I’m targeting the big question of solving a puzzle to turn a page with Hoop Dungeon. Essentially, many game narratives boil down to implementing two different modes; a story mode and a gameplay mode. I’m interested in merging them.

My goal is not just to solve the problem but also to demonstrate the solution. I would like to expand the toolbox of game design to include a pattern for when you want to avoid a bimodal game. I personally often find the shift abrupt and the narrative pacing that it forces to be onerous.

The best way to demonstrate this in the current environment for independent games is to take the game directly to the player. An argument holds much more weight when backed by players.

As the players are required to prove the value of the idea, we must also look to the ideas to provide value to the players. I think that eliminating the context switching of bimodal gameplay will let the story stand for itself. It is unsurprising when a game favors gameplay over narrative and thus favors the gameplay mode over the narrative one. When the narrative is presented as an interruption to the core of the game, its gameplay, that makes it very hard for a player to truly engage with the story.

In “You and Your Research”, Richard Hamming writes about how they managed an integration with binary computers that analog computers could not solve. The integration was however “crummy” and so, if published, would be picked apart by people working on analog installations. So, Hamming took the time to derive an elegant solution and published that instead. As an independent game designer, the infrastructure to support publishing crummy methods doesn’t exist. We need to take the time to prettify our solutions.

Here, that means both making Hoop Dungeon financially successful enough to appear pretty to game developers and making the solution to the big problem direct enough to be visible to a general player, and so, we sell out.