Evening Notes

The initial premise for the game was derived from ‘cozy games’, this hazy genre that has been around for a while but expanded to monolithic proportions during Covid and afterward. Basically they are simple, quiet games that involve maintaining some kind of repetitive domestic routine in a safe, low-stakes environment, often endlessly. Ur-examples of cozy games include Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley, Harvest Moon, etc. The current boom of these games was very visible to me at GDC, in reviewing platforms like Zero Punctuation and Rock Paper Shotgun, and especially at college. Much talk about the comfort and pleasure these games provide in difficult times, escapes from isolation and loneliness, etc.

Personally, I can’t stand cozy games. To me, they represent videogames buying into their own bogeyman-narrative, the shallow emptiness others imagine in them made manifest. Ted Kaczynski calls video games a surrogate activity for the power process, and cozygame devs pretty much say, yessir, that’s all we do, now get in here and surrogate, bitch. Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising; people believe there’s no edifying artistic merit in touching these things, so naturally they stop reaching for that aspect, while the shallowness sells like hotcakes. Still, it seems so desolate and hopeless to me - nothing interesting can happen, even in fantasy; even in our dreams the best we can hope for is to disappear quietly, numb in an ocean of fishing minigames.

So I wanted to make a game that satirized the negative aspects of cozygames by exaggerating the shallowness of them to overwhelming extremes. I wanted to make a game that was so numb, so limited and constraining, so devoid of stakes, that the subtextual fear and loathing that (IMO) was already there in the heart of cozy games would become impossible to avoid.

That was the main goal. My other goal was more personal; I had taken two narrative classes by this point, and I was getting frustrated with the scope of moods that seemed available with what people were doing around me. Every narrative was this same blend of cheap quirky humor, affectionate ‘edge’ that didn’t really have any substance, and nostalgic horror pastiche. I don’t really mind those things but I was sick of being stuck in them. I wanted to try making something that was quiet and subtle and, above all, something that was sad. Nobody ever made anything sad at college. They acted like the whole mood wasn’t there. But I like things that are quietly sad and it seemed really awful and wrong to think I wouldn’t ever be able to express that because I spent four years making games about frogs in capitalism or something.


There was a very strange tension at the center of making Evening. It was about a cozy game that slowly degrades into emptiness. For this degradation to be convincing, though, it needed to also actually be a cozy game. So, for me to create this thing that expressed my distaste and hostility for cozy games, the first thing I needed to do was... make a cozy game. This is no easy task. I would say I spent more time writing “in character” as cozy-mode than I spent actually building the decaying elements that were the central point of the premise.

The irony of it is, in making the faux-cozy world I ended up accidentally getting attached to it, so when it came time to destroy it - which was my goal all along - I suddenly found I didn’t want to. But I knew the plan and I had to stick to it. In the end I think it was a good thing that I spent so much time creating the cozy aspects, even if it meant there was less time to flesh out the decaying sequence; it seems much more immersive and meaningful to allow the player to drift in that state before I tear it apart.

Not too much to say about the development process itself. The technical aspects were not particularly demanding, I got to do a lot of branching dialogue stuff with Inky which was fun to plan out. All of the design planning was done in Notepad, which I maintain is way better than all that fancy Miro and Lucidchart shit they kept trying to shill to us. The story progression more-or-less exactly followed my initial design plan, although many small elements were added on the fly. The nice thing about a cozy game is that you can add a bunch of tiny domestic tasks pretty much haphazardly, and even if they don’t have any impact on each other they still feel like part of the same routine.

The hardest part for me was probably the sound design. I wanted to focus on building ambient soundscapes instead of music since I thought it’d be more relaxing and encourage a longer attention span. The process of finding separate sounds for everything, cleaning up the loops, keeping everything organized in the right rooms and correlating them with gameplay took much longer than expected and involved several frustrations. I would shore up the soundscape in one room, and then all the others suddenly seemed incomplete by comparison; this is one aspect of the game I’m still unhappy with. Were I to keep working on it I’d probably want to bring in a sound designer who knew what they were doing.


When I showed the game to people, I was surprised to find several testers asked me what the game meant, or what it was ‘supposed’ to mean. I gave kinda stammery non-answers, partly because I was afraid of overdetermining their impressions due to Word Of God-type bias, but mostly because I was just totally unprepared for the question. It’s funny how you can spend hours agonizing over the kind of meaning you want it to have, and then when the work is done and the meaning is right there it suddenly seems impossible to verbalize. In retrospect I wish I hadn’t dodged the question and just tried to give it a straight answer. It would be something like:

I think the game is about emptiness, and specifically a certain kind of creeping nihilism that intrudes in spaces of comfort and ease and that can hide behind daily routine. The fading away of gameplay elements is the gradual emptying of signifying elements in life until the world is effectively a blank room. Things disappearing one by one, not getting replaced. And as this happens the coziness stops being about comfort and starts being a way to avoid looking at the disappearances; a sense of inevitability, that nothing can be done about it, that makes it impossible to directly address the meaninglessness but keeps the player trapped in their shrinking list of domestic tasks until it is too late.

Impotence, but a specific kind that I think is underexplored in games. Generally helplessness and a lack of control in games is very stark: they show you the thing you want and then yank it away, dialogue options crossed out in Depression Quest, big choices which are then theatrically proven not to matter. But in Evening, the options the player might want to select, which could address the encroaching degradation, aren’t crossed out: they just aren’t there. The options given to the player are as shallow and consequence-free at the end as they are at the beginning, as though nothing is happening; the player cannot do anything about it because they cannot even acknowledge it. The rare opportunities to acknowledge are treated by the game like bugs, unknown elements, they don’t provoke any sort of reaction; you select the option to leave and it acts as though you have done nothing at all.

I don’t want to dismiss the game being about capital-D Death, or capital-D Depression; I think you could make a case that what I’ve written above fits with both. I don’t think the game is about capital-D Dementia. I understand the instinct to compare certain aspects (letters blinking out, ‘bugs’ appearing) with, say, Everywhere at the End of Time, but except for Griggums none of that was particularly intentional or desired. I think Griggums feels especially important and meaningful to players (which is good) and so her getting confused and dementia-y takes on outsized significance, but to me it was just one element of the fading-away and not any more central to the game than, say, the loss of the cat or the emptying of the bookshelf.

A few other design notes that might not be obvious: the game takes place in Bosnia, in an area which in real life is a national park; this is never stated but various aspects such as position of the sun, the rock partridge, implied climate etc. are made to fit with this. Mostly I just wanted a real geographic location early on as something concrete to base the details around and I thought it’d be funny if it was all Bosnia and always had been. The typewriter is the narrator; initially I included some vague references to a typewriter as a loose thread, and eventually liked it being a kind of easter-egg object. It never seemed right to put it in the foreground but there’s a subtext that Griggums is medium-aware at the start and knows what’s coming because of her interactions with the typewriter, that it is in some sense ‘me’ or represents the game as a whole, or something like that. I dunno, I wanted a small postmodern fourth-wall-y element but I didn’t want it to distract from anything so I mostly just gave it a few secrets and obtuse references.


The initial build of the game only had the one ending and that was it, nothing you did up to that point mattered. But “multiple endings” was one of the requirements of the project, and anyways after all that time working out these different threads and progression aspects it felt bad to blow them all on such a violent anticlimax. But it seemed totally against the spirit of the game to have a “good ending” where everything is fine and all the rooms come back and you just live in domestic bliss forever, so I was stuck. I remember pacing in circles for like two hours after the first build, just trying to figure out how to create an alternative ending that would feel worth getting without devaluing the themes. When I finally came up with the 2nd ending that you see in the final game it was intensely satisfying, and I'm very happy with how the results turned out.

Spoilers ahead: there isn’t actually any one trigger which determines which ending you get, there are 10 triggers and you need to hit at least 7 to switch tracks to the other one. I don’t remember all of them but they generally involve being very conscientious and thorough about things, keeping the plants watered and making the cat purr very loudly and things like that. Initially it was going to be a sequence of hidden options that you’d have to find that would allow you to find some secret room or allow you to walk out the front door or something, but I really didn’t like that; it felt cheap and trope-y to make “escaping” the ultimate goal. I couldn’t think how it’d make sense in context - escape into what? - and anyway you can’t escape entropy. I think the eureka was when I realized the player who fights to get a good ending isn’t one who wants to escape the game, but one who wants the game to keep going.

The inclusion of that second ending is a complete indulgence; it adds no new elements and reveals no hidden secrets or meanings. But after getting attached to a lot of these little gameplay elements I liked the idea of offering the dedicated player a really pure, shameless indulgence at the end, something that allowed the hints of affection underlying this generally cold and hostile experience to seep back through for a little while. The second ending ultimately goes to the same place as the first (see: no escaping entropy), but it still seems less painful to me. It’s a kind of consolation prize, maybe: nothing can get you out of it, but if you go the extra mile in paying attention to things, some of those molecular pieces of video game can stick around for a while, and perhaps the end won’t be so horribly empty.

Also, as I hate the trope of stories where the protagonist “wins” by heroically sacrificing the fantasy world, I perversely enjoyed constructing a scenario where falling into hazy fantasy is portrayed as unilaterally better than the alternative. Take that, real life!!


In conclusion Evening is a land of contrasts. I dunno, I’m always happy with the things I made recently and everything more than a year or two back seems gross and bad, so at some point I might decide the game is stupid and not worth the bits it’s printed on. But right now I’m pretty happy with it. I’m glad it seems not to be boring... in the right context a story where nothing happens can be surprisingly gripping... and it’s nice to see the game affecting people... remember to like and subscribe... don’t let the weight of entropy hit you on the way out... peace and love to all in god’s kingdom... stay tuned for my next game, “frogs & capitalism 2: zombie mode”