Because I have no original ideas, I took the liberty of recording my own vlog throughout the Comp. Enjoy! Brief notes below…
I did actually consider not coming forward, leaving this as one of the great unsolved mysteries of IF. But I’m too much of a narcissist. Also, detectives FLACRabbit and EJ managed to figure out the author of HEN AP PRAT GETS SMACKED IN THE TWAT was almost certainly me. Incredible work, you two!
If you couldn’t guess, I wanted to win the Golden Banana of Discord. My master plan was that I would make the ultimate Banana bait game by combining the two previous winning entries: Damon L. Wakes’ DICK MCBUTTS GETS KICKED IN THE NUTS and Stan Wixbuster’s LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST. This would provide a distraction while my real Banana contender, Violent Delight, snuck in and won it. (Why did I need a distraction? Oh, ‘cos it’s funny??) I am writing this without yet knowing whether my plan worked, but certainly a couple of people say I should get the Banana for Violent Delight. So we’ll see. Oh well. This shan’t be the last you’ll hear of Larissa Janus.
Anyway, it was only after the wave of censorship efforts from both payment processors and the UK government that I was motivated with urgency to submit to IFComp. I ended up submitting my intents right before the cutoff, and put together both games in the threeish weeks between then and the submission deadline. Believe it or not, my August was less miserable than last year’s. Both games are certainly scrappy but I think that suited them perfectly. They’re very much moments in time, responding to the conditions and circumstances of this year’s Comp. A full postmortem of my artistic thinking around both my entries is forthcoming, but I figured I should answer the main questions first.
I’d like to thank my partner-in-crime Konrad Utas (aka Naarel), the one person I chose to confide in throughout this whole thing. Yes, we have been giggling behind your backs as the rest of you made increasingly bizarre claims about my identity. A couple of people even fell hook line and sinker for my attempt to frame Autumn Chen by using her engine DendryNexus! Oh, I was cackling like (?) an evil witch when I came up with that one.
But of course the greatest thanks to Hugh Janus himself: Damon L. Wakes! For maximum secrecy, I did not get his permission to do this (hence the “copyright infringement” gag). Uh… I hope he can find it in his heart to forgive me. While it wasn’t formally a collaboration, the emails from “Hubert Janus” in the game were actually written by him! Although I’m not sure if he knew they were going to end up there… Hopefully that was a funny surprise.
In his IFComp 2023 vlog, Damon notes at the end that “people are enthusiastic about the Dick McButts literary universe or whatever. I kind of dread where this may go. But it’s done and cannot be undone.” I took this as tacit endorsement for doing this sort of thing. But now it is my own turn to fear for the future in the wake of what we have unleashed. Perhaps the world described by Old Man Dick in my game is not too far from reality.
[INCLUDE IF PLACED HIGHER THAN EXPECTED: Much as Damon described having Producersed his way to unexpected acclaim, I seem to have American Fictionned myself into having a joke entry taking seriously
Thank you to everyone who enjoyed the adventures of Hen ap Prat and unnamed protagonist of Violent Delight, and I dread to think what will happen to the IFComp next year!
P.S. Like with DICK MCBUTTS, HEN AP PRAT randomly assigns each player either a ‘good version’ or a linear ‘bad version’ of the story. For those wondering how I decided on the chance percentage, I recommend drawing your own conclusions from this page. 