Hello and welcome, I am organizing a collaborative community game built without profit in mind for the joy of making something together. The end result will be a choice-based interactive fiction game inspired by surreal, mysterious art such as the work of M.C. Escher, Lewis Carrol and Italo Calvino.
The Pitch
You have been transported to a bizarre museum whose strangeness only grows the longer you remain, and you grow strange with it. Find your way out of the twisting halls, past the impossible sculptures, and try to retain some sense of self for when you return to the real world.
At its heart I’m looking to populate this gallery with lots of weird art pieces, so if you want to drop in and write a single description of an art piece to be slotted into the final gallery you’re more than welcome! No coding, no version control, no problem.
We’re especially trying to help new authors find their voice and get practice working with other writers. To that end this is probably going to be a puzzle-light, exploration-heavy game, but it all depends on what folks want to contribute. To get an idea of what I mean we’ve built a short demo in Ink that you can dive into right now.
This is a time-boxed project that is going to go into brainstorming in 2 weeks (March 27th), we’ll be writing the first draft together starting two weeks later (April 13th) and wrapping up the writing portion 6 weeks after that (May 30th).
Our submission guidelines and materials will change as more people are added to the project. If you have any questions, hesitations, or feedback on the demo please drop your comments here. Thank you!
We’re up to 12 confirmed collaborators! I’m confident that when we kick off the work in a couple weeks there will be LOTS of wondrous ideas and mind-boggling writing to fill up this growing gallery.
Both of these were helpfully addressed by using choice-based IF over parser IF. That’s not to say I’ll never organize a collaborative parser game but I feel like the authorial audience has very different expectations.
We’re tackling both of these again by lowering the barrier to entry even further, as submissions can be plain text descriptions rather than full stories. This means more people can contribute but folks who want to dive in deeper (write lots of puzzles, make lots of NPCs) don’t have any artificial restrictions either.
I’ll definitely be writing up a postmortem on how this project goes and using lessons learned for future community projects. I think they’re fun and I plan to keep organizing them.
Please do join! We’ll be kicking off brainstorming at the end of the month: Cryptic Conservatory
Thought this particular portion of their submission guidelines would be of interest to the community:
Q: Can I use AI generation?
A: No. No commercial LLM or AI Image generator work will be accepted. We are here to write for the joy of writing, any GPT submissions will not be accepted and any submitter found to be using such technology will have all of their submissions revoked. If you wrote your own procedural text generator and wish to use it then contact curator@crypticconservatory.com with an explanation before attempting to submit, and be prepared to explain the source for its corpus/all training material.
We’re still looking for anyone else who wants to contribute! The team has grown to over 35 people so far and I’m excited to stitch together the surreal experience we will create. This is the last week of brainstorming, during which we’ve had lots of discussion in discord, plotting in Miro (a flowchart app), and several ideas put down on napkins (an archivist’s best friend)
If you want to write some words to be hung on a wall in the gallery, even if you aren’t sure you’ll have something by the pencils-down date, come on by the discord and join the chaos that is art.
We’ve had successful web hosting on itch.io before, such as with our last IFComp entry Mermaids of Ganymede by Paxton, but if we need more nuanced html control I’m also in the process of building a site which could host as well.
The demo uses ink’s built-in web export: Maze Gallery - Demo by Paxton - itch.io (password: labyrinth) which I’m looking to add further mechanical depth to with UI that sorts choices and inserts reactive art assets.
If you don’t already have something in mind, how are you going to connect all the sections together? Surely state tracking would be important. I’d be happy to find a way to make each of the sections link and brainstorm simple puzzles connecting all of the areas.
I also have many puzzle ideas in my head, which could be of help if you want - but any meetings I probably couldn’t make, due to timezones and other reasons. But a general schedule and I send notes in could be fine.
I can’t promise anything, and I also don’t know how to use ink, but I would be happy to do some theory (through notes). Also to find some way to connect the areas (both physically and in tone).
We have a pretty solid plan for how we’re going to integrate everything, the demo was built as a test of slotting in specific types of content (locations, art, NPCs, collectables, &c.) so all authors who adhere to the submission guidelines should be straightforward to implement. A map similar to this one for the demo will be created to track submissions as they are approved:
Once submissions close and we have a good idea of the size of the corpus we’re stitching together is when we begin real tech build in a phase called Compilation. We won’t know how long that’s going to take until all submissions are in, so it’s a soft end date at this point. Maze Gallery Submission Guide - Google Docs
We won’t be accepting new puzzle submissions at that time, the other editors and I will be working to implement all the written content and give feedback to submitters so they can revise as necessary. That being said, if you want to write puzzle then you’re welcome to join the discord and be a part of the process! There’s no obligation to join meetings (or even collaborate) just be kind and curious: Cryptic Conservatory
Submissions are officially open, and we’re still looking for anyone interested in contributing an art piece or two. To facilitate that I’ve put together a couple example submissions, one in a working .ink script and another as plain text.
We’ve gotten a lot of feedback so I’ve also been updating our Submission Guidelines with more explicit technical direction and hopefully more inspirational writing pillars
Good question! We’ve got a couple artists who were excited about the pitch and decided to join early. We discussed the goals for the game and decided that using more unusual art styles would fit best, so we eliminated the ideas of using sketches, photography, 3D renders, and wanted to shy away from traditional illustration.
Collage was my personal favorite, so I went ahead and cut up some newspapers and made a piece of test key art. In contrast to the high-detail style we discussed using something instructional, like ikea instructions or an exit sign. One artist did a wallpaper set (gorgeous) imitating the art-deco style with some things hidden in the geometric patterns. Another artist suggested using fine art, or public domain assets that one might actually see in a gallery.
To keep up with the democratic theme we put all of these to a vote during the brainstorming period, folks could vote for multiple but most preferred a single style.
That’s pretty big already! The green submissions are fully playable. Author’s schedules are understandably scattered, so I expect rates to fluctuate quite a bit as this continues to grow. The nice part of the rolling schedule is that means some authors are done contributing, some are just getting started, and some may not have joined yet but still have time.
Just one week to go for First Drafts, here’s another check-in to see how things are going:
7 full submissions, 6 more co-authors
8 authors with things intending to submit, bringing our total writing collaborators to 20
Thus far over 17,600 words are in the project
2 Artists, 2 Composers, and 3 Editors are preparing for the next phase
This is by far the biggest project I’ve ever managed, so we’ll see how smoothly the compilation phase goes. The discord server is full of lovely, supportive people so I have no doubt about everyone’s submissions getting polished to a high shine.
Does it look like noodles yet? We’ve separated the gallery into 4 general arcs, following the logic of a dream: Utopia, Surrealism, Uncanny, and Lucidity. This structure does imply a fairly linear experience, but hopefully the ability to skip to any location you’ve been previously (through the use of “You Are Here” directories), a few incentives to backtrack for optional puzzles, and some collectables in each area will keep players from merely trying to optimize their path.
Next week begins the hardest part: connecting & editing.
This project looks cool, and exciting to see it’s moving along well. But I’m just posting to say that Moreau’s Oedipus and the Sphinx is one of my favorite paintings, so I was tickled to see you use it here. Man, I miss living in NYC, I used to go to the Met and see it like once a month…
Is it still there even? Art galleries and museums are secretly getting rid of their best stuff (selling it?). I’m seeing a lot of things go missing here.
Yup, still there. I know some museums did some deaccessioning during COVID since their budgets took a hit from everything being closed, but I think for the bigger museums it was smaller scale stuff like extra copies of photos, non-exhibited works, etc. - this is a pretty high-profile piece that’s been in their highest-traffic gallery for decades.
We’ve separated the gallery into 4 general arcs, following the logic of a dream: Utopia, Surrealism, Uncanny, and Lucidity. This structure does imply a fairly linear experience, but hopefully the ability to skip to any location you’ve been previously (through the use of “You Are Here” directories), a few incentives to backtrack for optional puzzles, and some collectables in each area will keep players from merely trying to optimize their path.