Io is a tiny pixel game that doesn't really follow typical design conventions or expectations. There is no gameplay, most of the dialogue can be skipped, and it feels a bit awkward to play. Let me try to explain my process and intentions.
Earlier this year, one morning I was in the mood to explore games on itch.io. I found one of the games I played a bit striking. It had no gameplay, minimal graphics, minimal anything. It was like a minute long. But it was good, the story drew you in. There was something elegant about this; it's like when I try to be minimal when creating gameplay, like a puzzle should only contain the required elements. The game felt like the logical extreme of this development concept, how much can you remove from a game and have it still be good? This was my initial thought anyway; it is not rare for itch games to inspire me.
I do not usually go through with my itch.io inspiration bursts, but after bubbling on this idea during the day, I whipped something up later that evening. Usually I struggle to finish making long games; most of my completed games took a week to make or less, because I am given a strict time limit. I think it boils down to the fact that I lose interest after enough time passes. Anyway, I saw this as an opportunity to make a game I could finish where I didn't need a time restriction, because the game is so ridiculously simple that it just wouldn't take much time to finish. And indeed, the first prototype of the game took me about an hour to make. This was what is now the second room, including the player movement, art, placeholder music, and the dialogue.
It wasn't until nearly 5 months later that I revisited this idea. You might be able to tell that the tone of the dialogue changes slightly after that first room, I was in a different headspace after this much time. In fact, I had almost completely forgotten about what the game that inspired me was like, and what my original idea for the story was. Around this time I was enjoying reading up on old computer hardware. The Commodore 64, old hard drives, floppy disks, CRT monitors, the demoscene, that kind of thing. I think my appreciation for this old aesthetic is was brought me back to Io. I added a CRT filter, and started brainstorming more ideas for the aesthetic.
The aesthetic I arrived at was that I wanted the game to feel personal, and unpolished. Not unpolished in a janky, annoying kind of way, but in a way that reminds you it was made by a regular old person; sometimes the flaws in games is where the human element shines through. There are a lot of games like this on itch.io, and even when they are trash I always appreciate the vibe. I also wanted the story to genuinely take itself seriously, sort of as a personal challenge. Usually the dialogue I write is very sparse, vague, and jokey. This was a chance to wander out of my comfort zone. The way I described this aesthetic at the time was "you found a floppy disk at a garage sale and booted it up". I find it a compelling premise, because there is an untold story. Where did the game come from? Who made it? If this copy isn't finished, was it ever finished? Where is that person now?
While the game has its shortcomings, there are many parts of it I am happy with. I think the retro/shovelware aesthetic worked well; I emulate a fictional computer with 144x144 pixels, and cell-rendered graphics. The colour scheme and animations were convincingly restricted; I've had people ask me what engine I made it in, and they paused for a few seconds to process it when I told them it was made using a modern engine (Godot). There is a healthy level of jank, where it is very noticeable but doesn't hurt the player experience much: the movement and screen transitions are a bit uncomfortable, some of the cell colors don't match as if I am saving memory by reducing the number of cell variations, the dialogue has no sentence-casing. And to add to the game's weirdness, it almost seems like it is disinterested in the player experience. You can skip basically the entire story, you can't reread dialogue, and the game does not react to you skipping anything (these are consequences of the game I was inspired by).
My favourite part is the "leave" ending, which unintentionally ended up being somewhat interesting. The concept for it was simple, I wanted the player's soul to be broken up and dissolved into the cosmic vortex. I added in some dialogue mid-cutscene to explain what was happening. As a consequence, each time the player pressed continue a part of their soul was destroyed. In hindsight this is kind of metal, and there is something a bit poetic about it. The first part of your soul shattering is abrupt, and a bit surprising. Then the player catches on, and each press of the continue button is slowly accepting death, which is on point for this ending. Then the screen starts filling with yellow squares, which soon becomes apparent is the cosmic spiral Io mentioned, which sweeps away the dust of your ashes such that the screen is just filled with a spiral. This may be the point players realise "dang Io is the spiral thing", or if they realised it in the earlier dialogue perhaps they will appreciate the foreshadowing. The way the music kicks in here is pretty cool too, overall good vibes.
Now for the parts I am still not happy with. For one, I don't think my 'vibe intents' reached players. The aesthetic feels good; it's like a calm but subtly unsettling fever dream thanks to the music and visuals. But I don't think I did a good job selling the "passion/human element shining through the jankiness" vibe. The only real validation of this conclusion is that people who played the game did not think the jank was intentional, it didn't feel like it was serving a purpose to them. Of course I have only had a very small sample size so far, and I'm not sure if this is actually proof that I failed in my goal. But my uncertainty here seems to prove the idea was a bit vague. Did I want players to know the jank was intentional? Would it be more authentic if the game was genuinely just jank? This was not something I considered in a lot of detail, but I think if I were to revisit this concept I would not try to make the jank "authentic". Making a janky game is not interesting as a dev or a player, the goal should be to squeeze out just the "good essence" of jankiness that compelled me to try this idea. For now I'm not sure what this means. Should lack of polish be relevant to the game story/lore? Should bad mechanics be explicitly be brought up in dialogue? Can glitches introduced in earlier levels become interesting mechanics in later levels?
Finally, I am not happy with the dialogue; a bit unfortunate for a dialogue-driven game, no? My first problem with it is theme; I did not intend to make a game about philosophy. There were weeks and months between most instances where I worked on the game, and each time I had a slightly different idea of what I wanted it to be about. I think the one of the earlier concepts was that you would essentially get a tour of the underworld, get some worldbuilding lore, get to know Io, and then game over. At some point I decided I wanted to sow doubt of Io's intentions, and I guess philosophy justified her actions, so the rest of the game is discussing that. Life/death/ego just isn't the kind of story I want to write, and it all feels a bit jumbled to me. None of the ideas get enough room to breathe. I could spend a lot more time on the dialogue, but this game is only an experiment and I don't want to linger on it. I have certainly learned a lot when it comes to writing for games though, like how much planning is required, how much time it takes to convey ideas, how many avenues there are to add complexity, and what kind of story I would like to write. My friend suggested the dialogue would be more interesting by characterising the player and letting them talk; I guess that is obvious, and makes writing a lot more complicated. But I think that is on the right track for what I want to write about; I would prefer a more personal character-motivated storyline, with multiple conflicting voices.
In the end, I only make games for fun so Io's flaws do not weigh upon me. If anything, I am just happy that I finished a game for once (this is the first in years that I've done without relying on time pressure). It is a small victory, but it makes me a lot more confident in doing small solo projects like this. Hopefully more games coming soon (: