N: Hello hello and welcome to our post-cast.
A: For those who weren’t in the author’s forum: Edmund was posting our discussions on various games in the format of informal conversations. We decided it might be the best to keep the same tone for the postmortem.
N: Yeah, we were discussing, then we were molding the conversations into a nice, transcript-like form.
A: Because we both believe collaboration is a form of conversation between the authors.
N: Oh, yeah, absolutely. So, Ala[1], how do you feel about a thirteenth place?
A: I don’t- I don’t know? (laugh) It’s so overwhelming! This is my first competition!
N: She never entered a comp before, y’all. Not even an itch ranked jam.
A: Which is why all of this feels so weird! I’m grateful, obviously, I’m very grateful, I’m very moved by all of the support and love our work received, but it still doesn’t feel real.
N: We were both watching the IFComp ceremony and she was too stunned to speak.
A: And you were trembling like an aspen, I think neither of us came out of this unaffected.
N: True. So, we’re going into the postmortem part now?
A: I think it’s time, yes.
Part 1: Our background
N: So, what you need to know first and foremost is that we both come from the forgotten Polish countryside. The type that buses don’t reach and the municipality forgets about until it’s time for elections.
A: I had to move here from a different part of the forgotten Polish countryside. We met… oh my, that was more than a decade ago, no?
N: More than that, mhm. High school was a decade ago and we met in middle school.
A: That’s a lot of time. We both started writing back then and we frequently shared with each other, we- we created things together, just never in collaboration.
N: Poetry, we both tried our best to be poets back then. You’re just never good at it when you’re, like, 14. (laugh)
A: I’m older than you and I still wasn’t good at it! (laugh)
N: But yeah, the point is that our, uh, our art used to be very close together for a while, this will be relevant later on. And then I left our forgotten Polish countryside to go to high school in Warsaw and I-
A: Our ways parted.
N: I was a stupid teen who got manipulated by people on the internet into believing some really terrible things and that led me to ruining the relationship we had.
A: And nearly a decade later, you reached out and apologized for all of this, and we became friends again.
N: Thank gods.
A: I stopped writing for a very long while after our friendship breakup… then you reached out and started telling me all about the itch jams and the interactive fiction community and I thought: oh! That sounds quite lovely! Maybe I should come back to writing…
N: Yeah, I told you that you should.
A: I’ve been… how do you say it… hovering over Edmund’s shoulder when he was writing his stories for comps a lot of the time. Just making sure this could be something I might enjoy.
N: I think this is the right time to go to the game background segment?
A: I think it is!
Part 2: Game background
N: I’ve been toying with the idea of entering IFComp 2026 for a while but it always felt so intimidating. This is such a big competition, such an old competition, I just never felt like I’m ready for it.
A: I suggested we make something for IFComp together as a way to lessen the pressure put on you as a sole author. I never entered a competition before and my name truly has no reputation tied to it, so if we ended up doing terribly, you could always blame it all on me. (laugh)
N: Gods, no, I wouldn’t do this to you! (laugh) I wanted to submit under a pseudonym at first, if I were to do this alone, I was so deathly scared of it all for no reason.
A: We briefly considered also submitting under a shared pseudonym. I didn’t want to do it, so we didn’t.
N: Yeah, it was for the best that we did it under our names- well, our pen names, I guess. But yeah, I was deathly terrified of submitting to IFComp, it felt much more monumental than anything else.
A: I said “Edmund, I can do it with you. It’ll feel less daunting if we do it together.”
N: And it did. Alicja really mastered the art of calming me down.
A: But I was the one to send the intent because you were too scared to do so.
N: (laugh) Yeah, it was all written and I was like “oh gods, I can’t do this”. So you did it instead. Quite possible I’d just chicken out if it was left entirely to me. Thanks.
A: You thanked me enough at this point. Let’s move on: the game itself.
N: Oh, yeah. So, this was meant to be a whole different thing at the beginning. We knew we wanted the protagonists to be a plural system[2], that we knew from the start.
A: We have so many common friends who are plural and they’re all wonderful. Most of the media representation plural people have is… it leaves a lot to be desired. Explicit representation tends to be very sensationalized, very dramatic, very sanist-
N: Literally “what if there was a killer guy in your head and they took over and killed everyone and you didn’t even know” type of thing.
A: This, exactly. And better representation tends to be accidental or supernatural. We thought it might be good to write something where the representation is both explicit and as close to an actual plural experience as possible.
N: Yeah, uh, sorry to every person who wonder what is this a metaphor for. There is no metaphor. It’s just plurality. This is a thing that people are, in real life, right now.
A: Edmund’s initial plan was far more complicated. It was a mystery game where the reader would switch between three headmates[3] with no shared memory, so every scene would require at least three variants.
N: Yeah, the idea was that everyone had a different approach to what happened. There was one headmate who just came back from dormancy[4] and discovered that a mutual friend died some time ago, so they wanted to know what happened to them. Another headmate who never knew said friend was doing their best to stop them from trying to find that out. The third one, the host, knew the friend died, but they never knew what exactly happened and tried to move on. You would switch between them as they kind of… they’re all trying to do their own thing, they deal with the fallout of what the other person did before them, and the reader’s task is to piece things together from the fragments they’re given.
A: It was a very nice idea! And a completely unsustainable one. The amount of planning and writing required for this was far more than we were prepared for.
N: So it got scrapped. We were without any ideas until we had a whole talk one night…
A: We were processing some things together, mostly related to our time before we parted our ways, and- (laugh) This is a little silly, this is so silly.
N: We figured out we had a crush the same girl at the same time. That’s what caused us both to start writing.
A: To impress her. That was the whole point.
N: I didn’t know you liked her like that!
A: I never told you because I knew you liked her like that! Everyone knew! And she became your girlfriend so-
N: Yeah, that was- that was one hell of a talk to have. I thought, gods, this is so awkward. Like, we had this weird triangle going on where we three knew each other and all and-
A: It was this awkwardness of it that made us stop and think.
N: We thought: there’s a way to make this more awkward.
A: There we had it! Triangle for Two!
Part 3: What we wanted to achieve
A: As we said, our main goal was to create some plural representation which will be a central, inalienable point of the plot, and which won’t be sensationalized or pathologized. Just people trying to play with the cards they were dealt in life.
N: This is why I never wrote the actual coming out scene. They always come with the big drama, like, shocking reveal, heightened emotions, all of that. Starting with Anna being outside and calming down felt better because- see, we thought a lot about how to deal with Anna dealing with everything.
A: We envisioned her as a very… eccentric individual. She’s a quiet religious girl from a so-called good home and it’s a very dangerous mix of things. First versions of Anna were meant to be much colder, much less tolerant.
N: I think everyone was much colder. The tone was very bleak, it was miserable to write, we had to redo it several times.
A: That went against what we wanted to do. We wanted a story where people want to understand each other and themselves. Hostility or coldness would make absolutely no sense.
N: Another thing we wanted to do was- (laugh) Well, we put some Polish representation in there, haven’t we?
A: (laugh) We have! It’s a very specific, uhm, flavor of Poland, it’s the places we lived in, places we live in right now. Forgotten villages and small towns. This is what is called Polska powiatowa in Polish, beautiful places, truly beautiful places, with a horrific lack of perspectives for the future, transport exclusion, lack of services…
N: It’s like, it’s places in stasis, places in a state of decay. Places we love, places we hate, places which raised us.
A: All of the locations described in the game are based on a place we’ve seen. The only exception is the interior of Anna’s house, which was entirely made up.
N: What else… oh right. The third goal we didn’t reach.
A: Three: writing an actual love triangle.
N: Yeah, we were meant to do that. There were some starting points in there, it just never came to be. We’ll get into it more in the “What went wrong” section, but that was the only point we haven’t met, I think.
Part 4: What we did
N: Dividing work was very easy because we know what our strengths are. I mostly handled the dialogue, a lot of the planning itself, branching, all that fun stuff. Alicja was responsible in a vast majority for the whole atmosphere- the descriptions were her job, all of this wonderful prose people praised, that was her.
A: That was- that was me, yes. Edmund was responsible for the characterization of Jan and Anna, I handled everything related to Maria.
N: We worked in the same document. We had conversations about where things should go, what works best, what should be redone, and we made changes accordingly. Normal stuff.
A: It all went very smoothly, we agreed on almost everything.
N: We had to figure out the spelling we’re going with. (laugh) We’re not native English speakers, we were taught English at school.
A: I retained what we were taught, which is a more British way to spell things. Edmund Americanized in the time when our ways parted. We quickly realized it might be a problem.
N: Our first instinct was to keep things related to Maria in more British spelling to keep Alicja’s way of writing and things related to Jan in more American spelling but we ran into several problems.
A: First of all, it would mean Maria speaks differently than Jan, or it would probably be perceived as a difference in how their voices sound. You would associate different accents with them, and since the British accent-
N: Ah, yes, the singular British accent.
A: You know what I mean. The Singular British accent would possibly be read, thanks to its cultural reception, as Maria being somewhat more… sophisticated? Cultured? Than Jan, and it simply wasn’t the truth.
N: They’re all Polish, they’re all from a very specific place. Bronowice-Kolonia is a fake place but it is in Mazovian Voivodeship, we imagined it’d be somewhere in the “border” municipalities with the Kuyavian-Pomeranian Voivodeship, where the dialects and various linguistic quirks kind of mix due to proximity. Jan and Anna definitely speak the standard dialect of Polish, I think we established Maria can sometimes dip into some of the more Kuyavian-Pomeranian ways of speaking.
A: So, making Maria’s segments more “British” wouldn’t culturally translate.
N: But this is all nothing when you remember that there’s still the narration to take care of. It’d be too weird to keep switching between spellings so we had to choose.
A: We landed on more British spelling because I was handling the descriptions. It was easier.
N: What else… I was responsible for the text indications of who’s speaking and I’m a text orientation freak, so you have all of this left-right stuff. I also was the one responsible for all interactivity, so the cycling links during that one scene, that was me.
A: We tried our best to showcase our best.
N: Given the circumstances, we did incredibly well.
Part 5: What went wrong
N: Now, many reviewers said the game ended abruptly. This is because it was unfinished.
A: Throughout a lot of the crucial writing time, Edmund was incredibly depressed.
N: I get seasonal depression in the summer.
A: And in winter, and in the autumn, and in the spring.
N: I mean, yeah, fine, I’m depressed all the time, but it always reaches its peak in the summer.
A: We might be collaborators but we’re friends first and foremost. He was trying very hard to write through things, I told him: please, just rest. You don’t have energy for this. You can do this when you’re not falling asleep at the keyboard.
N: And you didn’t want to touch the project without me.
A: No. I had some things written down for future scenery, other than that, nothing.
N: So, we ended up with a game which wasn’t done at all, with the deadline fast approaching.
A: I said that it’s fine if we don’t end up submitting. We could always try next year, with a full version.
N: And I didn’t want to listen to you. (laugh)
A: It was your choice to keep going as far as you could. I told you, I wouldn’t be mad at you if you prioritized yourself.
N: I was mad at myself, like, I would be throwing out all of this hard work, that’s what it felt like. So the last days, I barely remember the last days, I was so focused on all of this.
A: You pulled an allnighter to work on it before the deadline. I was asleep.
N: It wasn’t wise at all. I felt like shit for three days after.
A: You also almost didn’t submit.
N: Yeah, I- I had some doubts because I wrote a random ending, I barely remembered it, but I wrote an ending, uploaded the game, and I sat there, and watched the Submit button.
A: That was when Ariana[5] started talking with you?
N: Yep, she asked what I was doing, I told her about my doubts, she called me a coward (laugh) Like, she said I’m going to regret it if I don’t submit it more than I’d regret it if I submitted it. “Learning opportunity”, she called it. “If it sucks, you’ll learn from it and move on. You gain nothing from not submitting.”
A: You told me she yelled at you to submit.
N: She did!
A: And we ended up not regretting…
N: She won’t let us forget it. At all.
(laugh break)
N: But yeah, uh, many things went very wrong. There are many scenes we haven’t written, many places the story is yet to visit, it’s not the complete Triangle for Two experience.
A: We hope to bring the full version to you for Spring Thing!
N: Yep! The original full version.
A: With an actual love triangle.
N: Oh, you can’t wait to write that scene where Anna starts to-
A: Shh! (laugh) True, I can’t wait to do this. Ectocomp first, though.
N: Yes, Ectocomp first.
So, anyway, now in the normal way: we thank you for enjoying Triangle for Two enough to put it in the top 20. We’re planning to collab again for the next year; currently brainstorming that. Hope we can deliver the version we really wanted to deliver for Spring Thing, so, see you there. Signing out, Ed (Naarel) and Alicja (A. Clearwater).
Ala is a Polish diminutive form of Alicja. I was asked to include this because this might not be as common knowledge as we thought. ↩︎
Plurality being a state in which a body contains more than one person/entity. A form of plurality you probably are aware of is Dissociative Identity Disorder. ↩︎
One of the terms used for specific individuals in a system. ↩︎
Basically headmate coma, in a way. ↩︎
Our mutual friend. ↩︎