[The noise and chaos of the Iron ChIF celebration comes to an end. A tired Lucian comes to the front of the stage and sits down, looking at the rows and rows of seats in the audience. A few of his friends are still hanging out, and he waves at them. ‘Hey, good job!’ ‘Yeah, your game was great,’ ‘What was it like?’]
What was it like, huh? It was amazing.
[he looks back on the stage at a discarded wig and cane.]
It didn’t really play out like I imagined! I really expected to be ‘in character’ more, playing up the over-the-top drama, making jokes about @Encorm’s kittens and about being old. But I didn’t end up with a persona at all; it was just me out there. I didn’t have time nor energy to be anything else. Honestly, it was kind of freeing? I had worried about being entertaining, but it turns out there’s just inherent drama in someone trying their best to do something difficult in a short amount of time. I remember a bit from James Acaster about his time on Taskmaster: he said as comedians, you tend to want to come up with ‘a bit’ beforehand to be funny in a particular way. But that doesn’t quite work for that show–you just have to roll with it, and the funny things will naturally emerge.
Though it was funny to me when I’m like ‘oh, I could tell the story of trying to improve the ease-of-use of the navigation in my game’, and all the judges jumped on it, like “WILL THIS FATAL FLAW DOOM OUR CHALLENGER???” Guys! Sometimes you get a little surprised when you type ‘north’! It’ll be OK!
But that was the only disconnect I ever felt at all, throughout the judging process. Everyone’s commented on how committed I was to the ‘open’ bit, and I feel like that was one of the benefits: unlike our Iron ChIF, who decided in the end to just ignore the judges’ commentary since it was too disconnected from the reality of the game he was making, I felt that because the judges always knew all of my plans and progress thus far, they had much more salient things to say. I could take everyone’s comments on ‘how to do a chase scene’ to heart. I could re-examine some of my coding foibles from @Zed’s comments, and fix them. It was pretty close to having real-time, useful code reviews as I went. Even their initial comments on ‘what could you do with scrolls’ colored how I presented my own ideas about them in the game. There’s a line from Horatio: “In the past, this scroll could alter its surroundings. When it was finally read, it changed the world.” That was basically just me shouting at the judges: “Hey! See? I listened! I’m using scrolls in multiple ways!” And of course the final ‘You have changed the world’ when you get to do it yourself.
And speaking of the ending/endings… actually, I have design questions for people about that, so I’ll save most of those musings and questions for a separate post. But in general: this was the very first time I had ever released anything with a ‘choice’ mode! I’ve mucked with it a bit in a WIP, which is why I felt fairly confident I was going to try it in this game (and is why I put the deliberate tease of ‘Include Hybrid Choices’ in my initial code commit). It was fascinating and kind of fun to actually write in this format that I had seen for years (both in IF and in RPGs like ‘Mass Effect’) and see things from the other side, as it were. It mostly served to show me how much I didn’t know, which is a little intimidating when you’re trying to Make Something Cool, but I plowed through with the help of intuition and instinct, and mostly emerged unscathed on the other side.
In general, ‘coding to intuition and instinct within a rough structure’ was my guiding mantra the whole five days. @Encorm linked to Emily Short’s ‘Idea to Implementation – Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling’ blog post, and speculated:
Reader, I… no. I did not have anything on paper, let alone butcher block paper. I barely had any design in my head. My basic mode was pretty close to what Emily described as, “Implement first! Design later!”
However, two things saved me from the inevitable crash-into-a-wall phase I’m sure I would have reached had that been my only methodology. First, I had set up a structure where I had a beta tester every day, and wanted to send them a playable work. This is pretty close to Emily’s ‘Write the through-line first’ method, though of course I didn’t make it all the way to the end on day one–I barely made it (with 9 hours left) on day five. But everything was chunked, and I at least got through scenes by the end of each day, and it was that structure that forced me (thank goodness) to actually implement the ‘chase scene’ by the end of Day 2. I think the game would have seriously suffered had I skipped over that and tried to come back to it later–it was the groundwork for at least half the game, and informed so much of the rest.
The second thing that saved me was having a final scene in mind. You can see it in my initial walkabout video with my son: I always knew I was heading to a scene where the player chooses between a local effect that helps heal the people they know and love, or a global effect that helps heal more people, but maybe not the people they love. I watched a class from Brandon Sanderson on writing once, and he described the general difference between ‘outline’ writers, who write outlines first, then write to them, and ‘discovery’ writers (aka ‘pantsers’, from ‘by the seat of your pants’) who make up/discover stuff as they go. He then discussed a third way, which he described as sort of a white board approach: you write down the cool scenes or beats you know you want on a white board, draw some speculative lines between them to indicate ‘I need to get from X to Y’, and as you write, you kind of ‘discovery-write’ yourself down those paths. That feels like the closest to what I did during those five days: discover a path between Constance flying high above the Aerie, to a scene with the queen’s child, kept alive by a scroll, who might die if the scroll was read, but which would benefit everyone else.
The fact that Constance knew the kid? The fact that Constance and the queen had some sort of relationship? The entire character of Horatio, a once-a-generation Reader who can affect that change? Those were details I discovered in the moments of writing as I careered down that path from High Above to The Nursery, gathering details as I went.
It’s possible that writing things in this way was what worked for JJ so well:
I am telling you right now, there is no way I would have thought to myself, ‘I must put in information that is a surprise to both the protagonist and the player at the same time’. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad it worked! But maybe it worked because I was discovering the character reveals at the same time the player did; we’re both being surprised by what’s emerging from my fingertips together. And so maybe, as I was in the headspace of ‘oh snap!’ I naturally wanted to put my protagonist in that same headspace?
I don’t know! All I can say is that I just kept writing, letting things that interested me take me where they would, and trusting myself whole-heartedly through the process. I didn’t have time for second guesses! I’d be writing a line of dialogue or item description, realize it was starting to veer towards some sort of character or backstory reveal, and make up something to fill in that void. I remember the thought process in my head as I wrote the very first sentences of the game:
The mantra repeats in your head, pushing you on as you wheel in circles over the forest canopy, riding thermals to heights where none…
‘OK, wait, I can’t finish that phrase with ‘none can see you’ because then I can’t see them back. Hmm, maybe falcons are the only species in this world that can see that far? OK…’
..where none but other Falcon Clan members could see you.
‘OK, that’s apparently how we’re dealing with species: the natives call them ‘clans’. Well, fair enough, but surely the Queen would have some Falcon clan people working for her? Oh, what if…’
‘could see you. And there’s no more Falcon Clan in the Royal Aerie–you and the rest of your clan were all banished years ago.’
'Intrigue! I wonder why they were banished? Add that to the list of ‘mysteries I could fill in later…’
As I wrote the rest of the game, more details of that event emerged, though since it never was directly relevant to the story, the full story didn’t come up. And reader, as I am writing these words, the final pieces of that story are falling into place in my mind. Now that it’s relevant. Now that I’m writing about it.
Victor noticed that I had given myself three different timeframes to play with for my backstory:
I really wish I had done this on purpose, because it sounds brilliant, but I guess this is the sort of unexpected alchemy that happens in the throes of just letting your brain do things. And now it’s definitely going into my bag of tricks to pull out the next time I have a backstory to fill. (Though I’ll have to be careful to not be too formulaic about it? I think? Maybe I can just pour the idea into my subconscious and let it work things out. Perfect plan, guaranteed, no notes.)
The only other thing I really wanted to talk about (though I’m happy to talk about anything! Ask me questions! I will babble!) is the puzzle design. Again, there are some specific questions I want to pull together for a different post to pick people’s brains, so I’ll save the bulk of that discussion for there. But in general, I 100% felt the same thing everyone else felt: while it was cool to have multiple puzzle solutions, the fact that you never had to use ‘down’ or ‘haste’ felt wrong. I really wanted to do something with ‘down’ and the steeply-pitched roofs of the Royal Quarters, but it just didn’t work out with what the story beats needed to be. You can still use ‘down’! But it’s… pretty obscure. And I think a lot of people didn’t quite twig to why ‘haste’ was working for them; I need to be clearer about that in the response messages. (And Victor thought I was telling him ‘haste’ wouldn’t work at all! Definitely have to fix whatever message that was.)
But I finally have better, less-obscure puzzle solutions that use ‘down’. And the inklings of an idea to make ‘you don’t have to use [thing]’ more palatable.
Because the game and the story are still living in my head, and I can’t let them go quite yet. I told @otistdog I wasn’t going to add back discarded ideas. This made Victor sad!
I have to say that writing fanfic for my game has got to be one of the highest compliments that could be paid to it, and I’m super honored. On the whole, though, I think I agree with JJ:
But on the other hand, there can be a fine line between a game leaving you wanting more and a game that feels incomplete. I don’t have any sort of objective way to determine the difference, so instead, I’m just going to rely on the very subjective ‘what did my instincts say at the time before I had time to overthink things’? So I want the ideas that are there to be complete. If anything survived the crucible process and got in there despite being half-finished (Horatio’s scene post-escape is a huge one here for me), that’s the signal to me that my sleep-deprived brain thought they were really important. And I want to do right by dear Constance, Horatio, Ash, and Aubrey.
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