Devlog #1: Work on Episode 1 has started

It has been six months since we released the prologue of Code 7 for free on the web. A lot has happened in that time: we got through Steam Greenlight, have been nominated for the A Maze Berlin Award and have been working on several university projects at the Cologne Game Lab (see: A Million Faces of War, The Old Man and the Sea with robots in space). Also we've been taking a lot of time to write the outline of the full five-episode Code 7 storyline to make sure every single episode will have a strong tale to tell of its own, while contributing to an epic overall story arc.

While it is a lot of fun to just experiment with new ideas and work on prototypes, the time has come that we feel confident to start the development of Episode I. That means we started writing, creating concept art and programming.

Obviously we will not give out any details on the story of the full game, but we can tell you our current plans on how to get this giant project finished with just two people with other jobs.

As you may know we are currently enrolled in the Cologne Game Lab at TH Cologne. The prologue of Code 7 arose out of one of the smaller projects in the first semester. Now we are starting the third semester and from now on all our attention is to be directed towards our master thesis.
We were given the opportunity to write our master thesis about Code 7 so we can focus almost all our university workload on this project.

Last but not least, we'd like to give you a short glimpse at some concept art for Episode I, which gives some clues as to where this episode is going to take place:

We hope you are as excited for this project as we are and will from now on provide you with regular updates on the process right here.

Our Experience with Steam Greenlight

So as of today, Code 7 was greenlit by Steam and we couldn't be happier. If you don't know what Steam Greenlight is, it's the pathway for little indie studios like us to get their games on the biggest video game sales platform "Steam". You have to open a game profile, show your screenshots and videos and let the Steam community vote if they'd buy the game. It took us 60 days and about 900 "Yes"-Votes to get through. Here's the problem though. The message came at a time when I had thought that I understood what our goal would be and that we'd need at least another two months to reach it.

There's a lot of texts written about what your game profile needs to get through Greenlight. About one year ago it had still been about 18k Yes-Votes, which changed in 2014 to getting into the Top 100 and hoping for the best, which would still not be a guarantee to get through.

So i thought our goal would be to get into the Top 100 and then wait for Valve to notice us. On the Statistics Page there's always a big percentage shown how much of the way to the Top 100 we had already left behind us. So the percentage slowly rose over the months and finally reached about 50%, then 51%, then 52%, then got back down to 50%. So we were kind of stuck at that percentage and would have needed a new impulse for people to vote to get through.



In addition you also get these fancy statistics, which show you how many votes the items in the Top 100 have, so you can at least anticipate how many more votes you need to get there. In this case most items have about 1500 votes and the top 5 spot has about 2600. The top 15 spot has actually more than that - about 2800. And the Top 10 Spot is in the bulk with the others at about 1500. So it seems the "Yes"-Votes alone aren't accounting for the position in the Top 100. But what else is?

Last but not least, you get a graph that shows you how many "Yes"-Votes you get in comparison to "No"-Votes. While you may think that it's bad that 4% more people voted no, you should look at the overall statistics for all the games in the Top 50.



Actually the average ratio for those games lays at about 28% "Yes"- to 72% "No"-Votes, which I think mostly makes the community look bad, because these are supposedly the best games on there. In the end we can almost be happy about the fact that we got almost the same amount of "Yes" and "No" votes.

However to me, the community is the best thing about Greenlight. If you get through or not, doesn't really seem to be connected to any of these statistics, because shortly before we got greenlit we were only about 56% of the way to the Top 100 and therefore - as mentioned before - thought it would take a while. The response of the community however was what really made this profile worth something.

The about 70 comments on the page were almost all very positive.  So here's what I'm taking away from Steam Greenlight:

If your product is good, don't worry about getting through. You will get greenlit eventually. Nobody will be able to predict how long it will take anyways. Instead, focus on the people and hear what they have to say. Stay active. Write announcements and discussions and show your game as best as you can. What comes after could be much more terrifying - trying to actually sell your stuff.

We're of course really excited to take that next step and go on working on the five episodes that we'll try to bring to Steam next year.

The genderless hero

The beauty of text is what the text doesn't state explicitly, but what is written between the lines. While the expression originally came from people literally writing between lines in invisible ink to send hidden messages,  it became an implication for reading a text while understanding more than what is explicitly stated, but is implied in certain words or what is left out.

We believe that this is also what made classical text adventures like Zork great. The possibilities that you form in your head are endless even if the possible outcomes are limited. Not only that - Leaving out graphical representations is another interesting aspect of those games. It leaves so much to the imagination of the player as this original magazine advertisement for Infocom likes you to believe. You sure are likely to be eaten by a grue, but what does it look like?

With "Code 7" we want to harvest this brain power in as many ways as possible. We want you to be able to use a wide range of commands. We want there to be several possible ways to achieve certain things. And most of all - we want you to use your imagination to form the world that is being described in your head, while the audiovisual atmosphere is helping to immerse you into the game.

One thing that we decided concordantly to leave out was any indication to the player character's gender. So we gave it the name "Alex", which can be both masculine and feminine.

Man? Woman? Genderless? - You decide!

Two weeks ago for the first time we showed the game on an exhibition - the A Maze Independent Games Festival in Berlin - and were able to talk to people who played the game face to face. It's very interesting and also a little bit sad that still almost everybody (about 90 percent of players) expected to play a male protagonist. Most men stated that they projected themselves into the role of the player and therefore believed the character to be male, too. Some were even disappointed by their own answer.

Women however didn't seem to project themselves into the character and instead mostly just shrugged it off with the words "I just guessed it's a man".

People tried to explain in many different ways why they thought like that. Here are just some of the most frequently given answers:

• A person I know is called "Alex" and there are more men that are called "Alex"
• The possible answers where too logical and cold so it seemed more like a man saying them
• I felt a love romance between Alex and Sam and so i thought Alex was the man

While we certainly can understand some of these arguments, one thing that we really have to keep in mind is that these are all things that are happening in the players heads. Can only a man give cold and logical answers? Can a love romance only happen between a man and a woman? We think that in the end it all comes down to one other answer - people are just used to certain things, like love romances between a man and a woman instead of one between two women or men who play the logical role.

Even though we'd like that to be different, that's the whole point of leaving out that information. You can decide on your own how you want to imagine things and if we can make only a few people think "out of the box", it was certainly worth our time.