Frosto Remembers: Keyphrases and Bad Words

Fun fact. Theo's name once was Josh.

I was trying to pick a generic name and I landed on Josh as a placeholder.  

See, everybody knows the basic visual novel mechanic of naming your character.  I hadn't figured out how to use that name in full force yet. So we wrote Josh all over the place. 

Once I figured it out and implemented, we did a find on 'Josh; and replaced it with [fname].  But in trying to have [fname] as a character of his own, not a generic replacement of you (because traditionally generic replacements of you have to be bland motherfuckers who don't get bitches and don't stack paper), I thought he should have a name, and that what you should be able to name him was a nickname.  

I know that's convoluted now.  I'm in the future with you as well.  But at the time, I thought it was neat. 

But a good game designer tries to use their tools as much as they can. After seeing I could rename the main character, well, what else was there that could be renamed? And thus we landed on that Naomi says a [keyphrase] to make you save.  

This part people really liked.  Let us know in the comments what you picked.

But now you could name them, but what if that name influenced the story, even a little bit?  Something silly and fun.   My idea was (and still is, depending on my mood) that based on what you put in, there'd be certain special words that triggered small changes down the line.  Just a small easter egg.

In Night One, there were a few put in. Booger and Tex, Maverick and Goose, were put in for name sillies. Keyphrases were a bit more complicated.

I wanted keyphrases that Naomi would comment on, and then some she would not allow.  This wasn't out of some desire of censorship mind you, but because I try to make my characters as real as possible. And also because it was funny.

Yahtzee Croshaw once said in his SimCity Online review that he tried to make his city's name Dogbollocks because he found it funny. He also frequently named Link inappropriate things like "FuckMe".  There is some illicit thrill in doing this and frankly, it's funny.

I am for a realistic feel in games though. While you think it's funny to make the [keyphrase] the word "Dick", Naomi definitely wasn't gonna say that. I found it hysterical. I imagined people trying for a while to find all of Naomi's reactions to these words and we'd all have a laugh.

So we launched with two sillies.  Guncat and Pizza.  You'd say these and she'd comment.  

Then we had three bad words, that she wouldn't allow. The first was 'Cake', a random word I picked to just see if it did work (ironic because Theo ain't got none). And then 'fuckme'. 

The last one I was very amused by was if someone face rolled the keyboard while making theirs, Naomi would ask, "How did you pronounce a semi-colon?"

After launch, we updated n1 with 'megamilk' where Naomi does the boobie speech and punches you out. People liked that one. There are a bunch of words that Naomi has some special dialog for. Just a line or two. Nothing special, and if you know you know. If you know what any of them are, feel free to post and share!

Every once and a while, someone would say their favorite thing, and I'd ask them "would you like that to be on the bad list?" and they'd tell me yes or no.  We had a lot of good ones.  

And that's how it was for a while. Then Night Two came. 

[keyphrase] was always on the back burner.  But now, it had some immediacy to it. I found some people using racial slurs and other really offensive things and posting them on social media. While I'm still not about limiting people, our game's reputation was on the line.  

We didn't put any sort of signifier around the [keyphrase], like making it bold or in a color when said. It was a part of normal conversation. So, people taking screenshots of offensive things and putting them up as reviews was problematic for us because what if people thought that was what our content was?  

When you sell games on the internet, especially as an indie studio, your reputation is just about everything. But ironically, it's the thing you have the least control over. Audiences are gonna audiences, and you don't know how people will discover your game.  You want them to find it in the best hypothetical way.  Anyone who saw one of these screenshots, even if we changed the font, might not understand that it is player-generated content.  

It was easier to cut it. So we now had a new classification of words. "Forbidden"

Other games made explicit content filters.  Should be easy, right? Ha.

First, I looked up if there was an online word list.  I found a GitHub project that was a list of "Obscene and otherwise bad words." It had 400 things in it. Cool.

Then as I reviewed the list, I remembered we're a porn game. While I didn't want slurs, hentai was fine for us.  Tits was fine. Dick was fine.  Ironically "sucks" was on the list.  That's in our game title.

So I went down the words one by one. And I learned things. Lots of things. Like what a birdlock is. More racial slurs than I even knew were there.  I had to take some words and modify them iteratively, making sure you couldn't put a bunch of extra letters in there and still get away with it.  Of course, if someone really wants to use a bad word, they'll find a way, but it didn't have to be easy.

The decision was also made also that Naomi wouldn't react to forbidden words.  The prompt would just appear blank. Don't even comment on it.  We got a thumbs down review about this, yelling that a word was a normal phrase.  Steam censored that word, so I don't even know what it is, but it's ironic as hell. 

But with that sorted, now we're back to 'bad'. Words we wanted Naomi to react to.

Now, we just got off of a giant list of words we didn't want in the game, so we were in censorship mode, trying to figure out what we didn't want Naomi to say. But then we remembered that wasn't the point.

Naomi wouldn't agree for the keyphrase to be 'dick'.  That's funny. But getting 'dickbutt' by the filter? That's funny.  So we carefully navigated the bad list, trying to put as much as we could into it, but still leaving room for dogbollocks.

And then I decided to throw a bone, and it's one of my favorite things.  During Dr. B's resealing of the ritual, you're allowed to pick a new word. And all the bad words are on the table.  And if you pick one, Naomi freaks out.  

It's so great.