Lucy recommends: Contact Protocol
You shall not pass.
Hey folks, hope you had a lovely week.
It's been a busy one over here! When I've not been enjoying Servant of the Lake, I've been catching up on demos and showcases, and one game from the Kinetic showcase has been all I can think about, so I'm thrilled to be highlighting it today. That's right, it's Contact Protocol.
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Contact Protocol is a starship job simulator. When passing other ships on the way to Jupiter, you’ll check their details against company records and facilitate safe passage, but be wary - there are corporate competitors, smugglers, and more in the space lanes…
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What is Contact Protocol?
As security officer aboard a corporate vessel, it's up to you to determine whether approaching ships can pass by verifying their information with the company's. But it's not all cut and dry: people can and will lie about their intentions, and all the while, your company and your fellow employees are breathing down your neck.
Why Contact Protocol rules
The Contact Protocol demo managed to do something truly remarkable: it really made me feel like it was my first day at a new job.
I was introduced to my new workstation, requisitioned a notebook (aka my intelligence gathering tool), met some colleagues, and got set up for my first shift. The job seems easy: hail approaching ships, ask them for their information, cross reference it with the company's records, and if it all matches, allow them to pass. Basically light admin work, right? Well, at least it starts out that way.
There's unease in the solar system.
With humanity taking to the stars and mining planets for everything they've got, there's a great divide between the haves and the have nots. The haves, like the corporation you work for, care nothing for the lives of the people doing the dirty work for them. The have nots: the miners, the smugglers, and those struggling to get by, will all lie to your face for a chance of small success. It's up to you to decide where your ethics lie, who to let through, and who to deny. It's not as easy as it sounds.
The company doesn't like loose ends, and denying entry means taking extreme measures: unleashing torpedos and killing those on board. It's remarkable how quickly the panic sets in: I've been given the tools and information to do the job, but with the ship rapidly approaching, I have to quickly ascertain if they're telling the truth, or if I trust them enough to let through. Sometimes, I have to make the hardest call. And I have to sit with that while I file my paperwork. I formally submit my version of events so that I'm prepared for the company to audit and second guess my decisions.
Not that I haven't second guessed myself already.
I have basic information, but with conflict in the region, it changes all the time. People tell me things, whispers, rumors. A new naming protocol, or the reason why their hull type doesn't match official records. Perhaps they're not being truthful. Perhaps they are. It's up to me to decide what and who to trust. Contact Protocol does an incredible job of creating a lingering unease throughout the demo where you constantly question your own decisions, and after making them, constantly feel scrutinized. It's not just because of the cold claustrophobia of space, the creaking of the old ship, or that you're the newbie. It's because your actions have consequences: ripple effects that impact your job performance, character relationships, and, well, the difference between life and death.
I felt genuinely stressed after my time with the demo, but I can't stop thinking about it. Not only is the worldbuilding and writing excellent, but it looks and feels gritty and grimey. Space travel is boring in Contact Protocol's world, it's a job. The game pushes you to make decisions and then reckon with them afterward. There's nuance to the morality, guilt, and a real fear of making the wrong decision.
On the first day at a new job, even the smallest mistakes feel enormous. In Contact Protocol, they actually are.
For fans of
Papers, Please, The Expanse
Don't just take my word for it, try it yourself!
From the developers...
I caught up with Michael (Mick) Hunter (Programming and Design), Peter Wood (Art Director) and James Leys (Marketing and Print Designer), to talk about cassette futurism, morality in games, and a stuffed cat.
The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
LFG: What's the background of Cold Zephyr, and where did the idea for Contact Protocol come from?
Michael Hunter: It kind of started as a university project at London College of Communication. I was massively nerdy about morality and games, I did a bunch of academic reading about it and I just got super into it. I looked obviously at Papers, Please, Spec Ops The Line, and then for my final project for my MA, I'd worked with Peter, we worked on a game about fish for UNESCO. We really like working together so I kind of got in touch and then we needed someone to do marketing. We found James and kind of realized that he's a big print media guy, there's a print media element to the game. So it all kind of just fell into place. We all had this kind of shared obsession with atmosphere and grit and immersion in games.
Peter Wood: Mick approached me a couple of months after we finished the fish game and he said he needed some help designing some spaceships for something he's working on. I did a couple of spaceship designs and he showed me the game as it was in that state. And it was all with stock 3D assets and stuff. I told him to give me a couple of weeks, I'll make you a completely new visual identity for this game and I think it just kind of snowballed from there. I really enjoy working on it together. Cold Zephyr was Mick alone and then I kind of came into the fold and now James is here as well and we're really a trio.
LFG: Let's talk a little bit about morality because it seems like for a long time, morality in games is boiled down to you either pick the good option or the bad option. And now with games like Papers, Please, there are these shades of gray. How do you approach tackling morality in a game?
Michael Hunter: That's such a dangerous question to ask me. Tell me if I ramble too much because this has been my obsession for a year and a half.
LFG: Please. That's what we're here for.
Michael Hunter: Obviously you know about KOTOR and Mass Effect and the kind of Renegade/Paragon, this is the blue option, this is the red option. I think what's happened is that originally people were just very excited to see morality being introduced to games. This is cool, this is thoughtful. And then the more people became used to it, the more it became a thing of the game is telling me what the morality is. And you end up with some situations where, I won't name any specific games, but you end up with situations where the game developer thought this is the good thing and this is the bad thing and maybe that wasn't necessarily actually what people agreed with. I think now our attitude as a studio is very much to give people the problems, make them as wicked and thorny as possible, give them limited information, make it feel real, and then if we do have the game judge them in any way, it's often a judgment that they can very easily disagree with.
We don't have the game lecture them or tell them they made a bad decision, here's 10 bad points or anything like that. It's more: you made a decision that maybe screwed someone over or you made a decision and you have no way of verifying if it was the right decision. And then the whole conceit of paperwork in the game secretly is about giving people a space to reflect on the decisions they made with a format that doesn't really work for that reflection.
You've got these boxes to tick and they often don't quite fit and so you end up thinking what should be on this form? Is the right response to this? So yeah, a lot of it is giving people things to disagree with and letting them do all the reflection on their end.
LFG: In terms of those choices that you are making, how are you peppering in the immediate returns on those versus a longer term consequence?
Peter Wood: So there are moments where you make decisions in the game, you have the encounters where you're dealing with ships that you are talking to and then afterwards you go to downtime. You have your crew interactions and a lot of the time, decisions you make in the encounter space will have an immediate effect on the kind of conversations you have with the crew. If someone, for example, tells you to let a ship pass and you blow it up, it's going to upset them and you'll hear about it the first thing you get back to the downtime. It's little things like that.
LFG: I'd love to find out your inspirations and how you approach the visual language of the game both from the print side and the technology side. I was certainly getting an Alien vibe.
Peter Wood: Alien is definitely a big influence on other cassette futurism spaces. I think we want the world to feel quite vivid and it's an environment that is very enclosed and everything you're doing it through a screen or through an interface. Even when you have footage of the world outside, the ship is through a CCTV. So you have this kind of window that's separating the player from the world outside and everything in this game is kind of through that lens. We wanted to create this feeling of claustrophobia and of everything being a secondhand source, and adding all the grime and dirt and cassette futurism on top of that I think is what is really nice combination.
LFG: What about from the printing side of things? I imagine you can have a lot of fun with that.
James Leys: Yeah, that is the most fun part is that Pete is the artist. I'll come up with a design for what I want a flyer or a fax to look like and I'll go to Peter who'll make a cool visual and then we'll put it together and it'll be amazing. I have magazines everywhere in my room, I'm constantly reading magazines, looking at old flyers, retro gaming mags. If we need something that's for quite a punky young faction, rebelling against Mars, for example, I'll go look up a bunch of punk flyers, see what they all look like and what the main themes are, then try to think 100 years from now, how would that be different, and then sort of just start from there building up in Indesign.
It's all the same way I would make any print page in a magazine: It's inspiration first. I absorb as much as I can of that thing and then come back to it. I'm a bit younger, I've never held a real fax in real life so I had to look up like a lot of what faxes look like. I had a bunch of faxes and then draw one up for the game and I think I did okay for 100 years in the future! Everything's going to be a bit different, that's three 30 year cycles of nostalgia coming back so it's got to look futuristic but also a bit old because it's cassette futurism. We build on it and like Mick says, we all wear different hats. So I'll make something Mick will say this doesn't work, Peter says that does work, and it all comes together as a mesh of our minds.
LFG: One thing that I really loved when I was playing the demo is how much it made me feel like it was my first day on the job, that I'd immediately been given too much responsibility and it was assumed that I would know how to do it all. How do you navigate building tension with downtime to ensure the pacing isn't too stressful?
Michael Hunter: I think that was a really thorny issue early on, it's where the whole downtime system came from. Originally you played a ship encounter, you got a little screen at the end that told you what was happening on the ship, you clicked through that and immediately there was another ship... it was too tense. People felt overly stressed with it and they had to step away sometimes. I tried to get my mum to play it and she gave up after the tutorial because she was too stressed out. That's really why we introduced the downtime, which has this more calming music. The music is all done by a guy called Rob Marr, he's a wonderful composer, and it's just this kind of slightly wanderlust-y music. You've got the mundanity surrounding you, so it's meant to be a kind of a break from the stress, but you get these moments where a character will ask you to do something maybe you shouldn't do.
The whole game is about ambiguity and making clear boundaries unclear. So whenever there's a safe space, we will always pepper in little bits of threat and menace in there if we can.
LFG: Even Ms Jones (the station's cat)! I'm a cat person, I felt safe with Ms Jones. And then she bit me.
Michael Hunter: Yeah, I'm sorry about that. She does bite, she's mean. We wanted a cat, but not too cutesy because she's been a little roughed up by the life on her spaceship. I think that was important to us as well that nothing in the game reads as too just a firm cliché.
Michael Hunter: This is Ms Jones in real life. Her head comes off as well, which is nice.
LFG: Damn.
Michael Hunter: She's posable! I think with Ms Jones, we didn't want an overly cutesy cat. We wanted one that displayed the realities of a cat in space. That's not actually great for the cat.
LFG: I think you have to be a very specific kind of person to be in space. You have to be willing to put yourself at risk just existing there. And yeah, the fact that there is a cat in space is kind of weird.
Michael Hunter: I think that's a big part of why the game exists it's inspired a lot by company towns. I was thinking up until now, space travel has been a thing where people are very driven to do it and they want to be up there. What happens when you introduce a survival aspect to that of no, you need to be there because that's your job. Once you're up there, it's not like an office job where you can turn around and say, "I quit now," because you can't walk out the door. You'll decompress. So a lot of it is based on that combination of what used to be this big adventure has now become mundane and kind of awful in all in its own way.
LFG: There are other people on the ship with you. Just how badly can you piss them off? And and how much can you make them like you?
Peter Wood: We have a trust system in the game and it's not explicit. It's just behind the scenes, and there's no way you can appease every character. If you make Fred trust you by doing all the things Fred wants you to do, then Nigel will hate you, it's like their motivations are opposites. And for each character, you kind of have an opposite character who are secretly competing against for your trust.
Michael Hunter: Yeah, I mean you can screw up things in a really big way. I don't want to give too much of the story away, but having characters on board with you who trust you can be very, very important for maintaining agency in the story. Part of it is office politics, but it's office politics in a pressurized container. There's also the fact that you're carrying miners with you, and Fred is representing those miners in a way that maybe the company doesn't like. They're a bunch of people who have been chosen for their appetite for high-risk work who are, "securely locked away." There is potential for that to go very, very badly wrong if you, upset them too much.
LFG: Who do you hope this game reaches?
Peter Wood: First of all, fans of Papers, Please are probably the core demographic. People who maybe enjoyed that game a lot and haven't maybe had the same itch scratched in the same way since. We're really trying to take things in a new direction to build upon the foundations that were laid there. Besides that, there's a lot of crossover with space sci-fi, hard sci-fi, even RPG people kind of enjoy it like the branching choices and things like that. Quite a lot of ways people can get into this game, I think. Yeah, in that sense quite an immersive game.
James Leys: I've seen a few playthroughs on YouTube and Twitch, and some people will do a thing and then it's silence and they're like, " I didn't mean to. I ran out of time." The people that really experience the stress. That's the funnest part of knowing that the way we've made it really works.
Peter Wood: I think people looking for immersion will get a lot out of it. People willing to commit. It's also quite hard to convince yourself to really get to that point of stress willingly.
Michael Hunter: I think once someone ends a level and does the kind of the sigh of relief, that's kind of when we know we've got them. Which is weird for a video game, we're kind of asking people to willingly put themselves in a very stressful situation. They seem to like it.
Thanks so much for reading! I'll be back on Monday with a new feature I'm calling "Peek at the Week" - a brief primer on gaming releases/events to keep an eye out for over the coming days. Hope you dig it! Have a great weekend!