Projects / Newline

Newline was dreamt up during the winter break of my last year in high school. I was suddenly struck with the motivation to code a game and build a little puzzle-solving ARG around it. I drafted a backend for the game server in Node.JS with Socket.IO and built a simple webpage with a terminal-like interface which the players would use to interact with the game. The idea for the name "Newline" originated from this interface design.

Inspired by some of my favorite games such as SOMA and Event[0], Newline takes place on a space station in Lunar orbit. The year is 2061, and the crew of the station awake with amnesia. They discover that they are stranded, and that even if they could make it back to Earth, their home planet is no longer habitable. Even worse, aboard the station is an unseen entity that corrodes metal and interferes with the station's systems. The crew must struggle to survive until they are rescued, and uncover the secrets of the station they inhabit.

On Christmas 2019, my friends and I got together for a holiday celebration. During the party, I handed out small cards with two hints on each of them. When the cards were assembled, a base64 message could be assembled and decoded. This message, when sent to my Discord bot, would grant them access to a link where they could begin playing the game.

Once they had access to the website, they could use the second hint given on the cards, which were usernames that allowed them to "log in" to the terminal and start playing. Within the game, players could explore the space station using various commands. They could travel from room to room, take a spacewalk, man the comms, lock and unlock doors, and even perform autopsies. Every so often, I would update the game with more story content, then make an announcement over Discord letting my friends know it was time for another round.

The sequel, Linefeed, is currently in development. It will be set on the Moon and will be more story-driven than Newline. Players will get to experience more action and will learn much more about the reality their characters inhabit, as well as how the monster from Newline came to be.