Scalpel in hand, you approach the quivering form…
I’m a recent college graduate. I spent this freshly postbac summer employed full-time, opening my laptop in the break room every so often and scrambling to link passages together in a massive file that lags horribly. Trudging around the vast, pallid expanse of the Twine document, looking for anomalies and wondering whether I’d make it to my objective… yes, you get the point. The author was trapped in a circumstance of their own making. I’m incredibly glad the finish line is behind me, but I remain compelled by the world of the wrack now that it’s no longer bearing down on me. I may well return to it in a story at some point; so much remains only gestured at ingame.
Speaking of: things I didn’t get to implement, meaning features I’d like to add to the post-comp release. No promises.
1: a save system. It bugs me that I wasn’t able to include this, but I’d have to hack it together in Twine’s least programming-heavy format. Theoretically doable, maybe unlikely, and a potential source of new gamebreaking errors. eek!
2: the “engine parasite”. A bit of content that’s halfway written already. (Shoutout to anyone who, like @alyshkalia, opened the game file to poke around and uncover secrets!) I didn’t have time to implement it, but I’m still fond of the idea, & it might be fun to add a bit more variety (and oddity) to the late-game trek. Feed blood to your car…?
[3: a few glances over the quick fixes I had to make, a few more checks for any remaining bugs, and maybe some minor edits &/or implementation of variant text where the prose gets repetitive.]
I think I’ll set the beginning of November as a hard date for publishing to Itch, since I don’t want to lag too far behind the ending of the comp. If I haven’t managed to implement either feature by then, I’m satisfied with what I’ve put out already. And it seems that many other people are too!
Scoring as highly as I did means so much to me. This is a longtime dream fulfilled. Even more than the awards, I value every reader’s attention. Special gratitude is owed to the many kind, as well as duly critical, reviews I received both here and elsewhere. If you wrote anything about Saltwrack, thank you so much. I read what you had to say; I appreciated it; I maybe yelled and whooped and sent it to my friends and family.
I’m floored by the grace I was given for the many gamebreaking bugs I had to scramble to fix. While I enjoy ludonarrative design for the way that mechanics and prose complement one another, at times it felt like the relentless puzzle of programming was working against me. I think it’s safe to say some of the low scores Saltwrack received were probably due to the unfortunate reviewers encountering a missing hyperlink or an error. (Or maybe they just didn’t care for the idea of following autistic androgynous psychics through a post-anthropocene wasteland. Or they had a bone to pick with cannibalism. I’d hate to assume.)
Even closer to the core is the thrill of exposing other people to my internal landscape. Seeing an audience discuss the scenes that have inhabited me for so long is completely surreal. Both oracles are stock characters of mine; other iterations of them appear in short stories and scrapped game ideas, and will likely continue to do so. The spire has been infesting my sketchbook pages since high school, as have salt-signs and inscrutable travelers. I feel everted, all-powerful, and fulfilled.
A list of inspirations and recommendations for those who enjoyed this sick brain-syrup: The Left Hand Of Darkness. The Dispossessed. The Southern Reach series. AMC’s The Terror. At The Mountains Of Madness. Roadside Picnic. The real-life biota and phenomena of tundras, ice sheets, and polar oceans.
Thanks, everyone, for playing.
