Loose Ties: Small Numbers and Big Personality

Smaller numbers, bigger personalities, and prettier pictures. A lot has changed!

This update overhauls many things, but chief among them is the energy system. Since the jam, Loose Ties has been haunted by one word - immediacy. The game was applying pressures in the right directions, but their application was too sluggish, like trying to push a boat through water. If you made a fatal mistake, it might take 9 or 10 turns for that to ripple through the systems and cause a game over. This is a problem - the wider the feedback loop, the longer it takes for the game to communicate its response to the player’s actions, making it harder for players to meaningfully engage with the game. The primary culprit of this sluggishness was the energy system. Energy could range from 0-100, and was reduced by one for each step and an extra one for each bad vibe. If you had 100 energy then you had enough of a buffer to ignore any tension the game might be trying to drum up. If you had 10 energy then you were often a dead man walking. This realisation created an objective around which the changes could be anchored: replace the big numbers with small ones.

The first head that hit the chopping block was one-energy-per-step. This system lent itself towards large numbers because moving is such a common action in the game. I scrapped this and opted for an alternative - you lose one energy for every turn that ends with at least one bad vibe. We could now comfortably reduce the energy range from 0-100 to 0-10 and, almost immediately, the moment to moment gameplay snapped into focus. The movement became more expressive, and bad vibes that could previously be ignored were now a top priority. The tactical game was no longer a second class citizen to the deduction game.

Quite the opposite in fact! With the smaller energy range, the deduction system was now busted. The way it had been working is that you mark down your best guess for each guest, and when you leave the room all of those guesses are checked and scored, either awarding or costing you energy. This phase was taking a massive swing at the game state, often completely wiping out your energy or awarding so much that it became an unaffecting surplus. I stewed on this for a few days before realising that it was a symptom that I’ve seen in a few of my previous designs (specifically, Mercantile). The diagnosis: too much compute was being done at once! We were assessing all of the guesses and awarding all of the energy in one moment, which was robbing the game of the narrative arcs that it could have if those highs and lows were doled out over a longer period. It was a bit like overlaying every frame of a movie into a single picture, the time is what made the movie good! To add a bit of time into the mix, you are now able to lock in a guess while you are in the room and the energy is gained or lost immediately. It worked so much better that I was a little embarrassed it hadn’t been my first idea. The whole point of Loose Ties is to interweave a tactical game with a deduction game, so of course those two elements should mingle instead of happening in a chunky lockstep. The game could now produce situations where a tactical mistake forces you to make a risky guess, or an awry guess means you have to helicopter around the gossip for the rest of the party. The two games were speaking in each other’s language!

Amidst these changes, one essential ingredient had fallen out of the design. Attrition. It’s true that losing one energy per step was stuffy and cynical, but it was also applying a necessary time pressure on each room. With the new changes, it had become common that you’d make it to a party that only produced good vibes, and you could blissfully rack up points there until you passed out at your keyboard. While this may sound ideal, it also makes the game suck and is simply untrue. I’m lucky enough to have attended get-togethers where joy feels like the only option, but they do always wind down at some point. Was there a way for us to translate this into something that was good and true in the language of the game? What I landed on was this: one by one the guests will become sleepy and begin to move towards the exit. Once they reach the exit they leave the party. If you haven’t locked in their guess by the time they leave, then it counts as incorrect and costs you energy. This completely changed the vibe of the game. Parties were no longer hostile, erosive spaces, they were brief pockets of potential. Moments where joy, connection, and sadness are all exaggerated. As the guests leave the party they take their potential with them, until you are left in the final entropic state - an empty room with you inside of it.

This system of attrition had much more texture than the one-energy-per-step approach. Guests are not just engines of vibes, the games tactical currency, they are also engines of information, the games deductive currency. The way that a guest behaves gives you essential insight into both their persona and the personas of the other guests at the party. That means that when a guest leaves, there can be an attrition of energy, vibes, and information.

Unfortunately, I’d taken a misstep in the conception of this system that would take me a long time to unravel. Namely, skilled players were able to prevent guests from reaching the exit indefinitely. It turns out that the time pressure was really only a factor for noobs, and advanced play was a matter of body blocking guests and hoping that they would have a good time while you did it. It was not fun to play and didn’t imply great things thematically.

Alas, I’d become so infatuated with the idea that I bent over backwards trying to get it to work. I spent days tinkering with the movement system, searching for some ruleset that completely prevented repeated board states. Parity actually came in quite useful here. By ensuring that moves which directly interact with the guest also alternate their parity, we could make it difficult for the player to interact with the same guest in the same way twice in a row. Over many iterations we asymptotically approached the perfect movement system, but we never quite got there. At one point, in a bout of desperation, I was hashing every combination of player and guest positions, and randomizing the board on whenever we saw a repeated position. If it was good enough for chess it was good enough for us, right? right?? Wrong, as it turns out. That lead to games that were more random, equally boring, and completely unbounded. You can put the monkeys at the type writers, but who wants to read all that.

What had completely gone over my head was that I was starting too complex. I needed guests to leave periodically, so why don’t they just leave periodically? No path-finding, no positional abuse from the player, just tick down their timer, and then remove them from the party in a single turn. This simpler approach did flatten the dance with the guests a little, but it tightened up the rest of the game so effectively that it felt like the right call to make. Each room was now able to work with it’s personas to make a unique tide of rising and falling tension.

With that arduous wrestling match behind us, we still had a few pico-8 tokens to spare! It was time for some fun stuff.

After completing the fourth party, two “secret” personas now get added to the game. These are oblivious, who is unable to have their vibe changed by other guests, and contrarian, who gets bad vibes whenever they should have good vibes and vice versa. These two personas work by breaking the rules of the other personas, so introducing them late in the game ensures that players have time to get comfortable with the base ruleset before we turn it on its head. In addition, it act as a small challenging treat for more advanced players.

A seeded mode was also added, which allows you to enter an 8-digit seed to determine the persona types and spawn locations of each room. My plan is to use this with my partner so we can both play daily runs of the same seed. I’m really excited to see what kind of competitive edge it brings out!

Finally, Loose Ties got its visuals punched up. The walls extend out of the ground, as any good wall should, and a small spiraling disco ball effect helps it look more like a party than a prison.

I’m sure that I’ve missed much of the minutia of this update, but I hope that this has given an idea of the cascading motivations behind the bigger changes. This wall of text is beginning to justify pico-8’s token limit, so thank you for making it this far. As always, I would love to hear your thoughts.