Galaxy's Next Most Awesome Rookie: Earth Edition: Max Battcher's Cover Letter: The Game is the many-subtitled mini-game I've developed as something of an interactive cover letter [1], in part to make up for my lack of ability to get to this year's PAX [2]. In case you think there is room for another sub-title in the game's name, rest assured that today I also sent out a couple of "Special Editions". To play it, all you need is Löve 2D 0.6.2.
This project was an interestingly tough creative challenge for me. It's tough trying to creatively write about things like "why you should hire me", and some of the things that appear on a resume (or don't, for various reasons), and keep them somewhat light-hearted and almost entirely skip-able. I'm not quite sure that I succeeded with what I was going for, but I do hope the final game feels at least half as silly and sweet as I had meant it to be.
At final count the game consists of nearly 3200 words of dialog and is somewhere shy of 560 words of dialog in the minimal path through the game. The script is 27 pages in Celtx PDF output, and I am curious if there is any sort of easy pages-to-minutes rule of thumb for KeyLimePie projects akin to screenwriting's established 1:1 estimate. I'm pretty sure there isn't, but this is the first finished project. [3]
On the technical side, I do feel that I succeeded in what I set out to accomplish. As I mentioned in my last blog post, I Löve KeyLimePie, the Löve 2D KeyLimePie client was written specifically with this project in mind. I wanted to build my cover letter in Lua because that is a language that many game companies use for scripting and it seemed useful to prove that I grok it.
Those that are curious may even notice that this marks the first KeyLimePie client I've open sourced in any capacity thus far, as the .love file itself is simply an unencrypted zip archive.
Please let me know if you try playing this "game", and if you have any thoughts or criticism on it.
| [1] | Although, don't tell anyone this, it secretly turns out to be more of an interactive resume, or extension of my resume. |
| [2] | I will miss PAX. I'm breaking a nice streak I had going, too. |
| [3] | Also, its rare for games writing in general to use standard formats like the screenplay, so I doubt in general there are many easy rules of thumbs anywhere in games writing today. |