The button was greyed out

There is a photograph pinned to the bulkhead in one of the Santa Maria’s cabins. If William tries to talk to it, the game answers: “Photographs don’t usually talk.”

That line has a version of its own. It was written to replace another one, “Photographs keep quiet”, which wasn’t right: keeping quiet is something you do, and giving that to a photograph gives it a will it hasn’t got. “Don’t usually talk” simply states the case. A discussion, a rewrite, a version number, a line in the changelog.

Nobody has ever read it while playing. In that room the TALK button is greyed out, and it is greyed out in nine rooms out of ten.

The person who wrote the text is the worst possible tester of that text

The revision batch was finished. The text measured line by line, the type check clean, the manifest of lines to be recorded sitting at three hundred and fifteen. Everything a machine can say about a piece of text had been said, and it all came back yes.

Then came the run through the actual game, which we did in a separate session, working off a list written beforehand and followed in the order it was written, without picking what to try. The reason is that whoever has just rewritten a file knows where they put their hands and goes to check those spots: that isn’t testing, it is proofreading with a mouse.

Three things came out of it that weren’t wrong. They weren’t coming out at all.

Fifty-eight lines counted and never met

The TALK verb only switched on inside the Communications Module, which is the room with the radio. Outside it, one line of code turned it off, written months ago and never read again: if you aren’t in that room, TALK is disabled. That was the grey button in the cabin.

The day before, we had counted how many targets on the ship answer to each verb. It was to decide whether to drop the four that move nothing: CLOSE, TALK, PUSH and GIVE open no doors and advance the story by not one step. The count said each of them has a hand-written answer on nearly everything you can touch on board: fifty-seven targets for CLOSE, fifty-eight for the other three. We kept them on the strength of that number.

The number was right. Those lines do exist, one by one, and we revised them across the ten batches done so far. Except that fifty-eight of them are lines the player never reaches, and nobody had asked the question: we had counted the stock in the warehouse and concluded that the shop was selling.

The photograph in the cabin was among those fifty-eight.

The rule that settled it fits in one sentence: if we thought them up and wrote them, they have to be there. TALK now works the way GIVE does, switched on if something in front of you answers or if you are holding something.

The other two

The second one involves the objects William carries. There are nine of them, and on each one almost every verb gives the same generic answer. For USE we had written three, which rotate: “No use to me here, not on its own.”, “First I need to decide where and how.”, “On its own it isn’t enough.” They are written for a USE that closes on itself, meaning the moment you pick up a tool and then don’t know what to apply it to. That moment didn’t exist in the game: USE on an object always opened the question “ON WHAT?”, and from there you either go on or cancel. Cancelling said nothing. Now cancelling is the answer, and “First I need to decide where and how” is exactly what is going on.

The third is the letter. When you use it the sheet opens, always, by any route: that is the right thing to do almost everywhere, and it is also why the letter could never be the first half of a USE this ON that. Two answers written for it never appeared: “It’s a letter, not a shipping document.” on the sealed crates, “And a letter is not archive material.” on the archive terminal.

This one stings more than the other two, because it was already written down somewhere. In the file of combinations, above a third line, there was a comment declaring that line unreachable for exactly this reason. Somebody found it months ago and noted it against that one line. Nobody went back to ask whether the other two had the same illness.

The batch, which is why we were there in the first place

All of this came out of testing the eleventh revision batch, the most awkward of the lot: it isn’t a room, it is the answers that apply everywhere. A line that holds up in the airlock has to hold up in the cabin too, in front of a bunk and in front of a dead man’s letter.

The criterion is tighter than it sounds: a refusal that applies to everything cannot assume anything about its target. “It won’t come off” assumes something is attached that may not be. “It’s already shut” assumes a ball can be shut, when a ball is neither open nor closed unless you break it. These weren’t imprecise lines: they were false for a share of the targets, and they came up in front of all of them.

That is where the batch’s most unpleasant rewrite comes from. Trying to talk to an object in your hand, the game said: “No answer. It’s an object.” In front of a thermal sensor that is a statement of fact. In front of that letter it is a classification, and classifying it denies the very thing it is. It now says “I’d be talking to myself.”, which is about the person refusing rather than the thing refused, and holds for all nine objects without naming any of them.

The rest of the batch is the two banks of generic answers rewritten from scratch, the five object-by-object combinations, the nine inventory descriptions, and the text of the letter, which now matches word for word the copy sent to the actor. Across the four files measured together, em dashes go from nineteen to one, and answers opening with a negative from thirty-nine per cent to twenty-three. The dash that stays is inside a machine-log caption, where it isn’t punctuation but a field separator, and the tool that measures can’t tell the two cases apart. Leaving it red costs less than bending the canon to fit the program.

A voice over the intro

Meanwhile the first voice recording for the game arrived. It is William’s monologue over the opening, read by Leonardo Tomassetti, and it now sits under the nine shots of the introduction.

It isn’t nine clips: it is a single track, edited beforehand, with every sentence at the second where it has to land. One playback command, no drift between elements starting separately. The rust falls on the rusted hull, the joint on the engines, “if I don’t hold it together” while William is unbolting something. The voice runs out a little over three seconds before the last shot, and that is deliberate: nobody is supposed to be talking over the close-up.

On the first run the voice started more than two seconds ahead of the picture. The cause wasn’t in the edit: decoding the nine videos held the animation still for a few seconds while the audio carried on by itself. Audio and picture don’t stall together, and while the introduction was silent there was no way to notice.

One thing needs saying plainly, since the rest of this section is about measurements: the balance between the voice and the music has been measured, not listened to. Nobody has heard that mix yet.

Two cards and eight seconds of black

The opening titles run over the shots of the introduction, one block of text per screen. The cast block was a single one, and now there are too many names: Cristian Spaccapaniccia gives his voice to the man who owned the ship before William, which is to say to the letter, and he has to be credited.

The block split in two, and the second half wanted a screen that didn’t exist. We made it out of an empty slot: eight seconds of solid black, no image, no placeholder. The engine already handled the case without knowing it. What it didn’t handle were the start times of the cards, eight numbers written out by hand: slipping one screen into the middle meant moving five of them. They work themselves out now, and before trusting the formula we made it reproduce the numbers that were already there.

The end credits have a fixed duration, so one extra line would make them scroll faster. The content grew by almost eleven per cent and the duration grew with it: measured in a real playthrough, the speed is the same as before.

Meanwhile

Two of the thirteen revision batches are left. The next one touches the files that hold the interface together, and it is the first where the tool that measures text sees almost nothing: it can’t read those files. That has to be settled before the batch opens, because without a measurement there is no criterion for calling it finished.

The test build the testers have is still the one from 30 July and stays there until the revision is closed. That copy stops working on 6 August, as its startup page says, and no other one goes out before then.

We kept one frame from the testing session, taken for a different reason: checking that the type and the layout held up on the build. They did. Down at the bottom, in the grid of nine verbs, you can also see TALK greyed out. It has been there for months. Noticing it took playing the game.