Tinkering and sentience in Peter Martingell’s A Day of Maintenance
The Queer Games Bundle is a collection of nearly 600 items by LGBTQ+ creators and teams, nearly 400 of which are independent video games, all sold for just $60. I’m talking with creators from the bundle about their games and their making habits. Visit the bundle and consider buying it.
Peter’s game A Day of Maintenance places you in the cockpit of a sentient robot on a regular workday of driving, fixing, and chatting to coworkers and a partner in space. It’s set in a quite large 3D world and features a big spread of truck and repair features to monitor and keep up with.
How long have you been making games?
If you want to consider when I first began thinking of my own games and scrawling ideas down? Since I was like 8 or something for sure — drawing a Legoland game idea after playing some Lego game is an early memory of mine. In terms of actual coding/art/design, that’ll be 2012, when I first started my uni course for Game Development.
What tools do you like to use?
Unity engine, with Rider for code, Affinity software for art, Audacity, and then I use the Ink scripting language for my story writing.
At some point I want to push myself to use another engine (Ren’py, or Unreal, or Godot) to force myself to ‘reset’ and get a new perspective on my working practice, but alas, time is an enemy :X
What themes or genres do you like to explore?
For me over these past years, I think I want to continue exploring mixing a ‘core’ genre with an interactive story. In a way I think I want to explore the “walk ’n talk” of a couple characters whilst you navigate to another area, then have that core genre feed back into it (whether that’s an FPS, or a Racer, or a Life sim), I think I just like the idea of a game that explores casual dialogue as a way of building character.
What are your favorite and least favorite aspects of making games?
Favourite: prototyping a game, adding art to a game, finally releasing a game and having the wave of tension release.
Least: funding it, bugtesting it, & the weeks leading to any release just fucking suck.
Is there a game that has affected you recently?
He fucked the girl out of me by Taylor McCue really hit me hard; in the way that I want to take a lot of inspiration to condense my own games down & find more visceral personal stories to tell? That game is deeply personal & I think is a shining example of what small indie games can do to get you in the character of someone processing a traumatic experience.
A Day of Maintenance is a kind of narrative repair sim adventure. Why did you decide to make it?
I kind of fell into it tbh — it started with wanting to make an open-world-ish truck game for 7DFPS. Then I like designing mechanics that can “stand isolated” from one another (to simplify development / allow combining mechanics more easily) so I added the crane & site-repair mechanic to give the player a reason to drive around.
Once that was done, I realised we had a good foundation to add more levels — if I wanted another act, it was “““just””” some terrain with repair sites in it, then we drop the player truck at a location and let them drive. So from that, I saw potential to add more driving. I can’t remember what exactly got me thinking of adding IF to it, but I want to say following Forgetful Loop I just realised “hey, using a Visual Novel-esque UI to tell stories lets you get a lot of dialogue done fast. So, if the D PAD is free as you drive around a truck, could the truck driving have an IF play out alongside it?”
Then yeah, 1 year 5 months later we had A Day of Maintenance!
What was it like to get all the different instrument panels and displays working together? [And y]ou decided to set the game up for controller play in particular. What was that like?
Difficult, yet easy? The hard part is managing controller input — both remembering it, presenting it, and making sure bindings don’t overlap (which was nooooot easy). The easy part was just having a load of world-space-ui all in the cabin. None of the panels “talk” to one-another code-wise, so really it’s a set-dressing problem of “does panel X sit well over here? is it important or secondary? no let’s put it there instead, that works!” and then over the year I added panel-by-panel.
In a way it was just a slow process of adding them 1-by-1. When I first started with the truck cabin, I basically threw down a load of blank cubes, then used those as ‘slots’ to fill in with UI, which helped to give me something to work/edit/revise as I needed to iterate on the cabin UI.
What inspired you as you thought about things like the sentience of the different robot workers?
I wrote about this a couple times across my Medium articles for the game so those go into more detail; but the igniting factor was wanting to find a reason for a robot to be anxious about something personal, but not having the ability or understanding to.
From that, me and Freya [Campbell] kinda just kept finding more thread to pull at? and it led to more and more ideas or concepts. I really enjoy what we came up with, I hope I get the chance to explore this setting again in the future.
What do you hope players take from the game?
For players: That you can be a weird queer and not worry about it / even if you’re in safe working conditions, it’s best to have a union to protect you.
For developers: That we have a lot of possibility space to explore with the Visual Novel as a mechanical device for telling story, it doesn’t have to be full-screen 1- liner texts; we can use game engines to do far more complex presentations and sequencing.
And then yeah, I also hope it inspires people in one way or another :)
