BLEAK

So it’s been four years since I finished uni, and by association about four years and six months since I last did anything with BLEAK, my final major project and attempt at a subversive city building game. In the years since, I’ve had time to ruminate, and to grow as a person and a professional. So I think an extensive critical reflection is potentially overdue.

In the four years since I submitted. BLEAK and finished my degree, there’s been three general elections, three Prime Ministers, a referendum on jettisoning ourselves from a political union AND in recent months even a plague. So there’s definite reasons behind why I haven’t carried on working on my grim near-future, ostensibly British game. It’s not really escapism, is it?

However, there are the bones of something good in BLEAK, and I’ve been thinking about what that could be. First off though, I need to perhaps explore where it came from. I’m going to be walking through the Game Design Document I wrote for Bleak, and ruminating on if it worked, or even if it made it into the final game.

There’s a reason for this, and it’s mostly personal reasons. BLEAK intentionally removed the human element and explored corporate greed and neoliberal approaches to political and personal life. These have become things that whilst I never shared as views, I can no longer feel comfortable exploring them as a context through concerns the work could be taken to glamourise or venerate the outlook. With this breakdown and critical reflection, I will be stopping and further work on BLEAK as a project, though given my interest in the genre I may lift ideas and mechanics for future projects.

Intent:

The idea that became Bleak began from dissatisfaction with an existing title. Ubisoft's Anno: 2070 featured two narratively opposed factions, the eco-friendly Eden Initiative, and the profit-hungry Global Trust. The dissatisfaction began after the realisation that this narrative difference wasn't well translated into gameplay. This made me wonder if the profit-above-all-else nature of the faction wasn't translatable into mechanics. Bleak is an exploration of alternate focuses and of the nature of greed.

From a top level perspective, this holds up still. Anno 2070 received a sequel in 2015 titled Anno 2205, which didn’t fare well in terms of reviews. Criticisms cited include a repetitive gameplay loop and overly complicated in-game infrastructure requirements. BLEAK can certainly be described as repetitive in the long term though that can be chalked up to the current version being built around the fact it was built for a degree show and to be played in small 1-2 minute bursts. Any further work on the project will require significant attention on the gameplay loop and any supplemental mechanics to break up the repetitive nature of the genre.

The latter point of BLEAK being an exploration of Greed didn’t really pan out. There’s currency for sure, but it’s only used to fund the building of assets and infrastructure. It’s just a currency used to interact with the fiction. The ‘win’ mechanic I settled on for the display demo was the construction (or purchase) and launch of twenty rockets. Within the sparse fiction of the game I rationalised this as the upper and middle management of the corporation you were working for leaving the planet after draining it of any and all available value. That meaning doesn’t really translate particularly well. In retrospect giving the player a goal of ‘reach a certain total value within an allotted time frame’ would perhaps be more suitable.

As it stands, there’s only one way in BLEAK to make money, and that’s from selling raw materials, or finished goods. Honestly I can’t help but see this as an incredibly rudimentary form of an economy. If BLEAK is to be an exploration of greed, literally everything that exists in the game world should be capable of being monetised. Though for a sense of progression, not everything should be available at the start. Coupling this with making commodities volatile in value, most players will be forced to expand out into other industries and endeavours.

Influences

- Robocop

- Robocop, alongside Alien are two of the genre-codifiers for this kind of grim, corporate-owned future. The themes of Robocop, such as the replacement of state services (Detroit Police) with corporate replacements (Robocop, ED-209)

- Bladerunner

- Like Robocop, one of the genre codifiers for widespread cyberpunk fiction. Provides interesting design and mood ideas.

- Anno 2070

- 2070 included a pro-corporate faction that was a step in the right direction, but in my person opinion held back on making the two factions feel and play differently. It was this dislike of the ‘bones’ of Anno that created the idea for Bleak. The game is sound in terms of actual mechanics and will serve as a major gameplay inspiration

- LS. Lowry

- Long term favourite artist of mine. Personal belief that his art style would synergise well with a modern low poly art style. Lowry’s place in the British art canon is a useful idea to play with.

Apart from the opening moments of the game, where a small farming village is bulldozed to clear space, there’s no real inclusion of the privatisation elements of Robocop, which is something that the above thoughts on the economy can filter into. A system where your corporation can bid for public contracts for utilities and services, like power supply and law enforcement. Perhaps as the contractee leases out more and more services, they become less of a bargaining power. Meaning that newer contracts and repeat contracts can become more lucrative, until it reaches the point where the players corporation is handling those elements of infrastructure outright, which presumably would be a useful goal, giving the player greater control of the game space.

The world of Blade Runner, and 2017’s Blade Runner 2049 provide ample aesthetic and mechanical inspiration that perhaps didn’t quite translate well into the final project. In Blade Runner, there’s a passing mention to Earth being less overpopulated as people have more or less left for the off-world colonies. By the time of 2049 this population slump and a decaying biosphere have left resorts like Las Vegas in ruin, and humanity clustering into dense, decaying, gaudy cityscapes. The Us / Them dichotomy is integral to cyberpunk, be it the othering of the Shadow Runners and the company men of Shadowrun, or the economical othering in Altered Carbon between the Meths and regular* people

*Not the best word, but I can’t think of anything more applicable

Lowry is a strange mention, but his body of work is something that has always resonated with me, and really manages to convey something grim and grimy whilst still including colour and life.

The choice to attempt to marry a simple lowry-adjacent aesthetic with a sci-fi flair was helped by the fact that as Bleak was a solo effort, I needed a quick turnaround for assets, and not having to spend time texturing the assets using the typical detailed texture flow definitely helped in that regard. However not having access to AO maps, and normal mapping for finer details meant that the buildings couldn’t support fine detail without it being modelled in, which made them less performance friendly.

The elevator Pitch

Resource management game set in an alternate future Britain where the player represents an abstracted megacorporation, building and growing a settlement from a refugee camp to a dank and grim metropolis for fun and profit, but mostly profit.

The sense of progression mentioned in the elevator pitch was present, but I have to question if it makes sense in the narrative context. The world of Bleak is meant to be a near-future Great Britain, where most if not all primary industries, as well as the literal biosphere have been bled dry to fuel industry, leaving behind something grim and desolate. Unfortunately this didn’t really translate into the actual gameplay - over half the buildings you can build are primary producers, which by my own narrative shouldn’t be functional. ANNO includes this by giving each island a maximum amount of specific resources, that when exhausted, are gone forever. This could be co-opted by Bleak but in a more aggressive fashion. Farms should be woefully inefficient, and require a large amount of space. Other primary resources like clay, or coal should be scarce, running out shortly after the player would be in a position to secure more from elsewhere - perhaps a trade system incorporating anonymous off-world colonies shipping food / materials.

This makes finding and making profit much more of a necessity, if most resources have a likelihood of suddenly not being available, maintaining a suitable buffer to cover unexpected costs is almost a necessity.

What sets this project apart?

- Strong focus on Cyberpunk ‘Corporate Dystopia’ themes

- Distinct lack of focus on individuals.

- Taking narrative and thematic cues from British Culture a la Fable, Discworld Etc.

- Distinct art style grounded in Art History.

In the years since, cyberpunk as a genre has seen something of a renaissance. 2018’s Altered Carbon captures the bright and vibrant yet still grim near-future, whilst also incorporating the political and social issues explored by the genre, something that not all examples of the genre. Given the increase in examples of the genre, any further examples risk being lost in the crowd. Whilst separate genres, BLEAK would in no means be able to draw people in instead of Cyberpunk 2077, nor do I have the knowledge of the genre to reasonably explore the themes in a satisfying manner.

The lack of focus on the individual is something that I tried to work into the game but given the nature of the genre, there’ll always be an importance placed on the denizens of your settlement. An early decision was that instead of tracking granular numbers of populace like Sim City, they’d be abstracted into aggregate units of population. Which in retrospect is just the above population tracking with smaller numbers. An earlier exploration that I roughly penned out but didn’t follow was to instead track percentages of populations. Breaking down the total population into distinct groups, along employment lines or more recognisable population classification. However to avoid [find a word] I feel reusing the population factions explored in the final game would work reasonably well, with a few changes:

• Generic

  • In retrospect, generic is a catch-all and doesn’t really serve a purpose as a category. A wider-impacting change would be to rework this into Unemployed, with the default state of a populace being a part of this group.

• Academic

  • Originally an abstraction for the more academic focused portion of society; researchers, teachers, historians etcetera. In the Vertical Slice prepared at Uni, academics were the primary selected faction, providing the win state of successfully launching twenty rockets.

• Military

  • Somewhat self explanatorily, the Military faction encompassed not just the tangible military force, but also the supplementary logistics like materiel production.

• Prisoner

  • With the overarching premise of exploring corporate greed and lack of restraint, dabbling into the prison-industrial complex was borderline inevitable.

• Criminal

  • With any kind of ‘simulation’ of this scale adding a criminal element is somewhat unavoidable. The setting of Bleak set up the criminal elements in a poorly-rationalised position of semi legality. I did envision that the criminal faction dealt with more unsavoury aspects, like drug and organ trafficking.

The original idea was to have the four specialised population types as diametrically opposed pairs. Focusing on Academic buildings and services will reduce the overall percentage of Military populace and vice versa. However this, and the associated interaction between Police and Criminal can definitely be regarded as naive, if not perhaps offensively simplistic.

The visual aspects of Bleak definitely carried some notable influences from both Lowry and general period architecture, along with a few jokes based on then-PM David Cameron, and a passing joke about Keith Richard meant that I was at least heading in a vague direction of building a tangible setting and world, though the fact that outside the clearly demarcated walls of the playable area, your settlement is stuck in a featureless void probably comes as a detriment. In the event of actual focus or development of the setting and in-game messaging, I’d definitely consider hiring a writer.

The final colour grading in the vertical slice created a rather dull and sullen look that fits the theme, and definitely strikes out in an interesting direction compared to the grime and dazzling neon of most 80’s inspired cyberpunk.

Core Gameplay Mechanics

• Structure creation / destruction

• Discontent

• Edits

• Discontent

• Edicts

• Contracts

• Resources

• Megacorp Interactions

• Trade

• Population Tokens

Invariably, structure creation and destruction made it into the final game, albeit in a simplistic way. Buildings can be placed on the play area, snapping to a grid of 10x10m tiles. Some buildings with a negative height punch out tiles beneath them to allow for them to dip below the base terrain. When destroyed, buildings collapse linearly and in an honestly dissatisfying manner. Though that was down to inexperience in that form of programmatic animation. Given time constraints, buildings do not have construction states or animations, though that would be something I’d explore given the chance. Other possible avenues of exploration would be to build on a terrain height map, to allow for a neater variance in terrain height, as well as more interesting settings than a flat, featureless plain.

Discontent was implemented into the vertical slice as one of the primary lose conditions. Unemployment and famine are the main producers of discontent. Unfortunately the system became rather watered down and bland during development, primarily down to inexperience and time constraints. Originally I had planned a more nuanced system that was more context sensitive, but in retrospect I am wondering if discontent is the right metric to measure. It’s a useful metric to track internally, being a gestalt of numerous individual policies, buildings and events. I feel now that the more interesting route to take would be to cause events to occur based on the current discontent score. The higher it is, the more likely events like riots and violent crime are to occur. This could be spun into a potential failstate where the player loses control of the situation in its entirety, perhaps ousted by a military coup / revolution.

Edicts were never implemented. Inspired by the feature with the same name from the Tropico series. Edicts provide small tweaks to other systems. BLEAKs implementation would have done the same thing. Unfortunately they were cut early on in development as it became clear that the necessary supplemental mechanics would not have been anywhere near malleable enough to accommodate the system.

Contracts similarly we removed during development, primarily down to time constraints. Ideally the contracts system would have periodically presented the user with an optional goal to complete. These would have tight time limits and would penalise the player financially if the production goal was not met in the time allotted.

Resources inevitably made it into the final game, due to them being an integral aspect of the game loop. However I feel that there’s a dissonance between the mechanics as-implemented and the setting the game takes place in. The world as presented is meant to be on the wane, similar in tone to the world presented in Judge Dredd though this is at odds with the relative ease to producing complicated goods and materials within BLEAK. This could be mitigated by imposing limitations on the maximum amount of primary resources that can be produced at a given time. Or a limit to the total amount that can be extracted. This could be modified further by having areas lack specific resources entirely, forcing the player to import materials they lack. This would then necessitate the creation of a sort of supply and demand system. Anno 2205 builds on the resource gathering system by giving each playable area a trait that boosts specific resources whilst reducing others. King Tides make coastal power stations more effective, at the cost of all other coastal sites having reduced yields.

Megacorp Interaction was a mechanic that would have created an extra level of depth to the game on repeat playthroughs. After completing a site1 and returning to the world map, the attained win/lose condition would have additional effects on following playthroughs. At a minimum, a functional settlement could export materials to the new settlement to assist in the beginning. Win Condition buildings like the Spaceport would infer additional benefits on following settlements / new settlements nearby. On the other end of the spectrum, a settlement that the player lost control of would be in a state of flux for a time, either inferring a penalty on nearby settlements, or perhaps being bought by a rival corporation.Rival corporations exist on the world map and grow and develop in step with the player. This could feed into a Risk style overlay where territories are gained and lost. Perhaps the territories that contain a Military win state building produce units to be used in this overlay? Like a lot of features, this was cut early on due to time constraints, but is an interesting idea to return to due to how much additional replay value it could create.

Trade remained in the final version but in a much distilled and simplified version. Earlier builds involved a system where the market price of a good varied depending on simulated supply and demand - selling something reduced the value a little due to increased supply. However this became wildly erratic due to the small values being employed. Looking back I think that leveraging something pseudo-random like Perlin noise to create an erratic external supply/demand effect. This is definitely something I would prefer to return to for a followup project.

Population Tokens remained a feature, though I question their usefulness. I intended them to be an abstraction of your populace as a measure of distancing. Most citybuilders use your population and their welfare as a measuring metric to show progression. Unlocking new items as rewards for reaching population milestones, with supplemental mechanics and elements being required to be engaged with as the population increases. Instead of avoiding this, or working around it in an interesting way, population tokens allowed me to abstract this away to avoid using large granular numbers. In retrospect, instead tying progression to the company value aggregated from the base value of all liquid assets and infrastructure along with the total value of produced goods. This provides a more in-line mechanism for player progression.

This however does not solve the issue of populations and how to represent them. It’s going against the grain a little, which maybe makes it fitting in the context - the elephant in the room that sci-fi games tend to skirt over is the looming nature of automation and the impact that will have on labour markets. Perhaps if the population system was taken out of the players control. The Tropico series has migrants arriving to your island seasonally, the number based on the prosperity of your island. These people require housing, with higher quality housing requiring power infrastructure. People are required in Tropico to staff and run the varying buildings the player builds. However perhaps an interesting mechanic would be that the population slowly grows based on the players success in BLEAK, which in turn will increase the pressure the populace places on the players infrastructure and profit margins. Edicts like UBI would reduce the discontent pressure a underutilised populace would use, or disallowing automation would remove that entirely at a productivity cost.

Population tokens were split into five: Generic, Military, Academic, Criminal and Prisoner. Initially designed as two sets of opposed pairs, the player would be able to demarcate buildings as belonging to each category, which would impact the demographics of the settlement - with certain buildings performing better at specific ranges. This mechanic could perhaps be retooled to function with specific buildings that would reduce or dampen the effects of discontent from a given population demographic.

Story:

Conveying the nature of the world involve in-universe adverts on loading screens and transitions, and a SimCity 3000-style news ticker. The News ticker has yet to be implemented, but it is intended to be implemented during the visual polish push in Term 2

longer term goals would be to have one or more self-contained missions, these themselves would be story driven. If this idea ever comes to fruition, these campaigns will be detailed in a separate document.

Whilst the world presented in BLEAK is sufficiently different from reality that a short timeline will need to be created to help develop the world, the real narrative that will be used is effectively created by the players themselves. This will be supplemented by delivering narrative content in the background, through fictional adverts, news articles, events etc.

For the most part, the sparse storytelling in BLEAK remained as written. Whilst some citybuilders like the Anno series have added story elements to the game, they’re not commonplace in the genre. ANNO 2205’s implementation of specific areas having a long chain of story driven events that culminate in a sweeping passive benefit for that area is an interesting take, which could feed into the Megacorp interactions mechanic.

Gameplay

Gameplay is broken into three tiers. The first tier is where the game starts, providing the player with a basic setup that will keep a small population stable for a reasonable amount of time. However the player will have to expand and grow the settlement as currently it will not be profitable. In addition their population will grow slowly, accelerating during migration waves. This means the player will have to expand infrastructure to support their burgeoning population.

This leads into the second tier. At this point the player will have some form of export base, and will at least be breaking even. This tier opens up more production options, including the second stages of many production lines. However at this point, the discontent mechanic comes into play. The player then has to expand on infrastructure further, to ensure that the settlement doesn’t riot and tear itself apart. Additionally the player can now begin to specialise their settlement through focusing on specific population groups and passing specific edicts. Once the player has placated the population enough that immediate riots are no longer an issue, the game opens up into its final tier of play.

The third tier greatly expands on the population groups, with three of the six having victory conditions, the opposite three being without, but to make up for that they’re simpler and require less ‘upkeep’ choosing one or more of those three allow the player to focus on alternate win conditions through the contracts system, fulfillment of one of the three population goals or any additional win conditions.

As of yet, the initial seed of the first gameplay tier is implemented, with the groundwork set for the remainder of the first tier and the subsequent tiers.

Breaking the gameplay into three distinct stages makes sense in a progression sense. Unfortunately in the final product the stages are less clear, and relatively easy to maintain and reach. With much of the supplemental mechanics that were designed to influence progression not implemented, the core game loop was shallow and not entirely engaging. Content reductions to meet deadlines also led to two of the population groups being cut. A refinement would be to redesign the population mechanics to be more passive, and an impetus for growth and development of your infrastructure, more finely tuned with production rates and modifiers to tighten the margins.