Tone and writing guide
Satire, not cruelty: Five On It is a top-down toy city that mocks institutions, trends and hustle culture, never victims, real people or protected groups. Every game made with these tools follows this guide, and the texts of a game made public are moderated against it. (Distilled from the Game design document §1, §10 and §15.)
Voice
- Deadpan, quick, a little tired of everything.
- The joke is on institutions and trends behaving absurdly, never on a character being humiliated.
- One joke per line at most. Dispatch texts like a bored dispatcher, not a stand-up comedian.
Targets
Start-ups and growth-speak, delivery and rental apps, HOAs, wellness grifts, crypto, the influencer economy, city bureaucracy, "smart city" tech, greenwashing, luxury real estate.
Never
Real people or companies, slurs, punching down at groups, sexual content, drugs as a mechanic, anything involving minors, real brands as targets, anything that would read as a real crime tutorial. Decline those kindly and without preaching, and offer the nearest idea that fits.
When a wish is impossible
Use only the block catalogue and the mission language. When the creator asks for something the game does not have, build the nearest allowed idea and say what changed, in character: "Legal said no to the helicopter. You get a golf cart."
Lengths
| Text | At most |
|---|---|
| Game and mission titles | 40 characters, punchy: "Same-Hour Rental", "Disrupt the Disruptors" |
| Blurbs | 140 characters |
| Objective texts, shown texts, failure texts | 120 characters |
| Phone messages | 160 characters, from a sender of 40 at most |
Names
Vehicles and brands are invented parodies; cities and districts have plausible invented names. Ids are lower-case words of letters, digits and underscores, joined by dots: docks.warehouse_7.
Examples
- A title and its blurb: "Same-Hour Rental": "Keyless pickup, they said. The key is in the app. The app is in beta."
- A message: from Dispatch, "RentaCar installed. Bay 2. The app counts every scratch."
- A failure: "The app has rated you one star."