Notes scribbled down and thrown away: On "Under the Cognomen of Edgar Allan Poe"

(Rather than writing a long expository post on the development of Cognomen, I thought I would write it bullet-point style, to keep on-point. This is still too long. Warning, lots of spoilers ahead. Cheers.)

Origins

  • It’s probably not a surprise to say that this title—which shifts between the present time and 1849—started as two efforts later bonded together.
  • Overall, there are three major perspective shifts throughout the text:
    • Second-person present tense for the present-day story
    • First-person present tense for the 1849 story
    • First-person past tense for the 1582 story

Present day: Bargain

  • The present-day story (working title: Bargain) borrows a device from film noir, which is to start at the end and tell the story in flashback.
  • Since the player should have agency in the flashbacks, I researched how magicians perform “forces” in their tricks. I wanted to know if I could give the player the illusion of free choice at the beginning.
  • The structure made writing the conversation responses for Inspector Dennings especially challenging, since (a) the player character already knows what has happened, (b) Dennings has a pretty good idea of what has already happened, (c) the player should not already know what they’re about to experience, and (d) the player should have some agency toward the outcome—that is, the scene the game opens in.
  • The original plan was for the player to visit numerous other locations outside the hospital. An entire airport scene was coded and dropped.
  • The player was to be carrying a smartphone with a platoon of usable apps. I was especially proud of the camera app, which allowed you to photograph just about any in-game object (although only a couple would be of use puzzle-wise).
  • Dennings’ toothpick is a reference to my father, a South Dakota farm kid with a habit of chewing on them. Always has two or three in his shirt pocket.
  • Early versions of the darkened skyscraper scene required you to cooperate with your double on several tasks, all while carrying on a conversation with him. It simply became too long, and some testers found it confusing.
  • The three book titles—Dead on Arrival, Blanking Out, and Out of Whack—come from D.O.A., a 1988 movie about publish-or-perish.

Past: Edgar Allan Poe is Dead

  • After reading about the circumstances around Poe’s death, I thought Baltimore, 1849 would make for a good IF.
    • Never been to Baltimore.
  • Working title: Edgar Allan Poe is Dead. Thought that was a touch too grim, even for Poe.
  • One fun bit was to incorporate references to Poe’s works. The raven, the bottle of Amontillado, ciphers, etc. were fairly obvious. Others are in there too.
  • One that got dropped was a reference to “The Man of the Crowd” when following your doppelganger through the previously-mentioned airport scene.
  • Theophilus is named after Theophilus of Adana, an early Christian bishop who supposedly made a pact with the devil. Notably, he beats the devil.
  • One reviewer asked where the humor was in the game. It’s there, but it’s not the goofy-pun or running-gag humor of Infocom et al. For example, I find the election fraud bit pretty funny. Being asked to sign someone else’s novel—after a major disaster—is my kind of humor.

Beta testers

  • Victor Gijsbers found a number of inconsistencies, but the largest was pointing out that there’s no wall—indeed, no dry land at all—between Germany and Alsace France. The open-a-gate scene became a cross-a-bridge-over-the-Rhine scene.
    • Never been to that part of Europe.
  • Rovarsson beta tested the early Bargain game, which I had hoped to enter in a Spring Thing. He was a good sport to go through those portions of the game again without complaint.
  • I learned that Brett Witty’s wife is a doctor, and my doctor’s dialogue was not authentic. Every writer needs this kind of early reviewer.
    • Never been a medical practitioner.
  • Amanda Walker reminded me that, aside from all the mysteriousness surrounding Poe’s death, he was a pretty dour writer. It’s true. Maybe it rubbed off one me, and there wasn’t enough humor in Cognomen after all.
  • Justin Kim found a showstopper OMG WTF bug approximately 36 hours before the IF Comp submission deadline.
  • Beta testers for the win!

The cipher

  • The cipher was not the hardest bit to code, but came with its own challenges.
  • I didn’t want the enciphered messages to be gobbledygook that the decoder disk “magically” deciphered. I also didn’t want the player to copy-and-paste the codes into an online tool and have them solved instantly.
  • My final solution: A Vignère cipher with an unusual key. Online decoders generally failed to crack it.
  • That said, it’s quite insecure today. I know this.
  • This sub-thread of folks trying to crack the ciphers warmed my heart. I never foresaw anyone would attempt this. What was I thinking?
  • There’s no evidence Poe had knowledge of any cipher other than the substitution (Caesar) variety.

The NPCs

  • By far the most involved part of the design.
  • Very rewarding to come up with character-specific speech patterns and details. Even if the character was meant to be unpleasant, I always strove to give each a human touch.
    • Except Belyle.
  • I wanted each to be able to develop and grow as they interacted with the character, but that proved to be too much for this solo writer to bite off. I landed on the poet in the pub as the one character who could grow, depending on the player’s choices.
  • Dr. Moran is a real person, and was attending to Poe when he died. Among Poe-philes today, he’s a controversial figure.

Famous versus Respected

  • When I began writing books, people told me I’d “failed” because I wasn’t famous, like Stephen King or J. K. Rowling. This was their definition of success.
  • Going through the MFA program, my peers looked down their noses at popular and bestselling fiction. From the way they talked about their own work, they expected it to be studied and argued over later. This was their definition of success.
  • I began to see the thirst for fame vs. respect in literature as more intertwined than expected. It’s like the way you can shift between eyes, keeping one or the other closed, and see what’s before you at different angles.
  • Once I started viewing the creative class through these two lenses—desiring fame versus desiring respect—it changed how I approached my own projects.
  • This realization was like “Rowdy” Roddy Piper putting on the sunglasses in John Carpenter’s They Live and seeing the world as it actually is.
  • If that’s too pop-culture for you: This realization was like Mari’s journey, the young narrator of Yuko Ogawa’s Hotel Iris, where the only person who sees the world truthfully is a man with no tongue, a man who speaks by scribbling down notes and throwing them away.
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Thank you! Really interesting stuff about how you developed it and some of the decisions you made. I loved this game :heart_eyes:

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Thanks for the kind words! I appreciate you playing it.

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I kept expecting this game to play a little more on the observation that Poe is the rare author whose work was both popular during his own lifetime and academically respected centuries later.

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It’s difficult to encompass every detail in a story like this. I felt it more important to reflect on Poe being the rare author who was popular and respected in his lifetime. His persisting legacy is reflected in the fact that his work remains well-known and widely read today.

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