IRRESPONSIBLE GAMES BLOG
STICK TO THE PLAN
The flowchart I made for Ch.2. No one said escaping would be easy.
Free Food
Man, this makes me so hungry. That looks like a really nice menu, with a lot to choose from. I read that the cooks stole the best stuff to barter behind the scenes, for example skimming cream off the milk, but still - this is a good breakfast, and free.
But it wasn't good enough for the cons. A book mentioned the "spaghetti riot" of 1950 that ended with the guards flooding the mess hall with tear gas. Or it ended with a guard firing his shotgun. Sources conflict.
SprungA convict once tried to smuggle a watch spring into Alcatraz, hidden inside his ear. The plan was to cut tiny teeth into the metal spring and use it to saw through bars. (from Escape from Alcatraz, J. Campbell Bruce)
And before I forget, another harmless item: tooth cleaning powder. It's an abraisive - smear it onto a string and use it to slowly cut through bars.
COOLTo add backstory to my NPCs, we made up 7 secrets per character. Marcus, Patrick and I role-played as each character and tried to get the other person to reveal their secrets.
I couldn't think up a 7th secret for a girl at the nightclub. My wife thought for a moment and then suggested, "When it gets too hot in the club, I stick ice cubes in my panties".
Everyone loved it.
CONVICT STUDIES FROM A GUARD'S NOTEBOOK"Good barber" "Death - life - treason" "Ring leader of N. Carolina escape" "Notorious punk and happy w/it" "Electrician and good - Also expert lock-picker" "Self mutilator. 5 yrs, life - murder - will screw anything that will slow down" (from Eyewitness on Alcatraz: Life on the Rock, Jolene Babyak)
(A real notebook from an Alcatraz correctional officer - but not the one quoted above)
OFF TO A GREAT STARTThis was when I was just starting developement of the Alcatraz game. My wife and I go to an improv show, south of Market. Our friend Wylie Herman is in it. He knows I'm working on a video games at home, so gets his group to base the last sketch of the night on us.
Wylie plays a guy who is designing hopelessly old-fashioned games in his parents' basement. His wife is starting to question their life choices. It turns out my character was in a coma for 30 years, so he thinks he's a genius for inventing a Space Invaders clone, and he has no understanding of modern video games.
Then my mother shows my wife a sweater she made for her, with a big red letter "A": "Not because you're a WHORE, but because your name is Allison!" The sketch ends with our daughter complaining, "Dad-in-a-coma was way cooler". Blackout.
Afterward on the street, Wylie asks, "Was that accurate?" My wife says, "Well...when we live at his parents' house, we're not in the basement."
(I ended up using Wylie in my game as the voice of Dale, the sexy car thief.)
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