The making of Space Poggers 2 : Zero Hour

In 1987 Space Quest I and II was released by Sierra Online, written and (I assume) designed/coded by two guys from Andromeda.

While I didn’t play the game that year, it must have only been 3 years later in 1990 that I was taking control of Roger Wilco as he strode out of a broom closet.

You could say I was hooked.

It’s too long ago now to recall exactly, but as I watch my own kids playing MineCraft on the PlayStation I would say that I spent tens of hours (hundreds?) saving the universe as a janitor (and finding love as Larry… but that is a different post altogether).

When Fable 5.2 dropped earlier this week I wanted to see if I could pair programme a similar game but using one of my most worthless possessions….. Space Pogger NFTs.

I have around ~120 Space Poggers with the past 115 of them being bought from probably 10% of what I spent to buy my first 5 (the price of NFTs went off a very cliff shaped cliff), so I wanted to put them to work as characters on their very own spaceship, The Lark.

Rather than one paragraph prompt and hoping for a one shot I approached it in a paired way. I sent as much information about the project as possible, as well as some example screens from game play on Space Quest, and then a rough idea about a story.

We went back and forth over a few hours where I proposed a number of jokes, ways to die, story lines, and puzzles, and how I wanted the story arc to go.

It was pretty shit, BUT the feedback was good and over those few hours I was really happy with the end result.

What it is (for players)

• A new adventure game in the style of 1987: 16 colours, you type what you want to do, and the narrator is rude about it
• Six chapters, one every Tuesday from 17 November to 22 December: 60 rooms, 600 points and more than 100 ways to die
• Free, in the browser, with nothing to install. It works on a phone, and you can put it on your home screen and play offline
• Save passwords work on any device and carry your score into the next chapter
• HINT gives a nudge, a stronger nudge, then the answer
• Stars 124 Space Poggers, with original art by Nate Bear (no involvement with this at all)
• CC0: anyone can do anything with it, but I won’t provide the code until after the releases so there are no spoilers for people who actually want to play it.

What it is (for techies)

• One HTML file of about 370 KB, with no frameworks, no libraries and no image files: every room is drawn by code
• The tests were the safety net: every chapter is played start to finish by script, every door walked, every exit tapped, every save password typo refused.
• I was the back up, I walked every room, spoke to every character, died every way. Exhaustingly fun.
• Once building got fast, the slow part became getting real people to play it. All six chapters were done before I had finished the second one (although there were a lot of in-game tweaks as I went through it).
• I removed the default keyboard on phone because it sucks for this. Instead I took a lead from the Wordle game and incorporated a custom keyboard, complete with tactile feedback as you type. On landscape I also split the keyboard, not sure it’s perfect but better than left/right aligning it.
• It runs for almost nothing on Cloudflare: a static file, plus a small Worker for sign-ups and anonymous play data. I can’t tell you how much I love Cloudflare.
• Why Poggers: I LOVED this collection and spent way more than I should have buying them over the past 5 years. This is me putting the ones I own to use, for a community that kept going after all that had happened.

Links

• Play (after 17th November: https://spacepoggers2.simplethin.gs/
• itch.io (after 17th November): https://simplethingsltd.itch.io/space-poggers-2
• Signup to be notified for each chapter: https://spacepoggers2.simplethin.gs