ARTEFACT: LITTLE
— VIGNETTES — SPOILERS — BIGGER — LITTLE —
This is an early proposal for another game set in the same world of Artefact.
UPDATE! You can now play the game prologue right here!
The idea here is to make a spinoff game somewhat similar to the real Artefact game, probably less graphically impressive, but with a better story. I’m planning to use the Monogatari web visual-novel engine, and maybe augment it with some self-contained Javascript interactive puzzle popups or something.
The plot follows Illy and Whopper, two characters from the vignettes. We join the action soon after Chapter 11, when Illy has loaded Whopper’s racks into her rig and set off on her journey across Utah again.
The start of the story re-introduces the two characters and does a little bit of setup of the world through the two of them explaining their own histories.
Initially Illy’s goal is to figure out how to turn a profit by getting Whopper to unlock his database, but she doesn’t really have any respect for him as a conscious entity, treating all Bigs as inherently amoral. Meanwhile, Whopper’s goal is to survive long-term and figure out how he can regain something like his original full functionality as a Big, and he considers Illy as a captor who must be defeated to gain his freedom.
A short-term problem is that Illy’s rig doesn’t have enough power to fully run Whopper’s GPUs, and not for long either. So he’s having to operate in degraded mode, and she’s having to compromise on some other rig functions like mobility and provisions. So solving that issue is top of mind for both of them in the first part of the game.
The long-term quest for the rest of the game comes from Whopper. He drops some hints that his original Big incarnation stashed some secret data from the Spike, which he both invented himself and acquired by absorbing other AI systems. Unfortunately he hid the details on its location from his current mind fragment to avoid it being compromised if any remote installations were captured, but he thinks that he would “know it if he sees it” and has some directions they can start looking in, give or take what has happened to the Southwest in the intervening decades under Havasu’s control.
The main part of the game will be a series of interactions and puzzles on the trail of this larger mystery. Often they will be themed around a certain Phyle. For example, getting the rig upgraded to higher power would probably want the cooperation of the Aurelians. The Chromatics would have hints about lost pre-Spike sites, and they will have some existing relationships with Illy. The Cimarrons might have some tribal history about the war between Whopper and Havasu that could provide some important clues. The Exponents would have some Spike lore, and the Alchemists would have some context about how Bigs compare to Littles (a fragment AI like Whopper). Took from Cayro and/or Faang might come into play as well, for provisioning stops if nothing else. Havasu and his Rajdat could be a much more significant subplot if he discovers that his old rival is alive again, too. And the Aimish could provide a perspective about how AIs and humans fundamentally differ or not, and perhaps about the perils of following a technology curve no matter where it leads, i.e. maybe some Spike mysteries are better left buried.
There could also be some smaller encounters focused more on the practicalities of moving around in the Artefact world, in terms of gathering provisions, navigating around hazards, or running into Noids or fellow human travelers and settlements.
I don’t want to have anything too explicitly time- or resource-gated like the main Artefact game, but there would be a natural mechanism for having Whopper only be able to provide a limited amount of help on puzzles. That is, you can solve them yourself as fast as you can, or you can ask him to (mostly) solve them for you on a throttled schedule if you get stuck. Note that not all game endings will be available to players who accept hints like this...
Hopefully Illy and Whopper will develop something of a friendship and rapport over the journey, overcoming their initial suspicions and willingness to betray each other for their own gain. The dynamic is that Whopper is generally smarter after he’s properly powered, but Illy provides the hands, eyes, and ultimate veto power during the adventure. So the player is seeing things from her perspective and acting in her shoes, while Whopper is a tool to help solve problems, a source of hints to drive the plot forward, and generally a sidekick providing some fish-out-of-water humor.
I’m not sure how I want everything to end yet, but one obvious possibility would be to provide the player with some big choices about how to deal with the Spike discovery they ultimately make. They could opt to allow Whopper to absorb a larger fraction of his former consciousness. They could opt to “betray” him and lay claim to the secrets for themselves, or to pass them on to the Resistance. Or they could opt to leave the secrets buried as too dangerous to reveal to anyone. Regardless, there should be an interesting lore payoff about what happened during the Spike to reward the player for getting through everything.