How to cross bridges without falling off

So this game is finally published.

What's "The Bridge" about, anyway?

This game was born from an idea I had many, many years ago. Approximately, 7 years ago (could've been 8). Back when I was still in high school and I listened to a lot of Radiohead (still do), and a vision of a bridge, where you HAD to keep on walking and couldn't turn back, popped into my head. I think I could've also been inspired a lot by The Beginner's Guide, and how it shows "impossible games", or games that require a lot of effort from the player to be played, as in, "stand in a jail cell for 5 hours doing nothing and then you can keep on playing". As I do with many of my ideas, I jotted it down somewhere, and kept it in my vault of dreams for a very, very long time. I knew I wanted to actually bring it to life at some point, just because I found the idea something I wanted to explore. 

Then many things happened inbetween:

A very long development cycle

So I opened up the document I created back when I decided to start working on it, and I found out it had  been on July 29th, 2023. I'm somewhat shy about revealing the actual time it took to create it, because it's a very long time for such a short game, but we weren't actively working on it during all that time. I started bouncing off the game with a friend and talking about what it would become. I knew it had to be about a bridge, and somewhere along the line, I remember having the idea about having to drop off items as you went, because they made you slow, or simply, because the game, or some "gates" wouldn't let you keep on going. Then I thought about the player having to write down descriptions for each object. I wanted the player to get involved somehow with actively providing context for these pieces, as I usually like to do on other projects. 

Then this friend had the idea of assigning a literal value to each object by adding up the amount of words written for each item. I wasn't very sold on the idea, but I said, hey, let's try that. Then the project froze up and I didn't work on it for a very long time. I have been very busy working on other games and attending events. But as the stubborn person I am, I knew I wanted to finish it.

Game Poems

Another thing that happened during the process, is that I discovered this amazing book written by Jordan Magnuson where he talks about the concept of "game poems" and how we can create games based on that philosophy. I'm no stranger to words, poetry or creating games around a personal idea (though the concept of a "game poem" isn't really about words). Still, reading the book motivated me towards actually finishing the thing. Also, during those months where the game was on stasis, I had the honor of attending the A MAZE Festival, where I was further motivated to keep on creating experimental projects.

So I returned to Mexico and decided not only to finish it, but use it as a "first game" with this "Interactive Dreams" brand I'm launching with The Bridge. If you used to follow this account beforehand, you'll know it was simply named after me. After this game, I want to work on expanding this project, little by little, and actively include more people on it.

Actually making the game

Around March or April, I involved a friend of mine (Mario) who wanted to get into programming games (he's a long-time web programmer) and we decided to just roll with it. We worked around a prototype I'd left behind from last year, and got to create a very basic screen-flow, but in reality, I was very distracted with other things at the time. I've been involved with a lot of projects lately, within and outside *formal work*. But I still worked on the game on spare times. I also involved a former student who wanted to help creating the art, and we reached a "final" prototype around July, but we still had a crisis to overcome.

I sent the game to a lot of people, because I wanted to test the experience, and oftentimes, creating a *new* type of experience can be harrowing. I felt *alone* in the sense that I actually can't compare "The Bridge" to other games I've personally played. I can compare it to other narrative games in the sense it somehow tells a story, and it somehow creates an interactive experience, but I didn't create it thinking on genre, or actively thinking on another game. If anyone can compare it to another game, please write it down on the comments. As it stand, it's just an adventure game.

The Bridge

So the game went like this:

You clicked on the main menu and it asked you to write down a place where you came from, a place you wanted to reach, and the game asks you to select 7 items you have to carry on a backpack before embarking on a journey to cross the bridge. Under the hood, the game assigned a secret value to each item, and then the crossing began. As you approached a lamppost (I'm somewhat drawn to the figure of the lamppost), the game asked to you drop an object in a scale (fashioned somehow by the idea of the ancient Egypt mythos of measuring yourself in the afterlife). The lampposts had hidden values that you had to measure up with the objects. If the total sum of your "baggage" was lower than the lamppost's value, then you could just continue walking the bridge. If the total sum was bigger, you HAD to drop something. If the item you dropped down wasn't enough dropped weight, you had to keep on dropping things until you were light enough to keep on going.

So, anyway, remember that scoring system that friend of mine helped me with? That was one of the first things to go. As I started to test the game, many people didn't click with the idea that you could not write a thing on an object's description, and still be very attached to it because of what it represents to you. The biggest challenge around this system was that I was keen on keeping it hidden to the player, as I strived to make the experience more *metaphorical* than literally having the game show you the weight of the objects and the requirements for the lampposts. As such, other players crossed through a lot of lampposts without having the drop anything (because they wouldn't write much down) and would think the game was actually broken! When they somehow found about the hidden mechanics of the game (having to write more to add weight to the object) they talked about not being invested enough, which is fair.  Other people *did* manage to get into the game's fiction right away, but I wanted to make it more "universal".

I knew I had to change a lot of things.

As I said on the previous paragraph, I removed the scoring system and left it the way it is now: you write down an object's description, but the game doesn't add any weight to it (you still add weight to the objects but I'll get around to that later), rather, EACH lamppost WILL ask you to drop something, one by one, which was actually the original idea. I wanted to experiment with a more systematical form of creating the game, but it ended up being a more *role-playing* type of thing, which means that there have been many players who don't click too much with it, and then other have reached to tell me that the game made them think a lot about the things they leave behind. Then you cross the entirety of the bridge and get the ending. As some people have pointed out: the *drama* comes from the realization that you WILL have to drop everything, and if you click with the fiction, then you'll be keeping aside *that* object you're the most attached to until its time to leave it behind, because there's no alternative.

Other quick things:

• At the beginning of the game, I changed the questions from "Where do you come from?" and "Where are you going to?" to "What's your biggest fear?" and "What's your biggest desire?" (or something like that) to better reflect the themes, as many people were literally writing down something like "my house", and the intention was to create a more *spiritual* type of experience.
• I experimented with adding "speech bubbles" to the character, i.e. thoughts that were intended to make the player reflect further about the themes of the game, but I thought they distracted too much and ended up removing them.
• I added a small prologue making the player *imagine* they're crossing a bridge. This has been one of the most praised things about the game, so I feel it was a pretty big win.
• I added a vignette effect that keeps on getting stronger as you go through the game, just for ambience.
• This is one of the few games where I didn't include any type of music, just ambient sounds. I didn't feel any type of music would fit the game, so I left the classical song just for the trailer.
• I added *that* ending because I felt the game ended up on a very flat note. Maybe the current ending is still flat for you, but I hope it's coherent with the rest of the experience.
• I added a timer to make the game feel *urgent* . This aspect is one I'm still not pretty sure about, as some players have reached a point where they run out of time, lose, and then on a second try, lose all, if any, involvement with the role-playing. I'm still not sure if it would've been better off without the timer, but something inside my head told me it was a good bet to leave it there.
• Edit: Another very important thing I forgot to mention is that there have also been a lot of observations regarding the type of objects that are presented in the game. I realized that by including more and more objects, the game would have more possibilities of resonating with more people, but the artist behind the game is currently busy working on their personal project, so, for now, the game will remain with these objects.
• A tester by the name of "bert" suggested we added another form of giving the objects meaning, so that's when the hearts were added, to convey another layer to it. So the weight system ended up returning, and as of now, you can add up to 3 hearts to any object, from a pool of, I think 20 hearts or such. If you leave behind an object with 3 hearts, the game will give you back some time for the timer, *and*, it will make walk a *LITTLE* bit faster (many suggested making the player go faster, but I just couldn't find a way to implement this in a way it made sense with the rest of the game; the character will go faster by a margin of 1.03 times their initial speed or something like that). This last part is hidden from the player, but the timer things is very explicit. This isn't explained to the player at the beginning, because I still wanted to make the players add the hearts just as they saw fit. I'm still not very sure about this decision, but anyhow, this game as a whole was made as an experiment in too many fronts.

Did we manage to cross the bridge?

Somehow, I managed to write a lot of words up to this point and just now I'm realizing I haven't actually talked about what I wanted to talk about: What was the point of creating this game? What did I want to accomplish with it? Which reminds me to someone who asked me that same question when I was showing The Wandering back at A MAZE. Well, "The Bridge", to *me* (because I fully believe in "the death of the author"), is a game about, literally, having to leave things behind in your life to keep on going; about realizing that things may have a lot of emotional baggage, and that, sometimes, it's too much to carry. Will this meaning resonate with other people? I don't know. I know the game has resonated with some of the testers, but I don't know if they actually thought about this meaning, or maybe, they created their own meaning, which I would actually prefer. At the core, what I wanted to create, was a game that made it difficult to cross a bridge because you had to leave behind things that are important to you as a human being. Whether that works for you or not, is entirely up to a coin flip.

If you haven't played it, I'd love it if you would please give it a try. After that, please comment!

If you've already played it! Please, leave a comment! I'd love to know your experience with the game.

Also, this is the "first" game that gets developed using the Interactive Dreams name. We'll be creating other small games during the following months (we're already working on them), but expect bigger news next year.

Thank you for reading!

— Luis León (Interactive Dreams)