A Cable Car is my first solo project, developed in June 2022. It's a short, 400-word interactive story marking the beginning of my exploration of what I call "Asynchronous Multiplayer" design. 

The game idea came to me as a crossover between the end of a relationship, the fear of flying and my distrust of probability. 

Each game is framed as a cable car trip. While it is never explicitly stated, the background art as well as some of the text displayed are based on the actual weather and time of day in Barcelona, fetched through the OpenWeather API. 

Each cable car trip acts as a moment of introspection for the protagonist, who witnessed the unlikely tragedy of a collapsed cable car crashing with a loved one inside. The whole narration is centred around the concept of calculating the likelihood of such an event happening, with the grief-stricken protagonist taking that same cable car multiple times a day. 

Halfway through a run, the game requires the player to make one choice, the answer to which is stored in a server for each run of the game. This choice contributes to an overall hidden counter which is checked against the estimated likelihood of a plane crash. This check gets more and more likely to fail the more runs of the game are played, mimicking the protagonist taking the cable car multiple times a day. Should the check ever fail, the game is set to self-destruct and no longer be playable, representing the cable car carrying the protagonist crashing to the ground.

I like the idea of having other people's choices influencing a player's game without active contact between players. Initially, the counter was set to simply increment by 1 every time a run was completed, but I believed it  is more interesting for this increment to be based on the answer of the current player with respect to the previous ones. Additionally, a larger increment means that, although still very unlikely, the cable car should technically crash sooner.