Background

Hello, user. is our second project, and was created as an entry to the 49th edition of the international game development contest Ludum Dare.

Hello, user. was released during a late night in 2021, and was received very well by its players. The project itself continued along a similar design path to the one that Totteri had become known for after the release of Once More, Through the Desert.

Development

Hello, user. is a project that was developed upon the advice given to us from players and reviewers after the release of our first game; Once More, Through the Desert. The experiences and short-comings of Once More, Through the Desert were taken into consideration during every aspect of the development of Hello, user.. A clear example of this was our decision to release Hello, user. on a more accessible platform. In doing this, Hello, user. was our first game to reach out to a significant player base.

From Hello, user. and onwards, we began taking inspiration from historical sources to shape the atmosphere of our projects. The general aesthetic and art style of Hello, user. is based on the Commodore 64, a revolutionary home computer system popular during the 1980s. While Once More, Through the Desert was vaguely inspired by retro graphics and aesthetics, Totteri’s signature retro-historical design style truly began with Hello, user. and would go on to define our future projects.

Images from the development process of Hello, user..

Hello, user. is a psychological story with multiple endings that is played through communication with an autonomous computer system. When developing the story and the interaction with the system itself, we placed a lot of our focus on the emotions that we wanted to convey to our players. We asked ourselves what we wanted the players to feel when playing the game, and how we would work to achieve it through gameplay.

Early art variants used during development.

By combining a mysterious, open-ended story with emotion-inducing audio, visuals and interaction design, we believe that we managed to reach the goals that we set when first starting out with development.

Results

Hello, user. attracted a niche audience and scored in 715th place out of 2721 submissions. Alongside this result, Hello, user. received praise for its atmosphere and emotion-inducing story and scored 148th place in one of the contest’s specialized categories.

Room for improvement?

Although the game mostly attracted a niche player base during the contest, Hello, user. was our first game to reach out to a large audience after release. Inexperienced as we were at the time, the original release of the game included a number of glitches and issues. These could range from minor code issues to graphical glitches.

Thanks to the feedback from early players and reviewers, these problems could be fixed with relative ease, and our players were able to experience the entirety of Hello, user. without any major issues.

The rules of Ludum Dare include a strict 72-hour time limit on project development, which forced us to scrap certain ideas which were originally included in the planning phase. As developers, it is important that we do not get too attached to the original iteration of a project idea, because it is easy to look past or ignore alternatives that one could improve upon one’s idea. Even more so when a strict deadline forces a team to prioritize certain paths during the design phase of a project.

As you can tell, developing a game is not a straightforward process. Many ideas go through multiple rounds of consideration, and every integrated system and chapter of a story needs to fit together like a digital puzzle. But when it all fits together, and the result is appreciated by so many players around the world, it inspires us developers and designers to continue doing what we do, and developing our methods.

Hello, user. is currently published on itch.io, and can be played for free here.