i wrote up a quick devlog on how i initially added a healthbar to my interactive fiction game as a joke, but why it's now my favorite mechanic. you can read it here and also here:
I have a confession to make: I never finished playing Amnesia. I got to the Cells area and then gave up because I was scared. Twelve years later, I still haven't played any other 3D horror games, because honestly some things in life are not just worth it.
I did, however, manage to play Amnesia for long enough to fall in love with one of my favorite mechanics I've seen in a game: the sanity system. Various actions throughout the game, such as spending too much time in darkness or staring directly at monsters, would drop your sanity. At low enough levels, the environment would take on a more sinister form -- the soundscape would become darker, and props such as paintings would change.
While the name sanity is unfortunate (I don't think most people with mental illnesses go around hallucinating freaky paintings) it was cool to see a health-adjacent mechanic that changes your environment. I haven't actually seen this done in any games that aren't survival horrors, which sucks because I think there's a lot of potential there!
When I first added a Morale bar to The Ape Painting, I saw it as kind of a joke that I'd remove later. Being part of the Games Are Art And I'll Fucking Prove It club means having a snide, condescending aversion to any mechanic that feels too gamey, and a health bar is the gamiest thing a game can have. I was in a slump with my writing and thought that adding a system I didn't actually want in the end product would break me out of the box a little.
Spoiler alert: it did and now it's one of the main selling points of my game.
The way morale works in The Ape Painting is that inevitably, certain dialogue points will drain the player character's morale. Different characters and objects throughout the apartment will remind Trixi of how naive and borderline impossible her dreams of being a best-selling author are, and in the span of 10 minutes she can go from full morale to feeling utterly hopeless. At 0 morale, the entire game changes - the color palette shifts, different music plays, and the interactions with basically every object are different. Items that would have previously driven the story forward in the typical point-and-click adventure fashion will instead send Trixi on various doom spirals.
Why am I writing so much content for a feature that I added in as a joke? I'd glad you asked! Here's why the morale mechanic grew on me:
#1: Solidifies any punchline
Getting a "morale lost" notification after a character says something mean to you is just funny. Morale loss comes with a dramatic whooomp sound and screen shake effect, so it's an easy way to add extra texture and punch to simple text-based jokes. There's also an emergent humor aspect here -- Trixi hiding in the fridge or having an existential breakdown because someone called her writing derivative isn't scripted, but feels connected because of the morale mechanic.
#2: Provides a player-led break from the main story
I've designed it to be pretty easy to dip in and out of 0 morale. For one, this is more true to life for me (sometimes I just want to feel bad and would rather wallow in despair than get actual work done), and two, this creates a sort of open-worldy feel to the game. At any point you can decide that you've had enough of trying to become a published author, and instead sit down at the kitchen table and think about how much better your life could have been if you'd stayed in college -- and then realize that there's a key under the table that unlocks the cabinet you've been curious about. I want the game to be whatever the opposite of toxic positivity and hustle culture is -- the most complete playthrough will come from saying "fuck this, I quit" at every chance you get.
#3: Provides a non-textual method of characterizing the protagonist
As an interactive fiction game, The Ape Painting builds up characters mostly through text. Which is cool and all, but one of the advantages that I think games have over novels is that they don't have to rely on text as the only means of narrative.
Here are some things that don't make Trixi lose morale:
- Watching a man die in front of her
- Finding the corpse of a policeman hidden in the bathroom
- Learning about an impending apocalypse that's going to destroy her and everyone she loves
Here are things that do make Trixi lose morale:
- People criticizing her writing
- Someone being mean to her online
- Being mildly inconvenienced in any way
This already tells the player everything they need to know about the protagonist, even without the game's writing.
Anyway,
I've been having a lot of fun working on this! It's weird that a mechanic I added in as a joke has ended up being the backbone of my game, but sometimes you just need to try weird shit and see what works. So that's why my visual novel has a healthbar.
