So, I may have recently placed highly in a major competition, and I’m sure everyone is dying to know how I did it (right???) but because I’ve been sick for the whole month of November, this is not actually the postmortem people are waiting for.
No, this is something I found when poking around in my writing folder. I noticed a document named “ectocomp 2022” and went “Huh, what’s this? Was I lying when I said I never outline my speed IF games?” But no, it was a complete postmortem for Something Blue, which placed third in the Petite Mort division that year.
I’ve mentioned recently that it seems like I was having an interesting time in the autumn of 2022, and to the list of things I don’t remember about that time (right now consisting of “playing the first Anastasia the Power Pony game” and “what happened to my IFComp reviews”) we can add “writing this postmortem” and “why I didn’t post this postmortem”. But it seems like a waste of past me’s efforts to just sit on it forever.
(I actually discovered this a couple weeks ago and was sitting on it temporarily in the hopes of posting it right before the Lady Thalia one so as to troll people a little less. But now it looks like that one’s not going to be done until like mid-December, and the postmortems for this year’s Ectocomp are about to start going up, so whatever, I’m just going to get on with it.)
Without further ado, here’s that postmortem:
Something Blue is a bit of a spiritual successor to my 2014 Ectocomp entry Wedding Day, both in that it’s an experiment in how much tension and/or pathos I can wring out of a story where pretty much everyone knows what the “twist” is going to be, and in that apparently when I sit down and ask myself “okay, what’s the scariest thing I can think of?” the answer is “traditional heterosexual marriage.” (Kidding! … Mostly.)
“Bluebeard” is a fairytale that I find particularly interesting, because it tends to be slotted into the Pandora/Eve/Psyche/etc. mold of “woman ruins everything due to Insatiable Feminine Curiosity,” but that’s only one possible reading. At least some versions, including Perrault’s well-known telling (which is the one I was primarily working off of), have been argued instead to be a criticism of arranged marriage—like, do you really want to sell your daughter off to the highest bidder even if he has six (6) wives who died under mysterious circumstances and a general aura of creepiness? And I’ve always questioned the idea that things would have been better if the heroine hadn’t opened the door. Would Bluebeard really have just let her live? He doesn’t exactly have the best track record with that. Sure, it brings the situation to a head (er, no pun intended) earlier than might have occurred otherwise, but in the end (at least in Perrault’s version) the heroine is able to stall Bluebeard until her brothers show up to rescue her. They kill Bluebeard in her defense, whereupon she inherits his estate and uses the money to allow both herself and her sister to marry for love. Which is a pretty ideal outcome for her, actually! And would not have happened if she hadn’t found out what he was up to. It is, in fact, a nicer ending than the PC of Something Blue gets, even in her best-case scenario, but in the end the game is horror, not a fairytale, and I feel like horror shouldn’t wrap things up too neatly.
The other major influence on the story is of course gothic fiction, which is also very unoriginal of me. The shoutout to Anne Radcliffe, one of the genre’s foundational authors, is probably way too on-the-nose, but when making a game in four hours, I didn’t have time to curb my more self-indulgent impulses. The genre gets flak for being melodramatic and a bit repetitive, which is not untrue, but sometimes I just want to roll around in a story about an unhappy woman stuck in a creepy house, okay?
For some more modern gothic, I was in the middle of reading The Cherry Robbers when I made this and some influence from that almost certainly found its way in. (If you, too, find that heterosexual marriage with traditional gender roles is the spookiest thing you can think of, I definitely recommend The Cherry Robbers.) Also, in doing a gothic Bluebeard retelling with a focus on gender roles and violence against women, I can’t not acknowledge Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, although it’s been many years since I read it and I wasn’t really drawing on it deliberately.
Speaking of things I wasn’t drawing on deliberately, the game’s format/central mechanic was chosen so that I could cram the maximum amount of interactivity (or the illusion thereof) into the minimum amount of Twine markup. I was not intentionally ripping off Emily Short’s First Draft of the Revolution, but I realized partway through making the game that it had probably been a subconscious influence. By then it was too late to change course and do something that would not lead people to compare me against Emily Short, so, oops.
And when I say the minimum amount of Twine markup, I really mean it–this game has six variables, one nested “replace” macro copy-pasted in two places, a set of “cycle” macros (also copy-pasted from letter to letter), one widget to convert the cycle macro options into points towards the various endings, and a single “if” statement checking those points to determine what ending to send you to. This allowed me to spend most of the four hours on writing prose, which I can do a lot faster (and more cleanly on the first try) than I can write Twine markup.