1. Was ‘You’ve…’ your first ever game? Or did you have a play around a few times before you hit your stride with that one?
I made one other game first, where I was just giggling with glee over the miracle of making a computer respond to stuff you typed into it. I don’t want to put the whole thing out there but here’s a little bit of code:
Using is an action applying to one thing. Understand "use [something]" as using.
Carry out using:
say "To what use indeed? To what use indeed."
2. What’s your process like for creating a game? Do you tend to map out the locations and plot first or do you start with a particular kind of interaction you’re interested in? Is it different on different games?
It is different on different games. I think on Wrenlaw I started out with the location and sort of grafted a story onto it. Taco Fiction started out with the title. I’ll tell you about how I developed some of the vignettes from the latest Castle Balderstone game, since those are fresh in my mind:
Visit Skuga Lake
I just wanted to copy the DSS system from Castlevania: Circle of the Moon. I had wanted to make my own version of this for a long time. The story began to take shape when I had the idea of placing a magic gem in the eye-hole of an animal totem amulet. That was a really cool image, and it suggested a bunch of animal-themed magical abilities.
I came up with a good set of animal amulets and ability types (like “talk to that type of animal” or “conjure an element that kind of matches that type of animal”) and made a spreadsheet of the powers you’d amass in this game. I looked at other games for abilities that would be fun to steal—like the mind-reading power, which I took from Golden Sun.
As this set of abilities filled out, I started coming up with puzzles to which the abilities could function as solutions, and I started coming up with a map where these puzzles could take place. The magic system also inspired certain parts of the story and story structure.
When I had the whole map drawn up and the story figured out, I started actually writing the game—but I still hadn’t settled on abilities for some of the stone/amulet combinations. I had to figure those out as I went along.
Singing for Me
I was playing Stardew Valley and I noticed that, after I did all my chores in a day, there was very little time to do anything else. I was lucky if I could decide to do one other thing. And I thought, what if we automated all those chores, but instead of letting you do more stuff we codified this rule that you only get to make one decision each day?
So I made a list of things you do in that sort of game—similar to the Skuga Lake ability list, actually! You can decide to buy something, you can decide to explore an area, you can decide to hang around a certain person.
And then I came up with a world where you could do all those things, and a story that made sense for that world. Except it had to be scary, because it was a Castle Balderstone story.
Nyvo the Dolphin
I was having a very grumpy day. I probably had a bad headache. I tried to make myself feel better by coming up with a game that would be as angry as I was. I don’t think this turned out to be all that therapeutic, but it was a long time ago, so I don’t remember for sure.
I thought it would be appropriately frustrating to make the game’s map very three-dimensional and unpredictable. This implied that the PC would be, say, a dolphin, swimming up and down around a shipwreck. The dolphin would run into the skeleton of some sailor who died in some grisly manner, and the skeleton would wordlessly teach the dolphin how to scream.
I got over my grumps and probably would have set this idea aside permanently, except the idea “skeleton teaches dolphin how to scream” got stuck in my craw. So, again, I came up with a world and a story where that idea could happen.
Usually there’s one neat thing I want to do, and I construct the game around it. There are some games where the inspiring idea is the setting, though: Wrenlaw, Ascent of the Gothic Tower, Curse of the Garden Isle. And I guess you’d say the story came first in The Horrible Pyramid or An Evening at the Ransom Woodingdean Museum House. I think.
3. Does the implementation form a big part of that? So, are there things that you rule out as being a headache relative to the pay off for the player and so on?
When an exciting idea makes me want to start on a project, it doesn’t matter how much of a headache it will end up being. Like the whole one-turn-a-day concept in Singing for Me. That is a stupid idea. Way too much work. But I really wanted to do it!
When a headache of an idea presents itself in the middle of development, I’m more likely to give it a pass.
4. Wrenlaw is quite different in tone and experience from the other three - was that more autobiographical as a piece?
Yes.
The settings of Wrenlaw and Taco Fiction are both based on places in Iowa City that I wanted to recreate in text. But the Taco Fiction location inspired feelings of anxiety and sneakiness for me, whereas the setting of Wrenlaw was connected more with reflection and wistfulness.
5.1. What parts of your games have you been proudest of?
I think the structure and themes of Winter Storm Draco are extremely tight and good.
I’m incredibly proud of The Lurking Horror II: The Lurkening, just because I wrote an MIT Mystery Hunt puzzle all by myself. And it has a story and jokes, which most individual Mystery Hunt puzzles don’t get to have.
The structure and themes of A Rope of Chalk are also very tight and good.
5.2. Are there any parts of implementing them that really drove you nuts at the time?
There’s one puzzle in A Rope of Chalk that held up development for months. Possibly years. I just needed there to be one little complication to impede your progress in one particular location, and it needed to have a certain mood, and it needed to involve a certain character, and it needed to mesh with all the themes in the game, and it needed to be perfect. I wrote in my planner over and over again: THIS WILL BE THE WEEK WHEN I FIGURE OUT THIS PUZZLE.
If anyone is interested, the puzzle I’m talking about is the snake puzzle! I needed you to do something with the snake monster, something that kept you from passing through that location before you had seen the rest of that chapter. Something that was appropriately intense for a snake monster.
I think the breakthrough came not when I suddenly came up with a good puzzle, but when I had the idea to present the situation and character in a different way. Then a puzzle idea that had been insufficiently interesting before started to seem much cooler in this new context.
I don’t remember all of this super distinctly so maybe parts of that story are not true. But it’s the kind of thing that happens all the time.
5.3. Which games of yours should I play next?
Well, I strongly believe that everyone should play all of my games. But if you’re on a tight schedule…
- From Wrenlaw, you should go to The Ascent of the Gothic Tower (if you like lonesome, navel-gazey stuff) or A Rope of Chalk.
- From You’ve Got A Stew Going!, there’s Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder or The Roscovian Palladium.
- From Taco Fiction, obviously there’s the sequel Dial C for Cupcakes. I think there’s a similar mood in Taleframe’s beloved “Crocodracula” games.
- From Nautilisia, there’s a very direct line of influence to Ryan Veeder’s Authentic Fly Fishing.
Actually you should definitely play Ryan Veeder’s Authentic Fly Fishing next.
6. What are a few games of other authors that you’ve really admired and why?
Doug Egan’s Afflicted is always the first one to come to mind. The tone and material were very inspiring, but also the approach to implementation: The game really works to simulate a world in a way that extends past the story. In a way, the plot is just one thread that exists sort of incidentally within a broader setting. It keeps making me think about creating experiences outside of the traditional goal of delivering narrative.
And that makes me think about the Entries in Event Two of the Second Quadrennial Ryan Veeder Exposition for Good Interactive Fiction, which I continue to find inspiring even though I kind of demanded them into existence.
I also want to point out Closure by Sarah Willson, which gives me a lot of interesting ideas about parser interaction.
7. My son (12) is quite into computer games so I’m keen to get him into IF - he’s asked me to make him a game featuring the SCP Foundation - any tips for a first time coder?!
Well the stuff I said earlier about “just make the dang thing you want to make” applies. Assuming you’re excited about the SCP idea, I strongly encourage you to make exactly the type of SCP Foundation-oriented game that appeals to you and not worry about whether it’s any good.
This might be just as obvious, but you should know going in that programming is frustrating and impossible and stupid. Nothing ever works. If you approach the project with this attitude, then any time something does work, it’ll be a miracle, and you’ll get to giggle gleefully whenever anything compiles correctly. And when someting doesn’t work (which, again, is 100% of the time) it won’t be so discouraging.
BUT ONE OTHER THING: Make sure you have a plan. If you can, you want to design the whole game, hold it all in your head, before you start writing. This is the first habit of highly effective people, “Begin with the end in mind.”
I remember very distinctly that when I wrote You’ve Got A Stew Going!, I put together all the text and logic for all the stew ingredients in kind of a haphazard “golly this is fun” manner—and when it came time to write the ending I ran into a brick wall, because I had no idea how to check whether you’d found all the ingredients, or what to do if you ate something instead of putting it in the stew, etc.
A similar thing happened with Taco Fiction, where I included enough nonlinearity for the ending to go a few slightly different ways, but I didn’t plan for how I’d check those variables when they all suddenly became relevant. I started writing the ending and suddenly had to do all this research on my own code and draw flow charts.
In both cases, I would have saved myself a lot of grief if my initial outlines had included something along the lines of “In this game you do X, and you can do Y or Y’, and if you do Y then Z happens and if you do Y’ then Z’ happens.” Then when I actually wrote the Y/Y’ choice I’d know to code it in a way that’s easily referenced when the Z/Z’ branch happens.
Of course, when you’re just starting out, it’s hard to know whether you’re doing the thing you would otherwise wish you had done earlier. So, be prepared to be surprised by this, maybe.
Thank you for your questions.
