I wrote a post-mortem for my entry in IF Comp 2023, which was fun to write and people enjoyed reading. I thought I might do it again for my 2025 entries. I’ve decided to separate my thoughts on Anne from those on Cart.
Statistics
Development period: It’s complicated.
Programming languages: Twine (Sugarcube)
Testers: 2
IF Comp Reviews: 7
Passages: 59 (52 story passages)
Words: 7,976
Lines of code: 398 (373 Twine + 25 CSS)
The above statistics are reported by tweego and a tweaked version of cloc.
Project origins
In comparison to my other games which come after a bunch of planning, sculpting and crafting, Cart came out nearly fully formed in two sessions. It was like being taken by a fell mood as a dwarf craftsman in Dwarf Fortress. The world was in a state and I just wrote the game out. I think it was just prior to the 2024 US Presidential Elections, borne from that fear of looming authoritarianism. I think I expected sensibility to eventually reign and all the fears not actually come to pass, and this was my discussion about those fears. Yeesh…
Writing process
When I was an undergraduate I experimented with automatic writing. I’d get into a fully open state with no filter or restraints and I’d just write what came to mind. It was weird, evocative text in a style like Nostradamus but not in quatrain form. It had a dark rhythm and exquisite word choice. I don’t think I’ve kept any of that, but the writing in Cart felt nearly the same although I was conscious of what I was doing this time.
There was some form of planning but it was different from other projects. I knew the basic story, but I flirted with the idea of setting it in actual historical times like the Australian Gold Rush. I did some very basic historical research on fascism and authoritarianism. I researched the history of night soil cartmen in Australia and England, which ended a lot later than you might have expected.
I ended up being ahistorical as the allegory was more important to me than the facts. So it’s set in a vague early Industrial Era England. In the mix were fears of creeping industrialization and the impact on workers and the local power structures of employers and the clergy. To distract from the power struggle, certain multicultural “others” are identified, exploited and brutalised.
I don’t usually think in these sort of ways. I’m usually quite optimistic or at worst exploring sad themes, rather than angry ones. The finale was always in mind. It reminded me of that George Orwell quote: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” Cart was always intended to finish with that very particular explosion of violence on the protagonist, with the story continuing afterwards.
The whole thing was written in that semi-conscious style whilst taking a few days off work, one day per week. Obviously I was writing code and structure, so it wasn’t unfiltered subconscious. But it wasn’t self-conscious, analytical writing, so you get obvious errors like “a dark rumination descends upon you”.
After the first session of writing, I gave it to my mate Mike of Armiger Games. His response began:
Yikes! That’s one hell of a dark opening. It’s pretty gripping, I want to know more about what happens to the boy, but it’s not an easy read.
I knew that I had something interesting, and slightly nudged my later writing towards respecting the player’s decision about the boy. I knew the boy’s role: he was to carry on after the protagonist’s death. How he spent the rest of the narrative was a revelation to me as I wrote it.
A Night-Soil Cart of content
After writing the first draft, I stepped back to see what I had. It was a weird, brutal game. I wanted to get some player reactions, so I asked for beta-testers on the forums. I got zero response. I tried again on the Neo-interactives Discord and got a response from Drew Cook, who gave excellent feedback. Max Fog, it should be noted, also offered but I declined because I worried about age-appropriateness. I think that was a huge mistake and I’m sorry, Max.
In being really surprised by the brutality of my own game, I was extremely honest in content warnings. And I think this drove many people away.
So I had this game that felt special but dangerous. What could I do with it?
As the situation in the US changed, Cart felt even more personally dangerous. If I published it, would it bring me trouble? Would it be better to bury it?
I was extremely anxious about the piece and what it represented. Fears of publishing it grew and morphed into odd worries. For example, why should I release it when there are games with much better knowledge and research (and writing?), like Autumn Chen’s Social Democracy? Will I not only invite trouble but embarrassment? Was it Fisher Price’s My First Thoughts on Fascism?
Over time my thoughts about it changed. I felt like I had something nonobvious to say, and something closer to a comment on the broader human condition in these troubling times rather than specific critiques.
Someone I knew said, “These times will answer the question: What would you have done in 1930s Germany?” I’m not an overly brave man, but I hoped I could attempt to speak truth to power.
As work on Anne progressed, I thought about the extravagance of submitting two IF Comp games. Or if I didn’t get Anne done in time, Cart might be my just-in-case submission.
The Empire urges a change
The version I submitted to IF Comp is not the original version of Cart. That scene in the darkness outside of a rich house’s party was originally different and it impacted the ending.
Originally what you saw was a young girl fleeing the party. The boy attempts to save her, but is scared off by Sir Harrington’s guards. The young girl is implied to be sexually abused, given Harrington’s pet name for her, and this makes the protagonist’s blood boil. Harrington gets the girl back in the house with the chilling, “We’re not nearly finished yet.”
The finale gives you the option of shouting the pet name as your one word spoken to power. The crowd see her visceral subconscious reaction as her calm, innocent demeanour drops, and turn on Harrington in a riot.
In amongst the litany of horrors of racism, violence, corruption and poverty, this felt like a unique horror to earn the inevitable ending. I don’t like subjects like sexual abuse, but it felt appropriate. There are obvious pointers to current alleged events, which was a coincidence rather than an intentional connection.
Further down the list of benefits was that it gave me a meaningful female character in a story full of males.
I was worried enough about the response to Cart. Then the UK Online Safety Act came about. The IF Comp organizers were, in my mind, very good about it. It was a bizarre, deeply-cutting effect on the Comp, crystallised at about the worst time. I let them know about the content with the girl and asked them for advice on whether I should retract the game from the Comp. They did say the choice was mine to make and that they didn’t moderate content of games in the competition. I was unsure I could rewrite it in time — returning to Cart whilst writing Anne was a scary thought.
In the end I found a solution. There was always this dangling question about religion through Cart. There are comments and a backstory about the local Church’s collusion with Harrington, but it didn’t really go anywhere. I replaced the girl with a young priest, replacing sexual abuse with corruption. It was not as good, but according to the guidelines it was better.
In the end the violence got Cart geoblocked anyway. Maybe I should have left it as it was.
Random notes
Some extra little tidbits to mention:
- I spent a while on the cover art. I wanted a cart in an evocative Unsplash photography sort of style, but it seemed beyond my ability to produce. I did the two versions in pretty quick time. The brutalistic pale one took some careful settings in Blender to achieve. The one on fire came to me in a dream and it took a while to get the fire sim in the ballpark of correct, and adjust all the lighting. I’m super pleased with how it turned out.
- Sir Harrington’s name was a stand-in that I never came up with a better version of.
- Embarrassingly I realised late that I knew people of the name that rhymed with Harrington who are lovely and should not be tarred with that character’s behaviour.
- The protagonist does not say a single word of dialogue until the finale. This took some gymnastics to do but I think wasn’t obvious. The boy also doesn’t speak.
- I had thought of submitting the game under the pseudonym “Ron Graham”, the name of one of the last nightmen in Australia. He retired from the job in Melbourne in 1995. I didn’t want the optimism of Anne to be tainted by the brutality of Cart. Then again, I wanted to flex my writing muscles. I ended up deciding against it because I had talked enough about Cart around the traps, and the name Ron Graham is also of a mathematician I knew and I didn’t want confusion around that.
- The body horror of the gold tooth scene was harrowing to write, so I hope it was harrowing to read.
- Some people complained that the structure of the interactivity was pretty limited. This was an intentional choice, and I think Mike Russo’s review captured the reasoning for that very well.
- The comedian Stewart Lee has a joke that his routines don’t have topical jokes. He can write them, but he’s more interested in weird experimental stuff. In a similar way, I can write games with loads of interactivity (Hand Me Down, One True Love, [redacted next IF Comp game]) but this year I chose not to.
- In a pre-IF Comp edit, I added the line about undesirables eating dogs, which is an obvious reference. It seemed to fit at the time. I think it’s too obvious and muddies the throughline of what I was trying to write. I’m glad the game ended in a more universal truth rather than pointing at any specific events.
- Early on I had consigned Cart to being the black sheep, and Anne my belle of the ball. Anne has a consistent rating on IFDB, and Cart’s is more wild. Reviews for both have been okay. I have NO idea how either will do.