Postage Please! - A Retrospective

Sunday, May 21st, 2023

This month I took part in Ludum Dare, which is kind of unusual for me. I don't usually participate in ranked game jams (they're kinda stressful) or weekend game jams (they're also kinda stressful) but for some reason I just felt like doing this one. Probably because I was/am in the post-show blues stage after showing Scared Little Ghost at Tokyo Sandbox? But regardless of the reason, that's a thing that happened, so I wanted to talk a little bit about Postage Please and how the jam went.

I will spoil the game so please stop here if you intend to play it! (I will also talk about Papers Please a bit which might spoil some in-game relationships, but won't contain any major game spoilers.)

Selecting & Testing an Idea

I played Papers Please on launch in 2013 (oh dear, that was ten years ago...) as well as The Republia Times by the same author, Lucas Pope. Since then I've always wanted to try making something similar, less in terms of the storyline (I don't want to remake Papers Please) and more in terms of the puzzle aspect of 'paper management' which is the friction that drives the storyline of those games. When the theme of 'delivery' for Ludum Dare was announced I immediately thought of the bureaucracy of postal systems, and decided that this would be a great time to try this out!

Using PICO-8 for my entry was a low-risk choice because I'm extremely familiar with it and it lets me work quickly, but there was some uncertainty involved due to the low resolution of 128x128 pixels. So for my first task, before really deciding too much about how the gameplay would work, I prototyped the most complicated interaction in the game. I knew I needed some way to explain the 'rules' of the postal system, and so the "Postmaster's Handbook (For postmasters only!)" was the logical choice. I came up with a number of 'rules' for how the postal system might need to operate (stamp values, postage speed, checking procedures) and wrote up some samples of these. Then I mocked up a book, with turnable pages. Screen size-wise it was tight, but it was readable enough! Next I tested the envelope, and it also worked. This work laid the foundation for the mouse-driven document interface and meant I could be fairly confident that the game should work in the screen space I had.

Initial Game Loop

Next I considered the main game loop and how that might work. Broken down:

• A customer brings a letter.
• You check the letter.
• You stamp the letter to either accept (postmark) or reject (void) it.
• You hand it back to the customer, presumably to put into the postbox.

I also considered a few extensions to this loop, mainly the possibility that customers who made mistakes might be able to 'correct' the problems and bring their letter back. I still like this idea, but I knew it was a prime candidate to remove (and it did end up being cut). However I think it's worth mentioning because it shows one of the key ways I wanted to differentiate this game from Papers Please - the idea of a cooperative relationship between the player as the postmaster and their customers.

Considering this loop I built out most of the components required for that. The letters themselves, the stamp, the books for checking, the stamping process, an in/out area (which doubled as a letter-weighing scale).

A key emotion I wanted to evoke was the stress of clutter and the need to self-organise the space - a feeling of you having to participate in a bureaucratic system with endless red tape. One of the ways I decided to do this was to keep the 'postmark' and 'void' ink stamps as separate items that were always present in the game world, rather than put them on some kind of overlay like in Papers Please. I also decided to make them look exactly the same. Part of this was so that I didn't have to draw two sprites, but it meant that the player themselves now had to keep track of which stamp is which. The 'intended' way to do that was to return them to the labelled receptacles they sat on after each use, but I left it to the player to decide.

When I had all the pieces mostly in place for the core game hook I moved on to the main gameplay driver, the story!

Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy comes in many forms. In Papers Please the bureaucracy you encounter is an instrument of control, and you are (perhaps unwillingly) forced to interact with it in order to provide for your family. The key initial driver in that game is making a wage, which you must do by processing any number of people in a set time. I wanted to try something different with Postage Please, which I think can be broken down into three main areas:

Firstly, there was no time limit and no pressure from the customers. A theme I wanted to explore was 'how can you provide engagement without time pressure' and so I removed it and instead set a number of customers per day. As I mentioned previously, I thought it would be interesting if the goal was to 'clear the queue' of people, helping them repeatedly to correct the issues with their letters until they were OK to send out. I cut this due to time constraints, but I kept the set customer list. A side-effect of this was that it let me evaluate the player based on how well they performed their tasks, rather than how efficiently they worked. If you wanted to diligently check and re-check the requirements to ensure that items of mail were OK then I wanted to allow this. It takes real-world time to do so, and that was the trade-off you as a player were making - how long do you want to engage to ensure you do your job correctly? I feel like this is an experience lots of people have when encountering a complex system as a customer - we always appreciate when the person on the other side of the counter helps us succeed, someone who cares and takes the time.

Secondly, the antagonist (the postal company) was not observing you and issuing corrections. I decided fairly early on that you would have a co-worker, Carrie, who would be sitting next to you and who would slide you messages when you made mistakes. 'Evaluation' happened instead at the end of the day, signalling when a bureaucratic machine might reasonably be expected to discover problems in your work. I wanted the postal company to feel like a cruel but realistic structure, the kind of system many people encounter in real life which will indiscriminately throw out people who may unwittingly cause issues.

Finally, and related, I wanted the player to feel like they could grow to understand their co-worker and her motivations over time. I decided to invent a storyline and have her pass notes at various points in each day which would correspond to the greater burdens being placed upon you both. Initially I thought that I would write her as an older person who was about to retire, but I decided to change the storyline to be about a postal service from inception, and so this made less sense and so I changed her character to be similar to the player's, a new postal worker.

The story itself, about the new postal service of a 'generous' king, I felt served its purpose, but I wish I'd had some more time to develop it. But to explain how it came to be I want to talk about Day 1, the game's tutorial.

No Postage

Papers Please is extremely well known, but is not going to be familiar to everyone, and so I needed a tutorial for the game, something that would teach the interactions required and let players understand how to use the game's items. And so, I came up with the idea that, on the first day, the only thing that would be required would be to postmark the letters - rejecting any would be impossible. And then I considered, why would postage even be required in a system where any mail would be postmarked? So I removed the postage stamps.

And then I decided I would make the story about how a public-benefit service would slowly become a for-profit enterprise. And with a coronation happening in the UK, and our postal service being linked with the royal family, it kind of wrote itself. Sorry, I don't really have a long explanation here.

In the limited time I had (basically two days due to family commitments) I tried to write as much as I could and invent as many new rules as possible, but I didn't manage to get as far as I really wanted to, but never mind. If I had done though, I wonder if people would have reacted to the final day - where you will either be promoted or fired - differently. The final day is a choice, and like the rest of the game I wanted it to be your choice as the player. Do you want to stay in your job as a postmaster in an increasingly heartless postal company, which seeks profit and recompense for mistakes? Or will you simply get yourself fired?

Anyway, that's all I really have for the retrospective of this game, I hope it was of interest to you! If you're interested the game can be played at Itch: https://bts.itch.io/postage-please/