In the beginning of December I was interviewed for the Danish Academy of Digital Interactive Entertainment, or DADIU for short – the national game academy, basically. It’s a collaboration between a dozen different Danish university-level educations where each place of education supplies developers for a certain role on each development team. The ITU supplies project managers and game designers, and the game designer position is reasonably popular compared to how many they accept, so they have interviews to determine who to admit.

During the interview I was asked to describe my favourite type of game. I did not hesitate to choose the Looking Glass Studios school of game design, which has given us such games as Ultima Underworld, System Shock, Thief, BioShock, even SWAT4, and of course Deus Ex. I wanted to explain what the fundamental design philosophy is that ties all these games together, but because I was extremely nervous, I made the mistake of describing it as realism. I told the interview panel that Looking Glass was all about creating a world with a structure and behaviour similar to what you would expect from the real world.

I quickly realised my mistake and struggled to recover from it, specifying that I wasn’t talking about graphical realism but the fidelity of your interaction with the world – toilets that flush when you use them, pool tables with balls that can be shoved around, computers with e-mail accounts you can access. But it was too late, the interviewers had misunderstood me and asked me what I would think about working on much more abstract games, leading into another line of questioning about my versatility as a game designer.

Only several days later did I grasp what I wanted to say during the interview: it’s not about realism, or with how much detail the game simulates the real world. It’s about placing the narrative at the core of the world design in particular and the game design in general. When you play Thief or Deus Ex or BioShock, everything is there for a reason – everything is motivated by the fiction. The point of this design paradigm is narrative consistency; you build a world rich with culture and history and characters and then you use that as the foundation of everything else.

This differs from eg. Bethesda’s (equally successful and admirable) design philosophy in that Bethesda seems more interested in feature density than narrative consistency. Consider Fallout 3 – what the hell does anybody live off of? Do they still eat 200 years old canned food? Why has nobody at least attempted to rebuild anything in all this time? How can any civilisation exist when the anarchic, murderous raiders outnumber everyone else by far? The important thing in Fallout 3 is that everything is interesting and memorable, and that there is a lot of it, not that it makes sense.

The design philosophy I’ve been “brought up on” is to establish the rules of the game world – how does it work, how is everything connected – and then refer back to that at every turn and use it as inspiration for the level design and the plot and even the basic game systems. Of course there’s a limit – even Deus Ex had painted-on doors, but as much as humanly possible, this philosophy is used to create games with worlds you can believe in. It ties back into that dreaded word, immersion – or presence, if you will.

Fallout 3′s inconsistencies are largely refridgerator moments, which is why the game can still immerse you as long as you’re playing, but the Looking Glass philosophy is about trying to eliminate those, so if you question why you found a sniper rifle and a pack of ammo on a balchony, you’ll be able to make up a reason without having to stretch your imagination too far. The danger is that the narrative consistency is taken so seriously that it begins to get in the way of usability or make the game less engaging, as was the case with the multiple names for the subway stations in The Nameless Mod. So far the professional developers working with this philosophy have managed to find a good balance, and after the feedback we’ve received on TNM, it’s something I’m keenly aware of myself.

I apologise if it seems like I’m trying to make a big deal out of a self-evident concept, but I failed to articulate this in my interview, and I’ve been wanting to put it into words ever since. It’s a pretty fundamental thing about my favourite games, it’s one of the many reasons Dragon Age most recently engaged me so thoroughly, and it felt like I should write a bit about it.

I did get accepted into DADIU though, and the first production will start April 26 and run for a month, at the end of which I will hopefully have another little game for my portfolio. For particularly good examples of DADIU productions, check out A Mazing Monk (a first year production) and Puzzle Bloom (a second year production).

Oh, and: Merry christmas

The Concept
The map in question is a vast sewer system designed as a labyrinth, inspired by the Hong Kong canals level in Deus Ex. Like the Hong Kong canals, there’s nothing strictly plot-critical in the sewers, the player will never need to visit them, and indeed the first two playthroughs of TNM (both by Gelo) skipped the sewers entirely to make it through the game faster. Instead, the sewers are a vessel for exploration, a recontextualization of the good old dungeon to be delved into and investigated for the sake of adventure.

The sewer level is the only map created from scratch by me, so it holds a special place in my heart. But it’s a bold design, and it’s not meant to appeal to everyone. When I originally visited Hong Kong, I was immensely thrilled by the way entire parts of the map were hidden simply by virtue of the map being so big and intricately structured. I believe I’ve mentioned it before, the sense of a “secret” that’s grounded in the fiction of the world, rather than being some sort of invisible door that disrupts your immersion in the game’s world. The sewers were designed to be so enormous and labyrinthine that things could be hidden simply by placing them slightly off the beaten path.

The Problem
The problem with the map became apparent during testing. In the alpha, a few testers expressed slight annoyance and frustration with how confusing and hostile the sewers are. Since we released the beta to more people, I’m not sure we’ve received any positive feedback to the sewers yet – the testers I’ve heard from have wanted to spend as little time as possible in the map, and some have gotten outright stuck in the level for several hours.

Which raises an interesting question: How do you get stuck in a map with seven exits? There are very few dead ends in this map – you usually just have to keep walking, and eventually you’ll find a way out. What exactly is the problem with the sewers? Why are people not liking it?

I talked it over with some of my fellow game design obsessives, and between us, I think we’ve figured out what the underlying problem is. It’s a discrepancy between what you expect and what you get: The map is designed to be explored without purpose – to get yourself willfully lost in and just poke around to satisfy your own curiosity and see what you’ll come across. If you don’t have any desire for aimless exploration, you shouldn’t enter the level in the first place. The problem arises when our players enter the level looking for something. Usually the entrance to the hidden basement of a building they’ve been given a side-mission in.

If you enter the sewers actively searching for something, it will immediately be a frustrating and terrifyingly hostile map. It’s a map designed to obfuscate, not direct – if you’re looking for something down there, the environment will be working against you at every turn. How to solve this?

The Possible Solution
Well there are a couple of solutions. One is to remove or completely redesign the map. This is not going to happen at this stage, the map took months to create, and I’m not yet ready to give up on the concept of the level. Another solution is to inform the player better. We already have messages in place when you enter the level, ensuring you understand that it’s easy to get lost down there, but players will still expect that they’ll be able to find the entrance to that hidden basement. This, I think, can also be changed through the power of More Information®: There’s a far more direct and easy entrance to it from another map, maybe all we need to do is make sure the players understand that the sewer entrance is just an alternative, and a harder one at that.

By changing one or two lines in the script, we could considerably improve the player’s experience with this level. Instead of changing the map itself, we’re going to try to change your expectations towards the map. We haven’t tried it yet, so I’ve no idea if it’ll work, or if it’ll be enough, but I’m hoping we can make the player understand that the map is completely optional and should be played at your own leisure. If it turns out to work, I think that’ll be an exceedingly valuable design lesson.

Warning: The comments contain minor TNM spoilers.

So instead, you’re going to get a random picture dump of photos I’ve taken over the last 2-3 weeks, because I love taking pictures and I love showing them off almost as much. First up is a batch of photos I took because the motifs remind me of various games – I’m really geeky that way. Then you’re getting a couple of random pictures too, because I’m a very self-indulgent person.

Half-Life 2, Water Hazard	Half-Life 2: The Lost Coast
Grand Theft Auto 3: San Andreas	Myst
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare	I’m going to put this in a game some day, mark my words!
Clearly they’re developing a lethal zombie virus in here. Or they’re controlling the national surveillance grid. Watching us all.	No game, really, the lighting was just hella good for photography that day.
The inevitable cat photo!	‘Tis I!

Tomorrow, I’m leaving for Malmö to attend the Nordic Game 2008 convention. Expect plenty more photos and a rundown of speaks I’ve attended when I return, Friday.

My biggest problem now is the dreaded crates. Everybody and their grandmother would, if prompted, tell you that crates are a lazy design choice, and that’s why they’re increasingly rare in modern games. To the player, crates are just a weird, nonsensical design flaw that we’ve all grown used to through repetition.

But the problem is that crates are (were) used for a reason. Several very good reasons in fact. First of all, they’re an easy way to say “hey, look over here!” A packet of pistol ammunition or a clip for an assault rifle or a bioelectric battery or whatever is generally small and easy to miss, whereas a crate is big and easily recognizable. After a level or two of picking up various goodies from these iconic equipment drops, the player will be trained to look for them, and you’ll never have to worry about calling attention to important places or item locations again – just put in a crate and your player will go there.

Surprisingly, it’s also great from a realism point of view. This is odd because realism is, of course, the main argument against using crates: How often do you actually see crates littering office buildings or back alleys or parks? Unless you work in a warehouse, you don’t really see a lot of crates. But let me ask you another question then: How often do you just leave stuff on the ground? Well, if you’re a messy teenager you may not even be able to see your floor through the piles and piles of junk littering it, but most normal people put things on shelves, on desks and tables, or in closets and cupboards.

If you’re a level designer working on an industrial factory complex or a park or canyon map, logical places to put items and equipment for the player will be few and far between, and if your game allows the player to sneak past enemies or if the enemies in the area are wild creatures or monsters so the player won’t even be able to pick equipment off of defeated enemies, it can be pretty hard to keep finding good ways to replenish the player’s health and ammo without making the player stop to ask “what the hell are grenades doing lying around the base of this tree…?”

Crates are the remedy! Crates are used to store all manner of objects temporarily while they are being moved from place to place. If you find a couple of crates with ammunition at the side of the road, you assume it’s been dropped off for somebody else to pick up later. If you find a crate with medkits on the floor of an industrial complex, you assume it’s recently been received and has yet to be unpacked. Or, if you actually stop to think about it, you’ll realize it’s still pretty unrealistic.

If you’re wondering how on Earth this ties into the balance work I’m doing right now, the answer is simple: Our crates do not support difficulty filtering (the measure we use to determine which items will appear on which difficulty levels), so if I need to remove an item from certain difficulties, I can’t put it in a crate. One of our programmers offered to code difficulty filtering into our crates, but I told him no because… crates are a lazy design measure, right? Instead, I find myself adding extra geometry or furniture to the world so I have somewhere to put all these items – somewhere that makes sense and where the player will notice them.

Once again I’ve managed to make things harder for myself. But look at the bright side: I get to whine about it in public! And hey, you’ll see a lot less of those logic-defying crates in TNM.

Remember back in the days of Jazz Jackrabbit and Wolfenstein 3D when all games had Secrets™? Secrets could vary from doors that looked like part of the wall and invisible holes in the ground where you could fall through if you stood still to props that served as triggers for bookcases sliding aside to reveal hidden rooms. My experience with action and platform games back then, though, is that the former type of secret was much more common: Hidden areas completely unmotivated in the fiction of the game. Why have a section of wall that slides away when you nudge it?

Deus Ex was one of the first games to consistently motivate its secrets in the fiction. Liberty Island, the first level in the game, has a couple of secret stashes: Two crates floating in the water under the dock, a sunken barge with equipment in its storage compartment, two containers full of medical bots. These are secrets that make sense – the crates were in a cage ostensibly meant for cargo storage, the barge was the ship that brought the ambrosia to the island before the NSF sunk it and made away with the cargo, and the medical bots are in storage containers, ostensibly about to be shipped into the UNATCO HQ or off of the island.

When you find a secret in Deus Ex, it doesn’t feel like a secret the developers placed there for you to discover, it feels like somebody in the game placed it there, out of the way, and you just found it by virtue of your inquisitiveness. Rather than being external to the fictional world of the game, these secrets are part of it. They aren’t really secrets, they’re just out of the way – they’re not expressly hidden from you, but you have to look around to find them. And since Deus Ex gives you skillpoints for exploration, there’s always an extra little nod from the developers when you find these areas.

Mysterious spaces is something the developers of the Hitman series are very good at as well. Hidden areas fit the Hitman games so well: The first part of a mission is often spent casing the locations, finding out how the level is laid out and looking for good places from which to snipe, ambush, or cause an “accident” to your target. The New Orleans mission The Murder of Crows in Blood Money is an excellent example of this, having a main outdoors area full of civilians and then a series of courtyards and alleys from which you can enter apartments and bars.

And Thief 3 is exactly the same, especially its city levels – you sneak around, trying to avoid the city watch, looking for shadows and niches you can hide in, all the while looking for the alluring glint of loot. In that way, it presses some of the same buttons as Wolfenstein 3D used to do: The nazi gold providing great motivation to find those hidden areas. But in Thief 3, the loot you find isn’t simply padding for your high score, it can be sold to your fences for money you can then use to buy equipment for your next mission – the reward is internal to the fiction. It all stays in the story, see? And of course another brilliant aspect of Thief 3 is that once you have the whole city figured out, you get the wall-climbing gloves and whole new spaces open up to you.

What these games have in common is a medium-freeform approach to level design. We’re not talking S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or Oblivion here, the game is divided into a linear string of confined levels, but each of these levels (each of the pearls on the string) is an open area within which you may move freely. Hidden areas are perfectly possible to include in more micro-linear levels such as in Half-Life or Call of Duty, but it doesn’t give you (or rather: me) quite the same joy of discovery. And the funny thing is, because the levels are so open, the areas don’t even really have to be hidden. It can just be an open window leading from the street into an apartment or a locked door you can pick to find a storage room with goodies.

If pressed to explain this thrill of intruding on the privacy of fictional characters, I can come up with a few reasons. First of all it plays to a curiosity that I think most of us have – an urge to look behind the building facades we see every day. In games we have the freedom to do that – to break into homes and take whatever we please without fear of repercussions or (less selfishly) without hurting anybody. This overlaps with the compelling nature of mystery and adventure – we tend to enjoy finding things we weren’t meant to find or being in on secrets. Certain structures will feel more fascinating to explore than others: Breaking into a generic apartment and robbing the place is all well and good, but finding out that I can jump out the window on the second floor of a tavern and grab onto the balcony outside, which offers access to that apartment without having to sneak past the guard posted at the front door – that is the sort of thing that makes me smile broadly or perhaps even chuckle quietly to myself as I play.

So that’s why I love these intricate, open levels, and it’s why I tend to love the hub areas with safe zones more than I love the real missions where you’re trespassing everywhere. I love constantly moving between public spaces and prohibited spaces, sneaking off the beaten path populated by friendly NPC’s to explore the places where I’m not supposed to be. And fun as playing such games are, it’s even more rewarding to build those levels.

But balancing a singleplayer game can be a pretty comprehensive project in and of itself. Seeing how TNM has been playable from start to finish for a couple of months, I reckoned it was about time to go over the amount of items in the game. Gelo complained a lot about a lack of equipment on his first playthrough, and initial datamining suggested that he was right.

I don’t know how professional teams generally handle balance, I suspect it varies a lot from team to team, just like most other aspects of game development. I know role-playing games generally use databases to manage difficulty by spawning enemies and items relative to the player character’s level at run-time, but even that must take a lot of tweaking to get a good difficulty curve throughout the game – I’m sure it helps if you’re building your game on a system like Dungeons & Dragons which comes with challenge rating tables, but I imagine the task of keeping all the databases balanced is still enough to keep a content designer occupied for an entire development cycle.

In some games, I think item placement is centralized. My cursory experience with Oblivion’s toolset seemed to indicate a central list of every character and item placed in the game, and I can definitely see that being useful for keeping track of everything. In a traditional linear shooter such as Half-Life 2, I reckon the designers probably handle ammo and item placement by intuition and then leave the tweaking to the QA department – I’m sure they keep careful track of which weapons are introduced to the player at what point in the game, though.

In TNM, we went about the task in a somewhat more anal-retentive way.

The first thing we did was to meet up on MSN and work out a list of how many items should be available to the player in each section of the game. Then Nick coded up a console command that gathers a list of every item on each difficulty setting in the current level and dumps it to a seperate log file. I went through each of our levels (we have 58 maps not counting the training mission or our cutscenes), dumping balance info from them as I went. I then organized these logs into a folder hierarchy and went about typing the data from them into an enormous balance sheet (pictured above in a low enough resolution that it won’t spoil anything). We haven’t quite finished this task yet, we’re still working on the two biggest sections, but I’ve finished balancing the three smaller sections of the game so they match the lists we worked out. It’s been a pretty monumental task, but I’ve found that forward planning makes it a lot easier.

One of the fun things about systematically balancing the game is that I get to see our plans for more detailed difficulty settings come true. With items set to “Normal”, the game will hopefully have about as many items as Deus Ex, whereas it will be positively throwing items at you on “Abundant”. In contrast to that, the “Sparse” and especially the “Rare” settings will force you to really conserve your ammo, scavenge every level for equipment, and really manage your item consumption well. As Nick puts it, you’ll feel like the game is punishing you.

Having made it about half-way through this process, it’s definitely not optimal. There must be a middle ground somewhere between placing items by intuition or being a complete nazi about it like we’ve been. Perhaps the best way is to establish general rules from the beginning of the project such as “Abundant should afford 50% more items than Normal, Sparse 50% less, and Rare 75% less than Normal” and then leave the rest to the QA team, or perhaps it’s best to adopt the RPG method and spawn ammo and items depending on the chosen difficulty.

Either way, it’ll be nice when we’re done balancing the game, because this is a tedious and not very rewarding process. It’ll be worth it though, and the best part is: We have a largely accurate list of item numbers in each mission when we’re done – perfect material for a walkthrough

Level design primarily has two purposes: Gameplay and aesthetics. Levels in games can either need to look pleasing or realistic – often both, but an equally important and somewhat more fundamental purpose is to make sure the game is fun to play. Depending on the game you’re working on, there can be various different demands the levels need to fulfil. What I perceive as the most basic of these demands is whether or not the level should be linear or non-linear. In my opinion, either can work really well, it simply depends on the nature of your game. Games with linear level design sometimes appeal to different players than games with nonlinear level design, but in my case (and in many others’ I’m sure) a linear game simply provides a different sort of experience.

I have created two simple diagrams to illustrate how significant the difference between linearity and nonlinearity in level design is. If you’ve ever spent any time actually thinking about this, I’m sure it’ll seem extremely self-evident, but it was nice for me to put these concepts into words and illustrate them even though they’re pretty easy to grasp. First of all, here is a level as it might appear in Half-Life – picture a set of corridors and rooms, perhaps a door leading into a courtyard with another building with a conveniently open door on the other side, and more corridors and rooms beyond:

Now regard this non-linear level as it might appear in Deus Ex – picture a part of a city, cordoned-off streets leading to a small plaza around a warehouse. The warehouse has an objective, it could be a generator that must be destroyed (my creativity knows no bounds!), and once you are done you may be extracted from the roof or you may simply be expected to go back the way you came. Also, there may be more than one way to enter this level in the first place, as pictured, and generally there will be several ways to enter the building or room with the objective):

Over 4000 brushes and apparently way too many surfaces to light properly, and not only does UnrealEd crash periodically if I dare so much as move the camera without switching to wireframe mode first, now it’s started crashing the goddamn game, shouting enigmatic, vaguely lighting-related, error messages at me as it plummets into those deepest and darkest parts of Windows where programs go to die.

I have to use UnrealEd 2 to do all the geometry and lighting because the BSP routines of UEd1 aren’t sophisticated enough to handle it properly, but I need to use UEd1 to place characters, objects, and pathing because UEd2 isn’t compatible with Deus Ex’ classes. It’s a fucking circus.

And now I can’t even play it anymore. Time to redo the ambient lighting…

At least it looks purdy.

The idea is that you can approach the creation of a challenge for a game in two ways: You can treat it as a puzzle, where there is only one way for your player to overcome the obstacle you place for him, or you can treat it as a problem where no specific solution is given, just a premise and a set of “tools”. Let me exemplify.

Half-Life 2 is a fantastic game which is heavily puzzle-oriented on several levels. Most obviously, the ordinary run ‘n’ gun shooter gameplay is frequently interrupted by an honest-to-God puzzle – generally based on some aspect of Havok’s impressive physics engine – which you have to solve in order to proceed through the game. On a somewhat higher level, the whole game is extremely linear and gives you only one choice in how to handle enemies: Kill them. The only choices you have in Half-Life 2 is whether to search for hidden items in certain nooks and crannies or just run past them, and which weapon to kill your enemies with. It’s a great shooter, but it’s definitely not going to ask you what you want to do.

By contrast, Hitman 4 puts you in a situation and presents you with a huge array of tools and tells you simply “Kill this guy and find the microfilm he’s hiding.” The tools at your disposal include going in guns blazing, sneaking past guards and security cameras, distracting guards into leaving their posts, climbing over walls and through windows a’la Splinter Cell, conning your way past obstacles with good old social engineering, neutralizing enemies or civilians more or less discretely and donning their clothes to pass effortlessly through restricted areas, or poisoning food and letting servants do the rest of the job. To take the optimal route through each level, you’ll usually have to use many of these techniques at different times in a mission, but often it’s possible to choose a single technique and stick with it, it’ll just be a lot harder. Additionally, Blood Money has a scoring system to steer you in the direction of playing the game like the developers want you to (so if you go in guns blazing, you’ll barely get paid), but once you’ve completed a mission by the book, you can always go back and play it again as a regular terrorist, blasting through to your target with full kevlar and a pimped-out assault rifle.

That’s what I mean by problem-oriented gameplay. Your problem is that you need to kill somebody, but he’s protected by approximately 20 well-armed and paranoid guards and sitting in a Las Vegas casino surrounded by civilians. You have a whole arsenal of weapons at your disposal and more tricks up your sleeve than David Copperfield. The game’s artificial intelligence is equipped to handle anything you can possibly think to throw at it, and it’s now up to you to devise a strategy and combine all these options to take out your target and not get yourself killed in the process. Even if you play the game by the book, laying low and carefully getting close enough to your target that you can safely take him or her out, you still have many many options for how to make the kill. Personally I enjoy creating “accidents” whenever possible – they look particularly good on the post-mission score board.

I want more games like this. I want more games that don’t tell you exactly how to complete your objectives, but just give you a bunch of options and drop you into a complicated situation. In fact I would like to try and take it further. I would like an entire game constructed as one big problem with an overall objective and no predefined path through the game. This game would simply consist of a large world, a micro-cosmos a’la Black Mesa or Citadel Station but structured more like Cyrodiil, filled with interesting situations and complicated, wide-open problems for the player to solve as part of his or her efforts to achieve the final objectives of the game.

I attended the following presentations Wednesday:

9:30 – 10:15
T. L. Taylor
Keynote entitled: From Box to World and Back Again: How People Transform the Games They Play

Summary: This talk will explore the ways players act as lively co-creators of the online games they play, shaping game culture in powerful ways.

My notes: Although MMOG’s are not my favourite category of games, Taylor had a lot of interesting things to say about online game culture in general, and her presentation served perfectly as an intro to Sotamaa’s:

10:30 – 11:15
Olli Sotamaa
Lecture entitled: Building on Player Creativity: Exploring Game Modifications and Modder Networks

Summary: The presentation examines the motivations and organization of mod makers. The benefits and downsides of modifications from the perspective of game developers are also discussed.

My notes: This talk was basically about me. There was nothing in here that I didn’t already know, but it was sort of nice to have it structured and conveyed in an academic fashion.

11:30 – 12:15
Simon Niedenthal
Lecture entitled: Novem Corda: Understanding Communities of Creative Practice in Game Design

Summary: We have developed an interactive tool called Novem Corda, which supports our inquiries into how digital artists think about, and communicate qualities of simulated illumination in the game design process.

My notes: Niedenthal has conducted a cross-disciplinary study of light in games, and he had some really interesting things to say about that.

13:15 – 14:00
Hilmar Veigar Pétursson
Keynote entitled: The Tao of Virtual World Societies

Summary: CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson looks to the East for inspiration in achieving a balance between the development team’s vision and the community’s desires.

My notes: This talk made me want to instantly pick up a subscription to EVE Online. Then I remembered the ludicrous death penalties and thought better of it.

14:15 – 15:00
Bart Simon
Lecture entitled: Against Immersion: Towards a Theory of Gaming as Interactive Performance

Summary: This paper against the utility of the concept of immersion for thinking about the idea of critical or reflexive gameplay.

My notes: Bart Simon is a very angry man. A very angry man.

15:15 – 16:00
Alessandro Canossa
Lecture entitled: Towards a Theory of the Player: Designing for Experience

Summary: After sketching a model describing the cognitive and physiological processes involved in the “player-avatar-game world” relationship, Alessandro intends to show how all player-types coexist within the implied player. Designers can increase the emotional and experiential impact of games by planning a “flow” path for each one of the player-types during the concept phase.

My notes: This stuff was directly applicable both in game analysis and in reducing the early iteration phase of a game development cycle. I gotta get my hands on his Ph.D.

16:15 – 17:00
Marek Walton
Lecture entitled: Beyond Storytelling: MMOs and the Role of Writers

Summary: MMOs require different skills from writers. Marek explores where the role’s reduced, where it’s increased, and where it’s an evolution of their development function.

My notes: I want to work for The Mustard Corp.