Fragment (Bake Sale)

[kaputtnik]

Fragment

A cybernetic ménage à (x²-x)

After the automated coming-of-age story of Annie Android and the six panel whodunnit comedy smash hit !, get ready for the third instalment in Ben Chandler's and Sebastian Pfaller's ongoing robo emotion series: Fragment.


Timothy Jenkins is an aspiring scientist in the field of experimental cybernetic psychology. He is a loner, working the days away in his tiny laboratory, mostly known to fellow scientists for the unconventional and daring character of his work - often conducted at the borders of the code of scientific practice. His most recent experimental setup, called the Plateaus of Oblivion, was intended to explore human memory and conditions of forgetting, remembering, grief and remorse - but somewhere along the way, in the heat of the moment, Timothy loses control of the situation. An effervescent whirlwind of pure emotional code unfolds, and he soon finds himself confronted with memories from an uncertain past, with fears he had long forgotten and suppressed - and with love, where he least expects it. Can he, a man who has long lost track of the world, handle this digital emotion overload?

Prepare yourself for an introspective and surreal 32-bit colour extravaganza of digitalized emotions!

Get it now as a part of the awesome AGS Fake Sale bundle! And also try Balling Skywards!

[Igor Hardy]

Wow - great stubb! And I will gladly play anything that Fen Chandler and Sebastian P-baller put in the oven!

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[kaputtnik]

Thanks, you two! I'm actually really curious to see how people like Fragment, since it is the first game I have released (even if it was originally Ben's game, I have turned it into something a little different from what it was in the beginning). If you have played it, comment, folks!

[Big GC]

It was good. Story was good although it felt like you wanted to push it further but was constrained by time?

Seemed like alot of questions left unanswered, but to be honest if I played through a again and with a different "mentality" and choose different answer combinations perhaps I will see more of these questions resolved.

All in all. very good and enjoyable. Arkady is a compelling character 

[ThreeOhFour]

I honestly am not sure where else the story could be pushed - although from discussing the game with a few people it seems that the story maybe isn't 100% clear...

Anyway, I hope people enjoy this, I am immensely proud of the game Sebastian turned it into from what I started with 3 years ago. There were times when I thought this game would be lost forever, never to be finished, but I am incredibly glad this wasn't the case!

[Big GC]

No I think you are correct, the story to me was clear, I suppose I more mean it feels like it could be fleshed out further.

Spoiler

The former girlfriend, why did the relationship end. What memories did he seek to erase, was there a tradgedy in his past.

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I suppose the fact that I am wondering these things after playing is a good sign for the story telling anyway.

[Tabata]

If you have played it, comment, folks!

I liked the graphics, animations and puzzles right from the start. The first part was a bit like collecting an unknown number of pieces to make the system work properly without knowing about the reason, why the character didn't even try to refuse playing that game.
I always hoped to catch some thoughts of him between the travels but I only was told first to collect the next fragment before doing something else.
Now this may have been because of my lack of English and it changed during the second part, when dialogs gave more hints about what the program was aiming for.

Concentrating on this different point of view made the gameplay very interesting und entertaining. The ending was a good idea and makes it kind of a separate search for to realize the things really wanted and needed â€" and to go for them â€" like all of us have to make decisions.
                 

To tell it in less words: I like the game and the story!   

[Dualnames]

When I read the premise of this, I expected nothing less than awesome. That's all there is to this game. Awesome all over.  Music was surprisingly great as usual, and puzzle design is fantastic.

[kaputtnik]

Wow, thanks Duals! I know I can't compete with The Unfolding Spider, but I am honoured to have reached this degree of awesome with our game! And I am also glad you like my somewhat meta music, haha.

Big GC: Thanks a lot for your comment - it was actually my intention to

Spoiler

leave this one conflict in his past open to interpretation - all of the others are more or less alluded to and explained while you are solving puzzles on the different plateaus, but breaking up with Marylee has left a memory that is (probably still) too real to ever forget, so Arkady does not dare bring it up in one of her puzzles. That's sort of a psychoanalytic approach I took here, only I don't know too much about psychoanalysis, haha.

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Tabata: Thanks for your kind comment, I think I'll even use a smiley to express my emotions here:  ! I was hoping that the game might work like this, that you become more and more aware of what you are (or rather Tim is) forced to do; I was hoping it might feel like sort of an ironic twist to the whole genre of room escape games, and then become clearer around the peak of the story. Oh, and about the language: I considered writing a German translation, but it was just so much text  . But I am absolutely planning on doing one in the near future, so maybe (once you have fully forgotten about the game?) you can play it again in German then.

Thanks for the feedback, guys (and girl!)!

[tzachs]

A very interesting story and a very entertaining game.
It was refreshing to see an original take on a known theme, I was always wondering what the computer was planning next, and continually sucked in by the beautiful environments.
The puzzles were mostly on the easy side, yet interesting and contributing to the story. I especially loved being inside the computer and thus fulfilling an old fantasy of mine...
Well done!

[kaputtnik]

Thank you for your comment, tzachs!

It's interesting you mention that it was a "known theme", are you referring to the story or rather the gameplay? I am such a noob in all things SciFi, yesterday I finished reading Neuromancer, and I put down the book and thought: "Anybody who ever plays Fragment must think I totally stole all the good ideas from this book." So the story is probably a remix of all cyberpunk and science fiction classics involving computers that have been written since 1980, and most likely nothing new (even though I wasn't really aware of that), haha.

Yeah, and then the game is also a sort of Shifter's Box of Memories (Just as I like to call Eternally Us the "Shifter's Box of the Dead"), so the general mechanics are very room-escapey, which I guess is the one form in which adventure games have survived in high quantities on the internet, so that's also a very popular concept. Although I tried to make the reasons for escaping the rooms (and for those rooms being there at all) very immediate and give the players the feeling that they were forced through the rooms, rather than escaping something.

I'm also very happy you found that the puzzle design was helping advance the story - most of the puzzles actually existed before the story in its current state had even taken shape. Ben had already built most of the game when I took over, so I simply "storified" his puzzles afterwards; I was really curious whether this would work out or not.

Really glad you liked the game!

[Dualnames]

I also did a review for the AGS Blog.

http://ags-ssh.blogspot.com/2012/03/review-fragment.html

This expresses my love for this wonderful game.

[Antje]

Thank you for this game! I played this game yesterday and I liked it very much. I love the colors and backgrounds, especially the scene with the picknick and the light in the plants in an earlier scene. Well done!
It's too bad you can not do very much in each screen as the main character. I like to keep the main character busy and it doesn't have to be very progressive in the storytelling in my opionion. But walking around in your game is because of the graphics and the whole feeling in your game sort of relaxing.
If there are any, I would love to play more of your games.

[kaputtnik]

Duals, thanks for the review, that's awesome! I'm glad the meta music worked well, I actually composed it using a computer keyboard as an input device and a really cheesy old software synthesizer to keep the meta joke within a closed computing system. As for the missing hints: I know this may seem like a mantra by now, but this is really by design - I tried making the plateaus seem as if you are being pushed through them and then have to do the somewhat repetitive recompiling of the fragments until you literally get the feeling of wanting to stop it and just quit and have some time to think (which you don't get).

It's a little like the self-scrolling camera in some sidescrollers, it just keeps pushing you on and on, and there is no way for you to stop; you have to go through all these memories because Arkady wants you to.


Antje: Thank you for your lovely comment! If you particularly enjoyed the graphics and the atmosphere, you should check out Ben Chandler's page here: http://ben304.blogspot.com/  - Ben and me worked on many of these games together (although he did the larger part of the work by far), if you enjoyed Fragment, you'll certainly like those as well!

[blueskirt]

Dear kaputtnik and Ben,
I cannot replay your game to get a different ending. Not because I can't be arsed, but because I can't force myself to act like a jerk towards Arkady. Do you pardon me?

Your buddy,
-blueskirt

PS - Your game was great, I'm glad it finally saw the light of day

[tzachs]

It's interesting you mention that it was a "known theme", are you referring to the story or rather the gameplay?

I was referring to the story, the "computer takes over" theme was done a lot, and even the

Spoiler

"computer falls in love with its creator"

[close]

theme was done a few times (I just recently watched a terrible b-movie with that theme).

[kaputtnik]

blueskirt, I must tell you a very well-kept secret:

Spoiler

The degree of nonlinearity in Fragment is rather, uhm, insignificant. You can actually be really, really nice to Arkday throughout the whole game and then get the bad ending anyway. That's a rather schizophrenic way to act, I guess, but so much for psychologists needing psychological assistance themselves! The only thing that really changes according to your behaviour is the phone conversation in the middle of the game. And you miss some additional dialogue if you are not particularly interested in what Arkady does and never ask her. Maybe you just load your last savegame, get the second ending and then try to forget about it?

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Oh, and I remember Ben told me at one point during development: "I really want people who play the game to love Arkady." It took me so long to get all of her dialogue right, haha...And then, when Ben was testing the game he said "I want to see the other ending, but I just can't do this!". So, thanks, I am really happy about that comment!

And tzachs, I will make sure that

Spoiler

my next game will be about something really off-beat and unbelievable and weird, something nobody has ever done before. Like a robot who is having trouble with his girlfriend, and...oh wait, crap . Maybe the next game after that?

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