On SPACEPLAN

SPACEPLAN has just been released for Steam. Billing itself as an "experimental piece of interaction based partly on a total misunderstanding of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time," SPACEPLAN is a delightful little game that began as a browser-based story at http://jhollands.co.uk/spaceplan/ and is well worth the investment of a few million clicks.

I stumbled across SPACEPLAN some time last year and immediately found its story entertaining, clever, and compelling. It's impossible to go into detail of the events of SPACEPLAN without ruining some aspect of the plot, so suffice it to say that it is a discovery-driven game that uses mouse clicks as its primary means of game currency. You end up clicking in SPACEPLAN. You click a lot.

Or, conversely, you don't click very much. I counted and you can, technically, complete the game using (3² + 6 + 10) mouse clicks (that's energy-generating clicks, not energy-spending clicks, of which there are at minimum 11). So it's possible to complete the game with only a few dozen clicks if you're patient. Veeeeeeeeery patient. The appeal of SPACEPLAN is that you need to go and accomplish things, and to do that you need energy, and you accrue energy by either (a) clicking the mouse, or (b) waiting for your energy accumulator to accumulate. It's up to you how much you want to click beyond the minimum 15 initial clicks, compelled only by your own sense of curiosity for what's going to happen next. You can do a purely click-fueled run, or you can do a 25-click run, or anything in between. It's up to you.

From there it's left up to the player to balance patience against progress: if you want to spend your energy to enhance your exploration, therefore advancing the story, or spend it on improving your energy collection technology, delaying immediate story progression in order to be able to accelerate the telling of that same story later. The entire game is a representation of the procrastinator's dilemma: do you begin walking to your destination along a dirt road today or do you wait for a six-lane express motorway to get built tomorrow?

SPACEPLAN is not the kind of game that would be fun to stream online. There will never be SPACEPLAN tournaments. You set up your energy collection process, whether that be manual or automatic, and then you wait. You wait until you have enough energy to buy the next thing you need to unlock the next story element. SPACEPLAN is more interactive than Progress Quest but, depending on how you play it, it doesn't have to be much more interactive.

If you intend to replay the game for analytical purposes, you'll want to invest in an autoclick utility. These are widely available for free online because simulating a mouse click is a common Windows UI programming exercise, and clicking something over and over again is just monotonous enough to warrant creating a simple automation utility.

So, thusly armed with an autoclick program that looks like My First Visual Basic GUI and works like a champ, I set out measuring how expensive the inventory of SPACEPLAN is, and only after completing the tally did it occur to me that I could not share it without spoiling the game for a new player.

In short: SPACEPLAN leans heavily on the utility of potatoes. Like, a lot. Potatoes are so useful in the universe of SPACEPLAN that it would make Mark Watney jealous. And so you click ever onward, unto a tuber-based journey that reaches into the very deepest of our cosmological questions about the origin and nature of time and space. And it misrepresents the principles and concepts in A Brief History of Time, phenomenally. Click. Explore. Repeat.