I didn’t proofread this. Caveat lector.
BOSH is a game that’s been kicking around in various forms on my hard drive and GitHub since I first started coding in Inform in 2022. I’m not really sure where the idea of the down-on-its-luck paranormal investigation agency came from, but it was there from the beginning. The central gag was also there: supernatural investigator stymied by mundane problems. In the original incarnation it was a blackout and you had to find a flashlight, which was a good deal easier than finding a screwdriver is in the released game.
The hyperplane was also an early bit of code, although I can’t remember if it was originally meant for BOSH or not. I wanted to see if I could make an effectively infinite area in Inform. And of course, I wanted to play with the standard directions. In general I just wanted to subvert everything.
BOSH was originally targeted for IFComp 2022, but by around April of that year it was clear that it was going to be too big to finish in the time available. So I shelved it and wrote “Crash” instead. That was a fairly straightforward space adventure without a lot of technical tricks. Which was good, because it allowed me to experience the difficulty of releasing a comp-quality game without any additional complexity.
I wasn’t any more ready when Spring Thing 2023 rolled around, so I threw together “Galaxy Jones” almost at the last minute, which was unfortunate, because it was a good idea crying for better execution.
Somewhere between Crash and Galaxy Jones I discovered Midjourney and AI art in general, which is where the GJ cover art came from. I was inspired by that to work AI art deeply into BOSH. The location would be shown, as would your character, any nearby NPCs, and any nearby sounds. (Oh, did I mention I had written a general sound propagation extension? Turned out to cause unacceptable lag in playtesting so I had to get rid of it.) My favorite part of the art was that it showed the person you were currently speaking to with a speech bubble.
Alas, it was not to be. At some point after Spring Thing a contentious discussion erupted on intfiction, which led me understand that not all of the community was keen on the use of AI art. As I was pretty invested in the look of BOSH at that point, I got upset and took my ball and went home for a few months. I even stopped writing Inform for a while. That didn’t last, as the date of the screenshot indicates. Some time around Spring Thing 2024 I returned to the site and starting pouring hours into BOSH with the intent of entering it in IFComp 2024. My original intent was to release it with graphics; then I got crickets when looking for testers, which made me think (perhaps rightly, perhaps wrongly?) that I was getting the cold shoulder. So I tried looking around for artists who might want to collaborate, but none of those worked out. So I turned off the graphics. I kind of miss the look of the left-hand column, but oh well.
So where did Larch Faraji come from? And why are they non-binary? First, I’m not attached to the second person viewpoint of the vast majority of [Edit: parser] IF. I’m not sure why it’s so overwhelmingly pervasive. Graphical adventures don’t have the same convention (imagine if Guybrush Threepwood were just “you”), so I’m not sure why text adventures must. (But apparently they must, because one reviewer complained about BOSH’s use of the third person.) So one of my plans early on was to make BOSH third person (also it was another silly trick like adding more compass directions). Galaxy Jones also features the third person, which I felt was imperative for conveying the sense of a hero rather than a nameless faceless protagonist.
Secondly, one of the features of BOSH was the ability to choose between multiple characters (of which the other two were Ezra Gaunt and Petula Clark Goldberg, who are briefly featured in BOSH still, if you examine the photos in the front office). I don’t really know what I thought the utility of that was, but in any case, it led to the creation of Larch Faraji so that the choice of character could be a little more inclusive. A good friend of mine who in the last few years began identifying as non-binary worked with me in finding the non-gendered first name “Larch”; the name Faraji I picked out of a list of names because I like how it sounded.
Later I removed the character choice because I couldn’t see the use of it, but the third person was pretty well baked in at that point, so I needed a protagonist. I liked Larch better than Ezra or Petula, so I kept them.
Unfortunately, characterizing Larch sufficiently eluded me, and I count this as a failure. I tried adding commentary by the PC, but I could never get it right, and a tester quite rightly suggested removing it.
My favorite thing about writing the game was creating the dialogue, the Book of Utilitarianism, and the books in the bookstore and elsewhere. Sure, most people wouldn’t read even one of the books, or ask Klimp about a single thing that wasn’t suggested directly by the game, but it was damn fun to come up with all that nonsense. And there’s a lot of it. Klimp has at least 300 topics he can answer about. And there are 30 books in the bookstore, including my favorite:
But who is The Dragon? You’ll have to wait for the sequel, if indeed it’s ever written. But if you finished the game, you may have noticed that the paper was delivered since you last were in the front office:
And finally, there is one way to die, that I’m still hoping someone will discover, and one secret prize that no one has claimed, related to one of the other games in the comp. I’m debating removing that. Someone find it soon! A hint: “Turn me on, dead man.”
Next up, for Spring Thing: “Galaxy Jones Reborn”, a new, improved, and reimagined version of “Galaxy Jones”, not a sequel.