficult for the GMBH team and their non-developer leader. Double Fine, between Amnesia Fortnight and the Double Fine Adventure documentary, is no stranger to showing the ups and downs of development. I appreciate that they're willing to show projects on all levels, as they form, warts and all.

Amnesia Fortnight is an amazing time, and I look forward to the rest of the documentary and playing the games that come out of it. The leadership is varied, the projects sound fun, and the look into development the documentaries give is fantastic. Every time it happens, Amnesia Fortnight is a ton of fun to tune into. I just hope it comes back quicker this time.

Time Wasted in Persona 5

Persona 5 has a time problem. Not the amount of time it takes to complete; I personally enjoy my time spent playing Persona games and have no issue with their incredibly long run times. It's Persona 5's tendency to disallow you to use that time effectively, to manage your life, that is rubbing me the wrong way.

I should back up and explain: Persona 5 is a Japanese Role Playing Game, or JRPG, in the vein of a traditional Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest game. In it, you control a party of teenagers who are all sick and tired of how they're labeled, beat down, and taken advantage of by manipulative and shitty adults in their life. Gaining the ability to summon Personas, magical representations of their own true emotions and personalities, they're able to go through dungeons caused by "distorted desires" and steal those desires. This causes those shitty adults to become good and, since they still did all the shitty stuff, turn themselves into the police.

Persona 5, as Persona 3 and 4 before it, is not just about going through those dungeons and defeating monsters, though. There's also a sort of time-management element to the game. The story of the game takes place over the course of several in-game months, and typically you can choose what to do on any particular day. You can go into dungeons to become more powerful in battle, obviously, but maybe you don't wanna do that today. Maybe you want to hang out with a party member, giving them additional skills and uses in battle as your bonds become stronger. Maybe you wanna take part in a sketchy medical trial to increase your courage. Maybe you wanna study for your exams that are coming up. There's a huge variety of activities to take part in, and friends to hang out with, and learning to use this time effectively is important to getting the most out of the game both narratively and mechanically.

The problem is, Persona 5 wastes a lot of this time, forcing you to go to sleep without performing any actions. If you've seen this complained about elsewhere, that's probably the context: The mascot character of the game, Morgana, tells you that you simply must go to bed, as you've had a busy day today, or you're going to have a busy day tomorrow, or just for no reason whatsoever, just go to bed already. Any time there's a main plot development in a day, the game can be counted on to say your day has been spent and send you off. The amount of days the game effectively passes over with no real explanation besides "because you need sleep" is astounding.

I've also got a bone to pick with how the game progresses time during dungeons, as well. In Persona 4, it was possible to clear an entire dungeon in a single in-game day. It was difficult, especially since it would mean taking on the final boss of the area low on items, health, and magic points, but certainly possible, especially on New Game +, where you play through the game with certain attributes carried over from a previous playthrough. If you could manage, it was the most effective way to play the game in my opinion: You're one-and-done on the dungeon, and you can coast out the rest of the time until the next story beat stress-free. Even in Persona 3, which did not let you face bosses until you hit the final day of that story arc, let you clear out a dungeon and know you were safe to face the final challenge at the end.

In Persona 5, the structure changes: See, the "distorted desires" are inside of "Palaces", mental fortresses where the person's cognition of the real world affects the rules of the land. And since people know you can't "steal" desires in real life, those desires aren't in a form that can be taken when you first encounter them at the end of a Palace. The target needs to perceive their desires as something that can be taken before they're able to be taken. So, the process of clearing a dungeon as quickly as possible goes like this: You spend one day, or as few days as you possibly can, going through the dungeon, fighting enemies to power up and solving puzzles to progress. Eventually, you come across their Desires, which are a vague blob of something-or-other when you first see them. You then end the day, since going into the dungeon uses up all of the time slots for that day. The following day, you decide to send a calling card warning the target that their desires are going to be stolen. This calling card changes their cognition of their desires to something which can be stolen, which in turn makes their desires take the form of something that can be stolen. The day then progresses again, with you unable to perform any other tasks that day, since you "need to rest up for the heist tomorrow!" I should be clear: You do not send out the calling card on the second day. You merely decide you're going to do that the following day, and then end the day without doing anything else. On the third day, you send the calling card out and make the desires take form. You go back into the Palace, where the desire has materialized but obviously this is a JRPG so there is inevitably a boss fight, and once you've beaten the boss, you've cleared the dungeon, congrats. You're still not able to do anything after the dungeon, but typically at this point you're celebrating with your friends so at least it makes sense in this case.

This all means the game actually requires you to take at least 3 days to clear dungeons, assuming you beeline to the end of dungeons like I typically try to do. But even this is misleading: increasingly common is the game's tendency to eat additional days out of your schedule by forcing you out of a dungeon prematurely so you can see some story play out. In the second dungeon, the game halted my progress midway through the dungeon, and forced me to exit so I could advance the plot outside the dungeon. This ended up adding 2 additional days to the process of clearing the dungeon, one for initial dungeoneering and another for plot, a significant dig in to your time in the game.

All of this does not even take into account issues returning from previous Persona games that take up your time. For example, exams will still effectively automatically progress you through an entire week. Any holiday time is also most likely going to go towards advancing the story of the game, over increasing your Kindness by eating meatloaf, or taking to a schoolmate about their insecurities. This stuff never bothered me in older Persona games, but in Persona 5 they just end up becoming the straws that break the camel's back.

This isn't a huge downer on the game that's dragging me down. As I sit here writing this piece, it's 7:36 AM on the day this will be posted. I wrote the entirety of this piece, or at least its first draft, in the last hour after mulling it over for the last week. I meant to start writing it sooner, I really did. But then I'd start playing Persona 5, and then suddenly the sun's coming up and I have to go to bed. The same thing happened today, in fact, except I don't have work tonight so I don't have to go to sleep at a reasonable time. I finally found the time to write this piece; it's a shame that the game makes it so hard to find the time to spend how I want.

Persona 5 and the Continued Excuses for No Gender Option

Persona 5 has finally been released in the West, after a long wait, and I'm glad to say that I've been enjoying the opening moments. Unfortunately, this release has proven to be somewhat controversial, as decisions and comments by the game's developers have riled up a sizable audience. One of these controversies, the decision to not allow any Playstation 4 sharing features to be used and threatening to take down any videos or streams of the game taking place after an in-game date, I'll not touch on in detail here. I'll just say I believe that once someone has purchased a game, they should be entitled to share it in whatever fashion they wish and leave it at that.

What I will be talking about regards comments made by the game's director, Katsura Hashino, during a recent interview posted onto Waypoint. In the interview, Hashino was questioned on a wide variety of topics related to the game, but his comments on the lack of a gender option in the game were most discouraging. In Persona 3 Portable, appropriately enough the port of the third title on the Playstation Portable, the player was given an option to play the original male main character or a new female main character. The changes were widespread. Certain plot details changed; a huge variety of Social Links, an in-game system of measuring your interpersonal relationships, were switched to account for the gender difference; and of course there were new animations and voice acting to accompany the change. It made many hopeful that similar changes would occur in later games. Unfortunately, Hashino made it clear, both in action and in words, that this would not be the case.

"Every time the development on a new Persona game starts, this subject always comes up at the very beginning," Hashino tells me. "When thinking about how much work goes into accomplishing such a feat, it's a huge amount. Honestly, to put that option into the game, we'd have to cut out other things to compensate for the workload, and every time that's the situation we'll basically say, 'it's not worth it'."

While the question was being asked, Hashino also elucidated the reasoning behind the option never being added to Persona 4. His reasoning was...perplexing, at best:

" . . . With Persona 4, though, we needed the character to come from a big city to a small country town to be the driving force of the story, and it seemed more natural for a male character to fulfill that role. There are story aspects to this decision, as well." 

First of all, speaking as a huge fan of Persona 4, I can't think of any "story aspect" to the game that made a male main character important or necessary. As for the move from a big city to a small country town...surely Hashino doesn't think there aren't any girls who have gone through this?

Back to Persona 5, however, the idea of a female main character being "impossible" strikes me as silly. It's almost amazing that this argument is being made; Remember when Assassin's Creed: Unity got flak for claiming it would have doubled the amount of work the animators had to do? Remember people from other companies, such as Naughty Dog and former BioWare animator Jonathan Cooper estimating it would actually take perhaps two days? He details his reasoning here, and even specifically notes it's an issue of planning over any sort of technical or resource limitation. That was nearly three years ago. And here we have another company talking about the work for a female option like an entire team of animators would be hunched over their computers for years.

"Now now," I hear you cry, "There's story considerations as well! There would need to be differences in some dialog for male and female main characters!" Yes, absolutely. Some of the dialog would need to be rewritten. Specifically, given that Persona 5 has disappointingly continued to not allow any queer relationships in the game, any references to a romantic attraction towards or from another female character would need to be altered. Similarly, romantic options would need to be added for the male characters in the game. Again, I'm not going to say that I know, for certain, that this would be a simple task. Writing romantic dialog is, I imagine, a different thing from writing typical dialog which requires looking at a character in a particular way. But, much like the animating, I can't imagine it's some hellish nightmare of writing. I can't see a writer on Persona 5 slaving away at it night after night because it's such an impossible task.

Hashino's claim seems to be that the team didn't have the resources to make a female main character option. One thing I'd like to point out before continuing on: This game was originally scheduled to release in 2014. They had the resources to develop it for 2 and a half years past their original release window...but not for a female main character?

What this all boils down to, and what it has always boiled down to, is that Hashino doesn't care. He doesn't care about any portion of the audience that would want a female option. He doesn't care about how much it would mean for a title in a series as popular as Persona is (in Japan, at least) to let you play as a woman. He believes that it's unnecessary, so it's more important to have a special animation for one of your party members to be visibly uncomfortable with a revealing outfit they're obliged to wear. To be fair, I imagine that's an opinion that a fair amount of the team share. But he still has the final say, and he just didn't care.

I appreciate the work Hashino has done; Again, I'm really enjoying Persona 5 so far and I'm a huge fan of Persona 4, another game he directed. But to hear "it would have been too much work" as an excuse again after so much criticism was levied against other games for it is disheartening. Hashino says that, after Persona 5, he's hoping to move on to other series at Atlus, specifically the fantasy RPG announced late last year. I sincerely hope that, whoever takes over the franchise from here is more willing to listen to those asking for a gender option. Or, at least, they give a better reason for it. 

The slow and steady start of Mass Effect

Mass Effect: Andromeda launched less than two weeks ago now, and opinions on this one seem low. It's incredibly disappointing, especially considering how much I love the other titles in the series.While talking about the title, Waypoint's Austin Walker compared it to the original, in doing so said the following on the original Mass Effect:

You get all of this dump, like "Oh, there's so much to this world! There's so many things that I'm learning about, and I'm learning about the different conflicts, and the different relationships, the genophage, the First Contact War between the Turians and the Humans, there's so much to dig into there."

Certainly, I've always enjoyed how Mass Effect opens. I've certainly replayed the beginning enough times, thanks to new runs started and never finished. But after hearing this quote, and recently starting yet another new playthrough of the game in honor of the new game coming out, I started to realize just how perfect the opening of Mass Effect is. It sets the exact right tone, and the exact right expectations, for the game to follow.

The game opens with characters discussing your Shepard, specifically mentioning some backstory details you pick during character creation. The very first thing the game does is take a moment to reiterate what your character has done, and how some view them already. I feel it should be noted your characters ability in combat is never mentioned, only where they're from, and what they've accomplished.

After this, you get a brief cutscene of your spaceship, the Normandy, cruising through space, before the game cuts to...dialog! The very first interactive aspect of the game is a dialog option, and immediately you can start fleshing out what kind of character your Shepard is. When someone questions an authority's action, do they agree if it seems suspicious or not acknowledge it? Do they stay professional at all times, or do they relax when the situation allows for it? One of the first things the game does is allow you to decide what kind of person your character is. You keep getting to determine what kind of character your Shepard is, as well; You're asked to meet with the captain of the ship, and on your way, there are several conversations you can have with a variety of characters on the ship. When you finally get to the captain, there's a lengthy segment of dialog, focused on setting up the story of the game and the lore of the universe. Once the game has set up a situation which will finally start some combat, and the game...gives you a little more talking!

Eventually, the first combat segment begins. Your crew jumps off the ship into an attacked colony filled with violent robots, but even here the focus is on speaking. Between almost every battle, there's a dialog tree: How do you handle a squad mate dying? How do you treat a soldier who's managed to survive a pretty rough situation? What about the civilians who did the same? It's your first introduction to what many would call the "real gameplay" of Mass Effect, but even here the game is clearly more interested in its writing and story than in its fighting.

After this segment, you're taken to the main hub, so to speak, of the game: The Citadel, a massive space station, and here the game really starts to show off its true colors. Very quickly, the game starts showing off more of the world the writers crafted, specifically the varied alien species. There are monotone and looming Elcor, small and wheezing Volus, tall and lanky Salarians, and a host of other aliens you can interact with and learn about. Among all of this, the game starts giving you a variety of side quests you can perform throughout the Citadel. They're all heavy on story, but have no combat. You can help a consort stop a war veteran from spreading lies, or try to convince a civilian working undercover with the police that their work is dangerous, or trace an odd money wire to an errant AI, but you never get into gunfights with any of them. It's all about experiencing these many varied stories.

If you decide to focus on getting through the main story at this point, to get to the "real game," there is some fighting...eventually. Once or twice. But it's not combat because "oh, we need some fighting here," it exists to show how dangerous the situation you're in at that moment. You take down a crime kingpin, who points you towards a witness who is both integral to your goals and in danger, so you go and save them. Two fights, within 5 minutes of each other, which only exist because it made sense in the story. And again, these segments exist to allow for character development: How do you react when a party member, who said they'd kill the crime kingpin once he was cornered, makes good on their word? When you rescue the witness, is your first concern their safety or the information they have?

In the end, this whole segment frames what Mass Effect's focus is wonderfully. It's not about combat, it's not about your abilities in a firefight, it's not about how powerful your guns are. It's about your character, your Shepard, and how they choose to interact with the world. Some may complain that the opening is "too slow" or "plodding," but what do they expect? It's the start of the story. Better to give it time to breath than force it to be something it isn't.