Incentivizing Vagueness in Floppy/Write's Design

Working on Floppy/Write has forced me to think a lot about vagueness—what it means to build a game where the player is constantly naming the world,  and expressing their own intricate and imprecise observations, and still moving the narrative forward. The game’s main mechanic is basically a notepad. You write things down. The system tries to understand what you mean. Sometimes it gets it. Sometimes it doesn’t. But either way, the story keeps going.

There’s no list of interactions, no highlighted clues, no real “correct” answers. You call someone “the guy with the striped jacket,” and maybe the game understands you. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe you meant Efrem, maybe you didn’t. The world reacts to your language—not the other way around.

That’s what excites me most about the project: it’s not about solving puzzles the right way, it’s about slowly creating your own version of the truth. A city that responds to how you’ve decided to remember it.

I wrote a longer piece on my Kofi about this design problem—how a game survives misunderstanding, how memory becomes input, and how ambiguity can be more engaging than precision. Expanding game systems that stretch under pressure (and don’t break), or narrative tools that work more like a notebook than a script.

Full devlog here: https://ko-fi.com/post/Designing-Around-Vagueness-in-FloppyWrite-Q5Q21GTNHI