I inconveniently went away on a working-euro-vacation the day IFComp closed, so I’ve been slow to write this post-mortem. Although I hope this means that having the thoughts swirl around in my head over all that time ensures I say everything I wanted to say.
This might be a bit long, which doesn’t seem unusual for a post-mortem, but I’ll kick it off with a real excerpt from my planning notes, which is probably a good thesis/TLDR for the whole thing:
Is flinging one’s heart into every recess of the internet a good way to process trauma? Idk but here goes nothing
Origin Story
I’m going to write this as plainly as I can while trying to not dive into too many extraneous details, for a few reasons. One, because it is pretty long in the first place. Two, because people already read a very oblique 1-2 hour game digging into almost nothing but extraneous details about it. And finally three, because I feel like I’ve personally earned the ability to write about it in sound mind and sober words, and I’d like to exercise that newfound skill.
Most of the same content warnings of Slated For Demolition hold for this origin story, including binge drinking, sexual assault, and suicidal ideation. For that reason, I’ll break this into a few parts, with the middle part marked as the sensitive portion.
origin story - part 1
In 2012, in between semesters at an out-of-state college, I took a summer job back in my hometown at a kid’s day camp. I ended up in a love triangle with two co-workers, which ended up in a tangled mess, as love triangles usually do. I didn’t want to give either of them personifications in my story, and giving them fake names here also makes me uncomfortable, but it is even more confusing if I don’t (not giving form to them in the game also probably melded them into a single character for most readers, which, hey, kind of metaphorically makes sense to me). Henceforth one will be “that person” and one will be “this person.” Hopefully that is enough for functional clarity. Apologies if not.
This person and that person and I were all co-workers and friends. I found that person to be very conventionally attractive. That person seemed into me, which was a thrilling prospect for someone with low self esteem. However, that person had commitment issues, and so our mutual interest hit a wall at the end of the summer of 2012. This person was someone I very much enjoyed talking to, and we developed a friendship while working together. This person asked me out at the end of the summer. I turned them down on the basis of not feeling attraction. It was at times a weird dynamic, but we all 3 remained on good terms. Then we all went our separate ways for school in the fall.
The summer of 2013 rolled around. Things were not going well for me in school. I was in a depressive spiral, spending most of my free time in bed staring at the wall. I decided, for some reason, to enroll in a summer semester class instead of going back home to work the summer camp job again, where I was wallowing in my misery every day. But before summer classes began, I made a brief visit home. During my visit, that person and I finally initiated a physical relationship, and regular flirtation was back on in full swing. Things were what the kids now call a full fledged “situationship”, and I was full of hope that someone with a well perceived social status (aka was “good looking”) was able to imbue their social value upon me by choosing me.
Meanwhile, this person and I started to become even closer friends. We texted nearly every day that summer. We had a lot in common. I shared a lot of my emotional self with this person, leaning on them for support while I was in a difficult mental place. At some point or another, I thought, maybe I did actually have feelings for this person? I always looked forward to talking to them, this person made me feel good. I was confused.
origin story - part 2 (skip for sensitive content)
Eventually, I could not stand it at school anymore, and found an excuse to come home for another brief visit and throw a giant party at my house to blow off some steam and try to forget how miserable I was. As soon as I got back home, that person did what the kids these days would call “ghosting” and refused to talk to me, despite the prior physical relationship and flirtation. I was confused. It was while I was at the grocery store, getting house party supplies, including a watermelon I intended to funnel vodka into so my underage friends could easily partake in the festivities, that I got a phone call from that person saying they just wanted to be friends. I was confused. This sliver of hope that I was a valuable person to someone that I held onto all summer long was slipping through my fingers. So I reacted in the way that any poorly adjusted 21-year-old might: I drank. I went home and drank a good deal of the vodka I was putting into the watermelon.
Well into my vodka run, I turned to this person for comfort, and asked them to come over and hang out with me. This person agreed and came over. I don’t remember much else after this, because of all the vodka. I do know this person had sex with me that night. In a deeply emotionally and physically vulnerable state, this person that I trusted, came over, had sex with me, and then left.
I was confused.
Then of course, the next day I had to throw a big raucous house party. This person and that person and all of our mutual friends showed up. I was a hungover mess, full of shame and disgust that I had not yet identified. That person had caught wind of my tryst that night before, except, you know, without the assault overtones. That person was congratulatory, and then somehow took this as permission to act romantic with me again, accidentally broke my foot by picking me up and dropping me and falling on top of me, and then attempted to initiate sex with me in my closet. I was confused! After turning that person down, that person decided to have sex with another partygoer in my own bathroom. Yes, I really did find his underwear left on the floor. Yes, I really did put it in the freezer, and handed it back to him a few hours later. Yes, I really do deeply regret not setting it on fire in front of his stupid face instead.
The night was winding down, most people had gone home or fallen asleep somewhere in my house, when I got a phone call from a friend, who reported that some guy I barely knew who was new to the summer camp staff that summer, had been at my party, acted weird, left, and had just posted something vaguely suicidal online. My friend was wondering if someone could go check on him. Thanks to my killer hangover, I had not been drinking at all, leaving me the only person still awake and sober. So I went looking for a stranger. We had the apartment complex address, but we were missing the unit number. I really did walk around at 4am making phone calls to other co-workers and the building manager and waking up drunk people passed out on their patios to try to find him. It was very surreal trying to find a stranger and talk them off a proverbial ledge when I myself was barely hanging by a thread. I was so terrified I would find his body. I thought surely that would be the end of the world for me. I wish I could say that calling him to see if I could hear his phone from behind the door worked. I mean, that was an idea I had, and I tried it. In reality he just eventually picked up the phone and told us which apartment he was in, but that doesn’t make for a very satisfying puzzle ending. I went to his apartment. He was ok. He promised not to do anything rash. I left. I never had another meaningful interaction with him again.
Then–and this is funny because I didn’t remember this until well after writing the entire draft of Slated for Demolition–I did actually go to 7-Eleven as the sun was rising on the way home. I didn’t get a slurpee, I got one of those gross Starbucks frappucinos, but, eh, I’m still gonna call it poetic. I went home, had a sobbing meltdown, and decided I couldn’t do it anymore. I had to leave art school and come live at home again. I needed support. So that is what I did. I kind of not-on-purpose let every friendship I had prior to that moment trail off, including the friendships I had with this person and that person. We didn’t ever really talk again, or have a serious direct confrontation about what happened. I changed schools and majors, set out on a new career path, and my life turned into something completely different.
origin story - part 3
Years went by. I looked back on those 48 hours as a massive formative experience. But I was still confused. I was confused about what I felt about this person and the betrayal that had taken place. I was confused about how defining assault feels completely different when you have to assign that label to yourself. 2017 and #MeToo came and went and I was quiet. It didn’t count, I thought, because I maybe kind of liked him and I invited him over and I was not infrequently having sex while intoxicated in those days. And maybe deep down it technically counts, but my life is not so bad. People experience horrible atrocities every minute on this planet. Relatively speaking, my hardships are not even worth mentioning.
The thing about trauma, though, is that it does not care if there exists a possibility of something worse. It still inflicts damage upon you, whether you acknowledge it or not. My relationship with sex, with alcohol, with men, with myself, was so dysfunctional at that point because that wasn’t even the first time this had happened to me. (That fact also took a very long time to register). But it was the first time it had happened with someone I cared about and trusted, and that left very deep emotional wounds. Even though I’d mentally recite the story every so often to myself, I didn’t speak it out loud to a single person for over a decade. It was too difficult to find the right words, the right time, or the right people who could possibly care or know how to respond.
Along comes 2024. For various reasons, I was in therapy and going through a lot of processing of my sexual history. In particular, I spent a lot of time revisiting primary sources documenting these events for the first time in a very long time, including the diary I kept, the [attempted] humorous self-deprecating blog post about it (side note: humorous self-deprecating blog posts about assault are anything but humorous in retrospect, they are instead painfully cringey), and my entire facebook message history with this person. It was, to be succinct, intense.
In this intensity, I became fixated, almost limerent, over this person. I wanted to know what they thought of it in retrospect. Did they see it as assault, or did they continue to write it off like I had for so long? Did they feel guilt? What kind of person were they now? Did they ever think of me? Did they still care about me at all? I estimated the risk of further emotional damage through direct confrontation as high. So I did what any normal internet user does: I found their social media and lurked. I was worried I’d fat finger a react button and reveal myself, so I did what any normal internet lurker does: I created a fake account. When I was creating the handle, the first word that came to mind was the word “slurpee”, because I’d been behind a car with a license plate with that word not long before. Then I thought, it needs to be some kind of slurpee. I contemplated possibilities for a few minutes, and “spaghetti” is the word that came to me. I liked it. It was weird and visceral. I could see a machine full of red sauce and pasta in my mind. So I became a spaghetti slurpee. That’s all it was, just a random choice in a moment where I didn’t even know I was writing something yet. So for the curious, no, I have no spaghetti related trauma! Of all the seemingly random images of the story, that one actually is totally random.
As a now spaghetti slurpee, I was checking in on this person on a very regular basis. I began to feel like I was haunting them without their knowledge. Ever the performance artist, I thought it would be really freaky if they came to my fake account page and read through a bunch of posts where I actually described haunting them. What a performative act it would be! This was far too insane, of course. The risk of ever being found out and humiliated as a psychotic stalker was too great. So instead I opened up a google doc and started writing excerpts no more than 280 characters long to get it out of my system, role playing as a spaghetti slurpee coming to get “you”. These were the bones of the opening scenes of Slated for Demolition.
Meanwhile, I’d recently finished grad school in the spring of 2024, finally had a bit more free time, and felt the infatuating call of being a writer again, something I hadn’t really done since dropping out of art school. I set a goal of participating in NaNoWriMo, an event I’d done many years in a row in high school and early college until yknow, the whole mental health breakdown thing. (I had no idea, by the way, that I was returning to NaNo for its last gasping, dying breath). I told myself I’d write every day in November, working on a Twine piece, which I’d aspired to do for the past 7 or 8 years. The piece I was working on was a bit ambitious for a first project. When I wanted a little creative break while still meeting my writing goals for the month, I’d go over to my slurpee google document instead and mess around eventually throwing it into the Twine editor. After a little while, I was working on this every day instead of the original project. I decided to lean in and commit to the project. I had written all the way through the cat in the alley and the first spaghetti scene in the 7-Eleven when I finally wrote a rough outline and set the goal of finishing a draft by the new year and submitting to IFComp by September 2025. And that is roughly, how the project was born. Is that more psychotic than my original twitter idea? Who is to say? If this person ever finds it (and/or this post-mortem), well, I probably have a very awkward conversation coming. What a performative act it became!
Inspirations
I believe several of my reviewers compared Slated For Demolition to the works of Porpentine and furkle. While the more tender part of my ego worries that this means I am derivative and boring, I am mostly incredibly flattered. With Those We Love Alive is one of the first Twines I ever played and was a complete revelation to me. I did shamelessly steal the mechanic of making links that progress the story forward different from non-progressing links from With Those We Love Alive, because I think it is an elegant design choice. Run on sentences was also a style choice I consciously copied, because I like the way it evokes an anxious internal dialogue. It is also worth mentioning that I played SPY INTRIGUE by furkle a few months prior and I recall thinking “gosh, how could I ever write something so emotionally cutting?” The death scenes of that work really left a mark on me, so much so that I went back and re-read a few early on in the writing process. I didn’t want to create the same experience necessarily, but the emotional juiciness was something I sought to mimic. The drama of how you dissolve into a different background background and a different consciousness when scenes shift in SPY INTRIGUE is something I wanted my work to evoke as well. I suppose then, for people to relate my work to those, means I was at least somewhat successful in my writing goals.
Other than that, my other primary inspiration was liminal space and backrooms content. Even though I dislike slasher horror, I’ve been fascinated with uncanny horror in the last few years. I seek out games and movies that make me feel not quite right. I don’t know why exactly, it probably has something to do with the pervasiveness of political dread, growing up into a world full of horrible things I cannot meaningfully change, and my own weird form of immersion therapy. But it felt natural that I wanted to further immerse myself in that feeling when writing.
At some point mid or early post rough draft (not exactly sure when), I jotted down a few notes about what I wanted the work to be. Here are those notes:
Limerence and haunting. A museum of memories and artifacts. A memorial to youth and trauma and growth.
I wanted to make something that felt like walking through a liminal space, like walking through some kind of backrooms. I wanted to create the fearful feeling of loneliness and hauntings by memories that you cannot shake. I wanted to revisit memories that haunt me, in hopes that it will help me process and let go. I wanted it to feel like a dream, like you aren’t sure who is talking or who you are in any one moment. Everything is always shifting.
It is too pretentious?
What will make a reader care?
Process and how decisions were made
Writing Slated For Demolition was a very indulgent and pretty under-planned process. I have a lot of self consciousness for being too melodramatic, but once I put my chips in the proverbial pot, I decided not reign it in too much and let this be for myself. After I had written the opening, up to the first dissolution in the 7-Eleven, I had to decide this wasn’t just going to be me being weird and projecting at a person who wasn’t actually listening to me, but finally the time to tell my own story in a way that felt right. Quite a few of the scenes started with me writing some stream of consciousness venting in a google doc to sometimes myself, sometimes to this person, sometimes to strangers, and then later stitching it together. I wanted to speak to many different people at once, so I did.
The cat with the dead bird was originally a one-off concept. In my fixation and embodied haunting (ie internet lurking), I had recalled how once I found my cat playing with a dead bird in my entryway coat closet. I had no idea how long the bird had been inside. It was very dry and devoid of any, erm, fluid-like substances. I remember picking it up and finding it to be very light and fragile. In my recent lurking fixation, I felt like my cat, playing with a dead bird. Not letting it go. Keeping it in a closet, my own weird little toy. I thought maybe we’d come back to the cat and bird somewhere else in the game, but then decided to pick out multiple objects as symbols of emotional weight instead. This is how it became a collection game: a simple mechanic to prompt exploration in an otherwise pretty linear experience.
I guess next came the idea to contextualize it in the house slated for demolition. Which is a completely different house from the one you wander around in the game, though I wouldn’t really expect anyone to know that. Background fact: I am what I call a semi-pro circus artist, and do local professional gigs on an infrequent basis. In 2020, one of the performance companies I work with was connected with some company that pairs artists with under-utilized spaces around the city. We were given access to this old bungalow house slated for demolition in a gentrifying neighborhood. Electricity and water had been cut off, but we could do basically whatever we wanted with the building, since they were going to tear it down anyway. So naturally we staged a circus show in this house, where each performer had a room where they were behind a plastic sheet and meant to perform a 5 minute act for a small group of people. With many more hanging plastic sheets and a complex pulley system, we ferried little covid-cohort groups of people from room to room, where they could watch a show unfold one act at a time. In order to make the flow through the house work, we had to bust through walls and create new passageways. We painted and transformed rooms into other worlds. We staged 2 separate shows in the house over the course of 3 months before it was torn down. In its place now stands very expensive townhouses.
This house came to mind when thinking about my own story because I was taking various scenes and repurposing them for my own creative desires. I purposefully wrote an oblique story to protect myself and also because it seemed like the only way to tell it and convey the actual disorienting feeling of it. In case you couldn’t tell, the three core locations in the middle of the game can happen in any order, and the smaller locations you can discover within them can be found in different orders as well. Setting up a non-linear arrangement of the events felt like re-arranging the rooms of that house, pulling back curtains at pre-determined times to let people walk through and watch something specifically curated for them unfold. In preparation to unburden myself of a story I’d kept more or less a secret for a decade, I wanted to reimagine it with co-creators, allowing people to choose their own order and assign meaning. The core game is framed by the house slated for demolition at the beginning and end because this is yet another performance I’ve put on. We take a step back and realize we’re only looking into a recreation of a world. It’s also a metaphor for how things are torn down, and we develop on top of them. The house is gone, now there is a new dwelling. My story is released into the world, now there is a new experience for me and other people to partake in. Is it better this way? New townhouses are not the same as old bungalows, but they do serve a purpose. I don’t know, but you can’t stop progress and the ever forward march of time.
That being said, I didn’t give a ton of thought to picking the in-game locations and most just came naturally. My own home is where the bulk of things took place, so that was an obvious choice. The apartment scene, which plays out almost exactly like it really happened, I thought definitely needed inclusion due to the puzzle-y and culminating nature of the event. I picked the grocery store I think just for variety, maybe also because of it was the inciting incident of it all, but it was the hardest part to write. I found it laborious to come up with things to say about each aisle, and I also couldn’t decide what should happen there. I didn’t want each run-in with the marinara demon to be the same thing over and over again, because it sounded boring and I didn’t want to write that. The idea to replace words randomly with names of different pasta shapes was chosen because I felt like I could programmatically pull it off without too much coding difficulty. Of course, I still found twine to be a pretty brittle place for this, and my implementation was not my best work as a developer (my actual full time gig). Any code change I wanted to make needed updates in many passages, which was very painful. Next time, I’d like to figure out how to make better possible use of functions. The fact that this scene I felt kind of creatively stuck ended up being a stand out in a couple of reviews is something that surprised and pleased me. I’m just happy no one reported any major bugs.
On the note of technical learnings: another important takeaway I got from writing this was that the passage history functionality in Twine is cursed and should probably generally be avoided (or at the very least not heavily relied upon), lest you want to risk trapping readers in link cycles. (at least in Harlowe, my story format of choice).
So anyways, after a rough outline, I wrote the bulk of it in 2 months. Then I took a couple of hours each weekend to refine and tweak for the next 8 months. This mimics how I create choreography and I think it worked well for me. It takes time for things to stew and reach the right flavor in my brain. Some undercurrent themes, like that of urban development and gentrification, took months for me to notice at all, and when I did, I was able to go back and amplify them to make them less of a coincidence and more of a motif. Plus, the long writing process meant I got to go to the coffee shop every week and feel very ~ * writerly * ~, with my laptop and deep thoughts, which is very fun and satisfying.
On “mature” content
I did not set out to make a super graphic game. As previously mentioned, I typically dislike horror movies and games with blood and gore. It just sort of…happened? I was trying to freak a reader out, and then later describe those dissociative feelings I had going through the experience, like your internal self was completely crumbling. The spaghetti was already there, and it was close enough to blood that the two clicked in my mind. I was delighted that people found the dissolution with spaghetti and marinara to be as powerful as they did, because I’ve never written anything like that before. I really felt like I was the teenage babysitter trying to get some kids to go “eewwwwwwwwwww” with a creepy story. In other words, I felt like I was being over the top and corny, but it sounds like it worked better than I intended.
Being geoblocked in the UK took me by a huge surprise, however. I only vaguely follow IF and had heard a little about all the itch debacle, but it hadn’t occurred to me that this would effect this event. It was a wake up call. As a result, I formed a lot of political anger over the OSA, but that rant is maybe best for another time and place than this post-mortem. I will say: being blocked because of fantasy blood and guts is one thing, but I think the hard part of that was being told that something that is representative of my very real, lived experience is not appropriate. It felt like I was being silenced. I don’t blame organizers at all for the decision, but I wish I had been more emotionally prepared for that reality. It was already hard and scary to share this work at all. This did not help. After sitting with it for a bit of time, I can accept it, but like I said, I don’t like it.
The end
I didn’t have an ending planned when I wrote my outline. I was originally hand-wavy about it and procrastinated thinking about it further. Since writing the work was pretty evidently my own process of processing, I hoped it would become more clear later on.
Originally, the only collectible you could redefine was the rubber duck. A lot of parts of the game are direct references to things that came up in my primary resource research, details I had forgotten about the experience, as well as quotes from diaries and message history. I have this one message history log in particular where I talked with this person hours after the events transpired, and we discussed a rubber duck that we’d been messing with when he had come over. I don’t remember the duck really at all, other than that yes, that is a thing I owned at the time. It felt so random and small, yet was a physical pinpoint to something very intense that happened. It felt important to me to include it, but it was also so random. What are people going to make out of a rubber duck, I thought. It won’t mean anything to them. Then I thought, maybe they can just replace it with whatever they want? Imparting themselves into the story a little bit? It wasn’t until a few weeks later of stewing I decided maybe we should do that with all of them. A reader is playing as me, they’re walking in my footsteps, this is a game about healing, but they can’t make me heal. They can’t make me find closure. But maybe they can blend the two of us together and let them take something away of their own, like some kind of transference. That was the general idea. Insert yourself, meditate on it, the end.
The ending is probably where I feel the weakest confidence about the work. I maybe could do more to set people up to place themselves into the work, interlacing suggestions throughout so that it doesn’t feel too abrupt at the end. I’m not sure it would get people all the way there, but maybe it would help. But even still…I just…didn’t know where to take it. Because I don’t know where to take it?? That’s the thing about closure. As Victor found and so beautifully wrote in his review, it is difficult to even know what it is or if it exists at all. Even though we get to tear down buildings, we don’t get to do the same with our own stories. We can repurpose them or hope they eventually fade. This game will eventually (maybe already has) fade from relevance. So the ending…doesn’t really exist, except in the tail of its existence, which is outside the work itself. In my opinion, especially as a performer, a work of art isn’t complete until you share it. Just like if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, it doesn’t make a noise, if you make choreography and no one watches, it doesn’t exist. If you write a long rambling twine game about trauma and no one reads, well, it doesn’t exist, even if you wrote the best ending in the world. Maybe hitting the upload button on the IFComp website was the real completion of processing, the real closure, the real ending. Maybe a reader clicking the last link is the ending. Maybe writing this post-mortem is the real ending. Maybe reading the post-mortem is the ending. I don’t know.
I will say this: during many in-between moments of life, such as driving in my car or walking my dog, I’d be pondering my game and become filled with dread that it was all wrong. It’s too personal, it’s too specific, it’s too oblique. I must go back and be more clear describing my experiences, and more universal in relating them to the reader. I must rip out a bunch of the stuff I’m self conscious about! But then I would go back and play through a scene and only find minor things I actually wanted to change. Most of the time, when I read the work back to myself, it felt right, and that is an utterly euphoric feeling.
Slated For Demolition was overall a fruitfully healing thing to create. I have not formally studied behavioral psychology, but I have no doubt there’s some literature out there about the positive effect recreating interactive versions of the sites of your trauma can have. Something about being able to visualize and place yourself in spaces of pain, free of any actors or real things that can hurt you, was very powerful to me. I feel far more unburdened now, and I am glad for it. Thank you to those that took the journey with me. Thank you for the kindness of these forums, for the well written reviews, and for the generous ratings. I had originally hoped to not place last, and when it became obvious that wouldn’t happen, I crossed my fingers for top 40 or so as validation enough. I didn’t think that this piece had the kind of universal appeal enough for 5th place, so I’m surprised and pleased to find that it has appeared to emotionally meet people in ways I didn’t expect. This has been my first IFComp and first time ever really engaging live with the community, and it has been simply delightful! I have so many ideas in my head now of things I want to write next, and pleased to share they will [likely] contain less marinara gore (no promises though). See you in future events!
edit: I am on the fence about making a post-comp edit and have no real experience with itch, so I’m not really sure if the future holds any other versions of the game, but at the very least, it is self hosted on my project website for now