Disobedient
Control the UNCONTROLLABLE.
A game about herding a cat.
"Disobedient" is a short, experimental video game where you control a character that considers your suggestions, but ultimately does what it wants.
"You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink"
Deep dive explanation here: Procedural Rhetoric of "Disobedient".
Why?
I'm partly inspired by my experiences tutoring math.
I enjoyed the subtle game of figuring out what my students understood, then carefully tailoring how and what I say to most effectively help.
I wanted to explore game design from a different angle, ignoring "fun" as a goal and focus more on what the mechanics say and how they make the player feel.
It's abstract, challenging, and your mileage may vary.
FAQ:
Q: "What am I supposed to do?"
A: That's for you to discover. A large part of this game is about attempting to piece together what you need to be doing.
Q: "Is this game possible to beat?"
A: Yes. At first, it may seem very difficult, but it's doable. It's totally valid if you don't finish, though.
Final Notes:
The browser version is provided, but Godot has some minor issues with audio lag and caching on browsers. For the best experience, you should download the game.
Credits:
Base cat design:
https://opengameart.org/content/grannys-house
Base house interior:
https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-house-insides
Music:
Komiku - Quiet Saturday
https://twitter.com/monplaisirmusic
Beatrice Dillon - 55
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Development log
- Procedural Rhetoric of "Disobedient"Oct 02, 2020
- Web Player quick updateAug 21, 2020
- "Mercy" effect addedAug 19, 2020
- Quick Balance UpdateAug 18, 2020
Comments
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I'm completely shocked- I managed to beat this after a half hour of figuring out what the "rules" were. Very fun little game, also infuriating but I love a challenge. Made me feel glad that I'm stubborn. Great work!
Difficulty seems fair- if it were any harder, I would have given up, but any easier defeats the point. It's not supposed to be easy.
Also, could not figure out where or when to enter the code. Going to try one more place but am having no luck with that.
That's awesome! I was starting to think that nobody was gonna get through it! I'm impressed that it only took a half hour!
You enter the code on the main menu, with the "start" being enter or space. I think I'll make a little change to clarify that.
It gives you a bunch of insight into how everything works under the hood. It's largely to satisfy your curiosity.
I know the game already thanked you but wow! That makes me so happy to hear!
I'm glad you made this- it was a great chance to do some brain work and crack a puzzle open! I enjoyed trying to figure things out without much guidance. It's a nice change from being led through everything. Sometimes you want to feel proud because you figured it out, you know?
For things like this, I find it works best to take a trial-and-error approach to determine each apparent rule one at a time, then test if I got it right and determine if there are more apparent rules. I focus on finding the rules first, and only attempt to beat the game once I'm certain I've found the essentials. I find it's hard or impossible to beat a game when you don't know the rules you need to play by, and working them out allowed me to play by skill instead of luck (though luck remains a factor here for obvious reasons).
The downside is I may have also followed a rule or two that didn't actually exist because coincidence led me to think an input and output were correlated, but for the most part this approach did the job and helped tide frustration. Little bits of progress can make a big difference in how long I can tolerate something.
I know what you mean, it's interesting to try and tease apart the individual mechanics when they are all presented to you at the same time and fundamentally random. It forces you to chase and debunk red herrings. Always striving to sort out the signal from the noise.
Game's don't usually do that (maybe for good reason! lol) but I thought it was a really interesting challenge game design wise to find a balance between making the game just opaque enough that the player really has to stay on their toes and question their assumptions, yet at the same time, clear enough about what's happening that they can ultimately figure it out. This was the primary thing I found myself balancing in my play tests.
You have no idea how reassuring it is to know that these things conveyed themselves properly at least for one person. I was really off-roading with this game when it comes to game design.