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Game Producer!

An IF adventure by Jason Bergman
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Game Guide by Jason Bergman
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Table of Contents

1) Introduction
2) Gameplay concepts and random things
   2A) Gender
   2B) Difficulty levels
   2C) Caffeine
   2D) Scoring
   2E) Random things
3) FAQs and disclaimers
   3A) The obligatory disclaimer
   3B) FAQs

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1) Introduction

Welcome to Game Producer! GP! (yes, the exclamation point is part of the
title...check the FAQs at the end of the document for an explanation of that, if
you really must know) is my second IF game, although my first, a funny little
thing called IF Quake, was really more of an April Fool's gag that somehow wound
up being a fully playable game (albeit it a very tongue-in-cheek one with more
gags in it than actual gameplay). Unlike that project, GP! was created to be
played as a game not a joke, so I hope you enjoy playing it!

This document does have some spoilers in it. Chapter 2 will go through the
random elements of the game as well as talk specifically about how the gameplay
works behind the scenes, so if you'd rather not know that sort of thing in
advance, you should probably play the game *before* reading this document in its
entirety. 

While there are spoilers in here, this is *not* the full walkthrough to the
game. For that, you'll need to download a separate text file, which should be
available in the same place you grabbed this one. If not, you can get it from
the IF Archive (www.ifarchive.org) or my web site at
www.loonyboi.com/if/gameproducer.

Thanks, and I hope you enjoy the game!

Jason Bergman

PS: This document is a bit on the lengthy side, and I'm not sure anyone really
will care all that much. But if you're curious, read away!

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2) Gameplay concepts and random stuff

Game Producer! is an IF adventure game written in the Inform language, so it
carries with it all the usual features of an Inform game. For the purposes of
this document, I'm going to assume you're familiar with IF. If you're not, I
suggest using the HELP command from within the game, as that lists the basic
commands you'll use when playing the game. In this section I'm going to get a
little more specific than that.

Anyway, let's get right to it. 

2A) Gender:

The first thing you do in Game Producer! is choose your gender by walking
through the door marked either Gentlemen or Ladies. There aren't too many
differences between the two. Some of the dialogue is different, but really,
there are only two major differences. If you don't want to know, skip below to
the part about difficulty levels

[Spoiler alert]

The QA puzzle: 

If you're playing as a woman, when you walk in the office, Sally calls you over.
By either using the TALK TO SALLY command, or WALK TO SALLY, she'll give you a
hairpin which you then put in your long hair. This is used to solve the QA
puzzle.

As a man, you get your small bit of metal when you pick up the invoice in your
desk drawer. As you pick it up, a paperclip tumbles out and lands on your desk.
Take that and use it to solve the QA puzzle when the time comes.

The PR puzzle:

In order to successfully complete the PR puzzle, you need to get the journalist
drunk. If you're playing as a man, you have a bottle of whiskey in your desk
drawer, next to the invoice and design doc. If you're a woman, you'll get a
bottle of rum by opening Raoul's desk in the finance department after completing
the finance puzzle. 

I'll go into this in the disclaimers section, but no, I'm not trying to say
anything about the gender differences with these changes. I just thought it
would be cool to have some minor differences based on your choice of gender. 

[/Spoiler alert]

2B) Difficulty Levels:

Game Producer! features three difficulty levels that are selected during the
opening dream sequence. The only difference between these is how much you
oversleep. If you select the Easy door, you'll wake up bright and early at 6:00
AM. If you choose Normal, you'll oversleep and get up at 12:00 PM, and if you
choose Hard, you'll *really* oversleep and get up at 1:00 PM. 

Otherwise the game is identical, although as this is a timed game (you have
until midnight, after which the game is over) this has a direct effect on your
game. Also note that two puzzles (the marketing and PR ones) are time-based, so
you need to make sure you're aware of how much time you have left. Maria in
marketing leaves at 6:00 PM (and takes her ads with her) and for PR, the
journalist is in the demo room from 4:00 PM to 10:00 PM (unless you start
talking to him, in which case he'll stay there until midnight). 

2C) Caffeine:

Just like any real life game producer, you can't function in GP! without your
morning cup of coffee. In GP! you have a constantly changing caffeine level.
When it gets too low you'll start getting warnings. Ignore it for too long and
you stand a chance (one in five) of nodding off and losing an hour. Drinking
caffeine also increases your productivity, which affects how much time passes
with each turn. With no caffeine in your system, time passes at a rate of 10
minutes per turn, which eats up time *very* quickly, so keep yourself
caffeinated!

You can increase your caffeine level by drinking coffee, HYPER soda and orange
juice (yes I know OJ has no caffeine, but it's the natural alternative, and for
the record, it's what I do in real life). 

Coffee is your standard choice. It's average on the caffeine scale and lasts a
reasonably long amount of time. In a game on normal difficulty you'll probably
have to recharge two, possibly three times if you drink coffee. Coffee also
causes time to pass at a rate of 3 minutes per turn.

Orange Juice gives you the best productivity (time passes at a rate of two
minutes per turn) but it lasts 30% less than coffee does and nearly half as long
as soda. In a normal game you may have to recharge four or more times if you
exclusively drink OJ in place of coffee. Also note that you can't have two
glasses of OJ in a two hour period, as all that citric acid would give you an
ulcer. (Yes, it's a convenient explanation for something put in for gameplay's
sake! There are lots of these). 

HYPER soda has the most caffeine of the three options, so it lasts the longest,
but it makes you agitated, which affects your productivity. Time passes at a
rate of 4 minutes per turn with soda in your system. On a normal game you may
never need to recharge if you drink HYPER soda (if you know exactly what to do,
that is), at most you'll probably need to recharge once.

In the original version of GP! I had a feature where if you drank too much
caffeine you had a heart attack and died. Despite putting in nags like "Are you
sure you want to drink that? You already have a dangerous amount of caffeine in
your system", everyone seemed to keep doing it anyway, leading to a lot of
pointless deaths. So it was removed, as was my secret anti-caffeine agenda.
Darn.

One thing that also had to be removed for the same reason was a feature where
you could push the limits of your body, and if you got it just right, it was
possible to drink an amount of caffeine that while marginally dangerous, would
result in your never needing to refuel during the course of the game. It was a
nice idea, but nobody was ever going to fiddle with it enough to find that magic
formula, so it was removed. 

2D) Scoring:

Game Producer! doesn't have the same kind of scoring system as you'd find in a
standard IF game. Instead your actions as you play the game affect the shipping
product. When your game goes gold (either by running out of time or by using the
magical gold disc), you're called into The Big Man's office and he tells you
your GameRankings review score average and how the final product sold. 

There are two main ways that your game is judged: your marketing score and your
polish score. Your marketing score is determined by whether or not you completed
the marketing and PR puzzles and whether or not you approved the three
advertisements in marketing. Your polish score is determined by whether or not
you got your developers paid and solved the QA puzzle, as well as how many bugs
you had QA file and how many times you played your game yourself. These numbers
are kept hidden from the player, as they do not directly correspond to your
GameRankings and sales figures, but merely factor into it. 

For example: when it comes to reviews, completing the PR puzzle is extremely
important, but it's not absolute, as that only represents your first review
score, and not necessarily the ones that follow. If you completed both the PR
and marketing puzzles, you will (most likely) not get a review score lower than
a 5. But again, that's just the bare minimum. From there you need a polished
game, as that's what typically determines the second round of review scores.
There are a ton of different factors that determine your GameRankings score, so
I won't go into them all here. But you get the general idea.

One note about GameRankings scores: as it's not a real average, and as Inform
doesn't support decimal points anyway, most of that score is completely random.
The first digit is your real score. The rest I leave up to chance. In other
words, it's great to get a 99.8% review score average, but that just means
you're incredibly lucky, not that you somehow did better than the guy whose
score was a 99.5%. For the record, it is impossible to get a 10. Those don't
exist in the real world, so they don't here either. You can get a 99.9%, but
it's very difficult. You need to complete everything in the game and then still
be extraordinarily lucky to get that. There is a certain element of luck
involved in real game reviews, so I'm comfortable only having one digit be
legitimate. 

In a reverse of the review score, your sales figures are determined by marketing
first and polish second. If your game reviews over a 9, you'll always sell at
least 500,000 copies (although there are exceptions...more on this in a second),
but if you want to sell more than that (there's a maximum of two million) you'll
need a higher marketing score. 

Having said all of that, there is a random element involved in sales as well.
Even if your game gets a 99.9 GameRankings rating and has a perfect marketing
score, it is possible for you to still sell only 20,000 copies. This is because
if you have a game that successful there's a 1 in 5 chance of it being a fluke.
This is a very real phenomenon in the video game industry, where a game seems to
do everything right but still somehow flops. I felt it would be interesting to
put in here as well. If you somehow get that (it's really hard to do), I
apologize...but that's the industry for you. You can always hit "undo" at the
last command prompt to re-roll the dice and see what happens. Since it's pretty
rare to get the fluke ending, you'll probably see the other one. (Although one
time I got it three times in a row...that was pretty wacky, and really, really
rare). 

The second part of your sales score is whether or not The Big Man decides to
greenlight your game's sequel. This is based primarily on sales, although a high
GameRankings score will offset low sales and may result in a sequel. 

Again, this is all done to simulate the industry. See the FAQs section if you're
curious to know more of this stuff. 

2E) Random things:

While you can choose your gender and difficulty level, you have absolutely no
control over what your game is. At the start of the game you are randomly
assigned one of three games: Regicide, an FPS by Spaz Graphics, Repatriation, an
RTS by Cacophony Artworks or Relapse of Regret, an RPG by Surgical Design. 

At one point I considered making it that each game would need a different
combination of marketing and QA to succeed, but I felt that would punish
replayability, as  someone who felt like they had the game figured out would do
the same things as before and get a completely different result. Because of
this, all three games are functionally identical. They just have different
names, genres and developers, and there's different text when you read the
design doc in your desk drawer. 

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3) FAQs and disclaimers

3A) The obligatory disclaimer:

For the record, I am indeed employed as an associate producer at a major video
game company. This game is in no way a reflection of my job, and this game is in
no way endorsed by my employer. Do not go poking through this expecting to find
dirt on any current or upcoming projects from my employer as there are none to
find. It is purely an IF game and not a political statement of any kind about
any aspect of the industry.

3B) FAQs

* So how close is this game to really working as a producer?

It's not even remotely close. The best way to describe it is to say that this
game is as accurate to the video game industry as Monopoly is a depiction of the
real estate market. The basic goals and terminology are there, but they've been
distilled down into gameplay  concepts that really don't have any relevance in
the day to day world of the industry.

* Are you trying to make a statement about the importance of
QA/PR/marketing/finance/PD in the development process?

Absolutely not. The closest thing you'll find in here to a political statement
is that in the game, as in life, you can't be a decent producer if you don't
play your own game. I think that's common sense, so I'm willing to stand behind
that. Everything else is pure fiction.

* Is the office based on your office?

Again, absolutely not. Same with the people therein. They're all completely
fictional (except one, which is described below). 

* What are some real-life "flukes"? Does this really happen?

Flukes absolutely happen in real-life. Two recent examples from Ubisoft (nothing
against Ubi, but I don't work for them, so I can use them as an example) would
be Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Beyond Good & Evil, both of which
scored very, very well (PoP for Xbox averages a 92.9% on GameRankings, BG&E has
an 88.5% average) and picked up a lot of awards, but neither sold very well. In
the case of PoP, Ubisoft committed to the franchise enough to release a sequel,
which sold very well. You'll see something similar in GP! if you have a high
review average and lots of polish but low marketing scores and sales figures. 

* What's with forcing people to drink caffeine?

People in the gaming industry drink a lot of caffeine. If that bothers you,
drink the OJ. I lead a caffeine-free lifestyle myself, but I'm in the extreme
minority in this industry. 

* Are there any in-jokes that people might miss?

Yeah, there are a couple. The two bottles of alcohol are only barely described,
but they're  based on Sid Meier games. "Sid's Old Time Tennessee Whiskey!" is
Railroad Tycoon, while "Sid's Pirate Treasure Rum!" is Pirates!. The exclamation
point in the title is itself a tribute to Sid (as many of his games have
similarly excitable names). 

* Is the journalist based on anyone in particular?

Actually, yes. He's based on me. Before moving over to the other side of the
industry, I was a games journalist, and on my worst days, I was probably fairly
similar to the jerk in this game. But he's obviously been exaggerated quite a
bit. Also I can hold my liquor better than he can. 

* Are there any statements in here about how the two genders work differently in
the gaming industry?

Nope, that's all in your head. I suppose you could read into the fact that I use
the word "gender" and not "sex" in this document, but that would be silly. 

* What's some fun stuff I can do?

Unlike my first attempt at IF, for the most part, Game Producer! is a
straightforward adventure game. I wanted the game to be taken seriously, so I
didn't overload it with goofy stuff like I did with IF Quake, but I did put in a
couple of things. (I'm only human). 

Be sure to read the journalist's notebook. There are seven possible responses,
and I had a lot of fun writing them. 

* What's that number you type on Raoul's calculator mean?

Go find a calculator and type "5318008". Then turn it upside down. Now chuckle.
Producers can be infantile. I say this as one of them. 

* What's up with the "Mexican army knife"?

Again, no politics, I just needed something that could cut twine but still be
flimsy enough to break off after one use. Given the comparatively small size and
budget of the Mexican army, it seemed like an easy gag. Plus I got to put in a
funny line about a hazy trip to Tijuana. 

Actually, before becoming the Mexican army knife, that particular object was
known as "a lucky rabbit's foot". The rabbit's foot was to be used to cut the
twine, as it had a single plastic claw with a serrated edge which would break
off after one use. The absurdity of this made me chuckle, but it's really
unintuitive, and I was already relying on people to even notice that this
concealed object was on their keychain in the first place. That just made it a
double-whammy. 

I do however miss the line I had in there about the lucky rabbit's foot being
one of mankind's oldest surviving (and still in common use) totems, which it is. 

* In the opening dream sequence, in one of the rooms it says, "You can't quite
place it, but these doors remind you of something." What's that mean? Also,
what's with the cane? I took it, but then it was gone when I woke up.

Aside from being where you choose your difficulty level, that room is a
reference that's purely in there for the one person in a thousand who will
actually get it ("we call that the Dennis Miller ratio"). 

It's the riddle of the Sphinx: "What walks on four legs in the morning, two in
the afternoon, and three in the evening?" (The answer is man: you crawl as a
baby, stand upright as an adult and use a cane in old age). 

When you walk through the "hard" door you automatically take the cane (if you
haven't already). But since it's a dream, you don't have it when you wake up. 

* Will you release the source code?

No, I don't think so. It's not that I don't believe in open source...I do,
really. Lord knows reading through other people's code helped me to write this
game, and it's completely hypocritical of me to not release my own. 

The reason is simply that I'm a terrible programmer, and I don't think releasing
the code would do anyone any good. Pretty much all I think would come of it is I
would get a lot of e-mail from far better programmers than I with all the ways I
could have written it better. My code is sloppy, completely inefficient, and has
been known to give real programmers nightmares. I'll spare the world my
disturbing, uncommented, hacked together mess of source code and keep it out of
sight, thus preserving the illusion that I know what I'm doing.

Another reason is that because there were so many features that were in the game
but dropped (several towards the end of its development) there's a lot of legacy
code still stuck in here. The thought of combing through it finding all that
stuff gives me nightmares. 

Having said all that, if you really, really, really want to see it, e-mail me
and I might give it to you. But trust me, you don't want it. That this game is
playable at all is a triumph over my meager programming skills (and a tribute to
the quality of the Inform programming language).

* If you're such a lousy programmer, why didn't you write it in Inform 7?

As I said, I'm a sloppy programmer. Weird as it may seem, that still makes me a
programmer. I'm much more comfortable writing code than writing everything out
in natural language.

That's not to say I won't explore Inform 7, but it was so alien to me that it
was a better idea to get right into coding poorly than attempt to learn such a
radically new approach. This game was started in late July, so I didn't have a
ton of time (particularly since I had several games at my real job to finish up
simultaneously). 

* Do you find it at all ironic that a game in which the player is tasked with
creating a polished and bug-free game is itself a bug-ridden and unpolished
game? I mean, just playing it for an hour, I found <bug>, not to mention <bug>
and <bug>. 

Quiet you. 

--
Game Producer! is (c) 2006 Jason Bergman
