Everything has to start somewhere. Qugart Games’ story starts with a mobile game called Superposition…

In 2016 the text-based adventure genre was living its peak so it seemed logical to start a developer career within this niche. There were several reasons supporting it, one being the sheer simplicity of programming these games. The overwhelming success of titles like Lifeline made it seem like a bulletproof opportunity. My concept was the following:

“Experiment with an Artifical Intelligence, in order to find out its true nature in the dark and cruel sci-fi universe of Superposition.”

Without any questions, this was quite a unique idea in the text-adventure genre. Most of the games were crime stories or thrillers where the Player had to “help” the main character.

The main theme song of Superposition:

Superposition looked like the love child of a retro RPG and a modern messaging app, with the addition of cinematic, vintage-style, live-action scenes. Every time the A.I. goes to sleep, Theos Corp contacts the player through these short “films”.

Theos Corp’s signature logo:

Theos Corp’s signature sound:

The Story

The Player is hired to research the behavior of the A.I. and find out if it has consciousness or it is just faking it. It is a double agent situation between the machine and Theos Corp.

As the game progresses the Player can witness the cognitive leveling of the robot.

First-generation A.I.

Rather primitive in this state. It still cannot understand the nature of its existence.

Second-generation A.I.

First signs of emotional attachment and interest in science and art.

Third-generation A.I.

The top of the food chain. Nothing less than the next Apex predator.

Every little detail points towards the evolution of the A.I., for example, the two pieces of music it composes for the Player in one of the storylines:

“Primitive Melody”

After some time, as the machine levels up, it will upgrade the melody, making it more complex and emotional:

“Evolved Melody”

Development

The development of Superposition was Superhard(sorry for the pun) and took an incredibly long time(1 year) due to several factors. The game was made with a technology(Cordova hybrid app) not really suitable for programming games. These hybrid apps are developed with HTML and JavaScript, which are basically web programming tools. Also, the game wasn’t linear in the lightest sense, as it had 7 different storylines, each with its own ending. All of these had different dramaturgy and stories, which made it a pain to test. The game was divided by black and white live-action scenes, making the app huge for a mobile text-based game(almost 100 megabytes).

Reception

Despite the hellish development, Superposition got mostly positive feedback.

“Simply amazing, unique story, and just as uniquely executed. The only complaint is the same as others, I like that the AI is needy, but it sucks that it kills itself because I was sleeping, so a longer grace period would be appreciated.”

“Really cool. I am a philo major psych minor who is fascinated by ai. So this is perfect for me. And you have done an excellent job so far.”

“The concept, the acting, sounds and music are all amazing. I want to make this a 4 star, but I will not knock the dev for making the game how they want. My complaint is that you have to speak to the AI within a certain time frame once it reaches out to you. If you do not, you will lose the game and it restarts. I get why this happens, but I do not always have the time to stop and respond if I’m at work or for example last night, was sleeping when the AI approached me and I didn’t respond in time.”

I still tend to get emails asking about the release for IOS or a sequel on Android. It always feels a bit bad to tell people how Superposition was a broken game that functioned more like a learning process than a quality product. However, with every “fail”, comes an experience.

Why failed?

You might ask if people liked it, why is it not available anymore. I think of games not only as pieces of art but also as products. They have to reach a certain level of quality to be presentable. Superposition suffered from performance and quality issues(poor assets), and even game-breaking bugs. On some devices, for example, it was impossible to start a new game from the Main Menu because the “New Game” button became inactive. Other times the game would shut itself down from the background, deleting all the player’s current progress.

Not to mention the unique saving system, called Loadcodes. The idea was to save progress with binary codes and protect them from tampering with so-called “Quantum-colors”. This way, the progress(with the whole decision tree) was able to migrate from device to device in a few binary numbers and colors. It was a cool plan, but after implementing it in the game, the scary realization came. It didn’t work too well. Sometimes it would work and sometimes it wouldn’t. This was much worse than not working at all because the latter is an error, but the former is a glitch. And glitches are the worst.

Was it worth it?

You bet it was worth it! The hardest thing in indie game development is finishing and releasing a game. A lot of people mistake your first release as an ultimate goal, while it is merely the first step…

“The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.”

The old Qugart Games logo