This is a postmortem for the best interactive demonstration of the future of AAAA menuing technology. That or it's a postmortem for a high effort shitpost. One of those. In any case I am quite happy with the result even though it's missing some of the content I had planned for it.

This project stated out more or less on a whim when I was hanging out in the chat of Foolbox. At the time we were joking around about radial menus and Fool's antipathy toward them. During this chat the Radial Menu Game Jam was mentioned and Fool said he'd participate only if at least five other people did. At that point there were four participants so I joined to ensure proper peer pressure was applied to Foolbox. The resulting game, scopecreep, was 100% worth the effort and you should play it right now!

Since the seed of my participation in this jam was getting some LULZ at dislike of radial menus I decided my game needed to be built entirely around the most cumbersome and obnoxious uses of radial menus I could think of. I wanted everything to be radial menus. I wanted radial menus on top of radial menus that would then make items that could be used in yet more radial menus. Madness! I don't know what possessed me to make a rage game based on menus, but I'm glad it did. I needed to get some evil out of my system and this was the perfect outlet.

What went right?

I feel that the overall aesthetic, meant to be a pastiche of a generic AAA game with some form of live service and microtransactions bolted on to it, worked. The best part is all of the visual design and atmosphere was thrown together between 1 AM and 3 AM on the last day. Pretty good for a rush job, eh?

The response I got from players, live and not, is about what I was hoping to get. My goal was to get a response similar to what a good dad joke does. Pain and suffering combined with some chuckles.

The ending. I think having the game "crash" to desktop once the player actually gets to playing is the perfect anti-climax to cap off a kafkaesque nightmare of menus and legal agreements that act to prevent the player from actually doing what most gamers want to do. Which is game. Not menus.

What went wrong?

The usual problem with jam games reared its head. I ran out of time and wasn't able to add all the stuff I wanted. The biggest single delay was getting the radial menus working well. I had set aside an entire day to focus on the jam and burned most of it on getting the basics of the menuing system and UI widgets working instead of developing content. The other issue was that the excessively longwinded license and code of conduct documents took a lot of writing. And that took quite some time to do too.

All the delay prevented me from adding the feature I was really excited about doing which was the microtransaction shop. My goal for this project was to have a ton of paths through the game that would all lead to the shop. Leaving the shop would return to the main menu putting them back on the path to accidentally visit the store again. Only after the player navigated all the traps that would open the shop would the "game" start. And crash. But alas, I didn't have time for it.

The last thing that went wrong was that I had already planned the game before the jam theme was announced. Since I couldn't really shoehorn this kind of satire into the theme I simply said "screw it, I'll put it in the title" and left it at that. Probably cost me a few places in the jam rankings but I was trying to get some laughs instead of win so not a big deal.

Conclusion

I am quite happy with how this project turned out. While I could have done more with it I think the joke came across well. Were I to change anything I'd cut back the amount of text needed in the agreements so I could have more time to do the microtransaction store. And provide a stronger hint on how to get a page counted as "read" in the EULA and Code of Conduct. On the other hand an MTX store needs assets which are also really time consuming. Who knows how that would've gone?

In any case that's it from me. Hope you, uhh, enjoyed this abomination of a game I created.