WHEELJAM
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was the first time a game melted my brain since I first picked up Super Mario 64 in 1996. This is not about Oblivion’s sweeping vistas, incredible expansion, its innovations on DLC or anything of the sort. This is about the persuasion wheel, a mechanic from Oblivion’s Speechcraft system, wherein you simulate an NPC to like you through a conversation abstracted via this wheel.
My first project at Strange Scaffold was Bass Reeves Can’t Die. It was never released, but a video came out about it. That video led to many people floored at the heartfelt story of the little game that couldn’t, but still confused about how the fucking wheel worked. That led me to make a thread on Bluesky about how I implemented the wheel in BRCD, and subsequently, how it worked in the first place which amassed me a very small but specific following. To appease my fellow perverts, I created this game jam, got several collaborators roped in, and took the bit entirely too far.
Most people don’t know how this thing works, even if they’ve played Oblivion. That seems like terrible jam fodder if even the devs don’t know what they’re doing, so making templates seemed like a pretty obvious solution. I sat down to work on the Unity version and casually threw out on Bluesky that if anyone felt like making it in Godot, I’d be willing to share my dark secrets of wheel knowledge. Shane Scott answered the call, and within a couple weeks we had versions for Unity, Unreal, and Godot. You can find links to them on the jam page, or on my GitHub.
Aidan had created a cool logo for merch as a shitpost-taken-seriously, then also revealed themself to be a solid music composer. Then I roped in my good friend and collaborator Lars Olson to do graphics for the wheel, while Shane roped in Tavee Villamar to do graphics for the jam page. By this point, we had a whole team working on the jam.
In parallel, I had spent some time modeling and 3D printing wheels to see if I could make a functional, physical model. Turns out, yes! The individual slices were held in place by magnets, and the backer they’re on spins on a bearing, much like a fidget spinner. More embedded magnets loosely hold the spinner in place when not interacted with, allowing the wheel to spin, but then lock in place in one of 4 positions. Modified versions of these will be given away as prizes for the jam.
This also led to me having a perfectly usable 3D model of the wheel, which led to me creating the trailer at the top of this page. I created the basic space scene, worked with Aidan who created the general music sketch, and we passed the edit and music back and forth until we had our final trailer.
The best part of WHEELJAM so far is that as I write this, it’s still under construction, and will be running from March 13-20, 2025. This page will be updated to reflect the jam’s status on completion — something to look forward to.
WHEELJAM has also gotten some press coverage, as detailed here!
Rock Paper Shotgun
Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion gets a whole gamejam dedicated to Persuasion Pie, co-hosted by a Don’t Nod developer
80LV
Celebrate Persuasion Wheel from The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion in This Game Jam
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