strings (orig)
So this was the plan: we’d finish warden for Ecotcomp ’25, then spend Oct – Mar on a follow-up for Spring Thing. Warden was an impulse project that we only decided to make six weeks before deadline. Never again would we leave ourselves so little time!
The reality: after we finished warden, I had to immediately start two separate writing- and research-heavy term projects for my Library & Info Science master’s, my job picked up in workload and stress. By mid-Dec I’d burned out hard, and then I got sick. It wasn’t until the middle of January that I started pitching ideas to Tabitha.
Good news: we landed on an idea that we both liked, a story about a bugfolk musician living through a very bad year. It’d be set in the same place as warden. It’d explore how inadequate creativity feels in the face of real problems & whether skill comes with obligation. The main mechanic centered on acquiring more musical techniques to use in a performance mini-game and maybe use in random events. We outlined the story beats and the level ups/unlocks. Because it was episodic and narrative-heavy, Twine felt like a better fit than a parser. I titled it strings and started learning Sugarcube.
Interlude: Jamming
I started mandolin lessons a couple years ago. My teacher is a guy who’s been gigging, jamming, and teaching for decades. He says that you don’t really learn to play until you play with others, and I’ve been bullied into going to jams where (mostly older) folks get together in the local VFW or the back room of a food co-op and play old time tunes together in a big circle. Most of the players don’t read music; they’ve always learned by ear, they have an intuitive understanding of music and their instruments, whereas I can read music but struggle to learn new tunes by ear on the fly. I’m nervous playing with others; I play worse when I’m not alone. Playing at home and playing elsewhere are totally different experiences for me.
Since picking up the mandolin, I’ve been thinking about real music, the kind of music people play for fun, sans money, mediation, marketing: the difference between playing FOR & playing WITH, the shared experience that music creates, how intuitive (and vulnerable) it can be, what it did/does culturally and socially.
Unstringing
My “process” working on a creative project goes something like this:
-
Find an idea that really sparks for me
-
Intentionally cultivate a hyperfixation by being really indulgent and cringe, creating elements that definitely won’t make it into the finished project (e.g., the evolutionary origins of bugfolk)
-
Nurture that hyperfixation for weeks at a time by letting the worst parts simmer a little longer in the back of my mind, not forcing anything before I have some level of enthusiasm for it.
-
While I’m doing the minute-to-minute work, I stay unself-consciously enthusiastic in a “cringe is dead” sort of way, and I only really think about audience when I go back over something for edits.
I was deeply into strings (orig). I had a playlist about it. I was worldbuilding a bugfolk economy and thinking about whether a shared culture can exist when communities are small and scattered. The performance minigame took place in a bug bar set up inside a ruined chimney, and for fun I let the player go up to the bar multiple times and get $tipsy, negatively affecting performance. On another whim I created an unlockable skill that boosted your performance if you were drunk, and then I realized I’d canonized and incentivized bugfolk alcoholism and deleted all of that. I was having fun!
But strings (orig) is obviously not the game we released for the Festival. We drafted maybe 1/5th of strings (orig) and shared a chunk of that 1/5th with testers, and they let us know, kindly, that our central mechanics were underbaked, our UI was rough, and the writing was a raw enthusiasm and not much else. [cue the distant screams of a giant cicada] It wasn’t really a surprise, and it was maybe even fixable, but not by deadline. I suggested we put strings (orig) on ice and pivot; Tabitha agreed, and we again found ourselves with no game and almost exactly 6 weeks to deadline.
Interlude: They should make a creative process that feels good
I’m finding that my emotional experience of making games is similar to making music. I have a great time writing and working on a game with Tabitha, working through tough spots until something really clicks, but then we get to a point where it has to be shared to be fully realized. Every mistake a tester or, worse, a player encounters is so embarrassing that I want to dig a deep hole and hide in it for 17 years until I re-emerge as a large, screaming insect. There’s something really harrowing about sharing something that I care about. No one should read or hear my fumbling attempts at things that they mastered years ago!
Cross-stitch, my main hobby until I started working on games last August, would never do me like this. After I finish a cross-stitch project, I look at it and say “nice! :),” and then I start a new project. Sometimes I take out an earlier project and I say “nice :)” again. A bit solipsistic, maybe, but more relaxing. I’ve got an unfinished 1 stitch:1 pixel recreation of Viridian Forest from Pokemon Red/Blue that I could be working on, what am I doing sharing my silly nonsense?
strings (remix)
We talked about withdrawing our intent to enter, but we decided to fall back on an idea I’d previously pitched, a smaller parser about a musician gathering an ensemble. It was a very weird creative-emotional effort to let go of a project I had dug into so deeply and immediately try to get excited about a new project with a very different tone. There are echoes of strings (orig) in strings (remix) (the game we eventually released): underground tunnels, a broken chimney, worm calling, performances. I liked to think about my abandoned characters working elements of their home into a fantastical folk song. I put a lot of my own home into strings (remix), too. The plants and insects are ones I see in our yard or nearby fields in May, with the exception of the master musicians. We won’t hear katydids for another month at least, and I haven’t seen any new adult stag beetles yet this year, but we always get a few coming out of the soil by early summer. Here’s a pic of one from last year:
I enjoyed writing in a heightened, sort of mythic style, and it was fun challenge to write a protagonist who was a folk hero and try to hint at accomplishments and stories that don’t actually exist. I had fun choosing insects for the master musicians, though I drafted the dragonfly segment first and only later decided that all the master musicians should be critters that can hear and use sound in some way. Dragonflies didn’t, as far as I knew. Stag beetle larva stridulate (rasp two limbs together) to each other for uncertain reasons. Many moths have good hearing, used to find mates and avoid bats. Many katydids have big ears on their tibia. Just days before deadline I almost changed the dragonfly to a mosquito (who are great at picking out specific frequencies) or a water strider (very sensitive to vibrations on the water), but I found a study that found some dragonflies perceive/respond to sound despite not having ears, probably using sensory bristles on their abdomen. No edits needed; thanks, science!
Interlude: my fantasy jam
I get nervous, personally, but there’s still something electrifying about playing with other people. There’s a moment when a bunch of instruments turn into a single ensemble that is totally unique. (There’s also a moment when you can tell that’s never going to happen because Bob is leading but he’s way off tempo and half a step out of tune. That’s also a unique feeling, and also pretty fun to experience.) I wanted that final ensemble to make musical sense. The dragonfly first had a harp; I love a harp, but it’s not really a jam instrument, I turned to my Youtube playlist of lo-fi phone recordings of people playing in festival tents or crowded pubs or someone’s front porch, and I thought about what instruments I’d be most excited to hear or play alongside in person. Guitar and banjo were obvious staples; fiddle overlapped too much with mandolin, and I wanted to mix it up a little. Shout out to accordionists (or concertina-ists) and drummers, they bring something really special. In most Celtic jams, at least, the drum would be a bodhran, but when you have four arms having at least two bongo-type drums made more sense. I haven’t actually seen any sort of drum at an old-time/Appalachian jam. There is rhythm (washboards, clog dancers, spoons), just not usually drums. Weird. I’m going to a jam festival over Memorial Day weekend, I’ll look out for someone with a drum.
I wanted to find out more about the frequency of tiny strings, but it depended too much on the physical properties on a very small scale. Realistically, I’m not at all confident that a bugdolin would be meaningfully audible to anyone of any size.
The Final Stretch
The flow state was more elusive with this second project. It took a lot of deliberate work and intentional focus to get through it in time. Huge shoutout to Tabitha, who put in a lot of work even on the initial draft. They did all the coding work on what I’ve been calling That Damn Mole Puzzle, working hard to make my initial concept functional and then working harder to make it playable. We ended up with a draft for testers with over a week to spare. Our testers were incredibly generous with their time and effort; several offered additional rounds of testing, and their feedback was incredibly valuable.
I burned out again in the week before deadline. Tabitha was pouring time into technical/QoL elements and fixing Inform’s issues with paragraph breaks. I knew my writing needed another round of polish, that the QoL could’ve used my attention. I kept trying, but I was out of juice. This semester’s classes were particularly stressful, work remains stressful, and 2026 has really ground me down. You can only give what you’ve got, and I gave what I had, and I think the game needed more. What’re you gonna do?
Be smarter about the next project, I guess (though I feel like I’ve heard that one before…). We’ve got one more bugfolk game planned for IFComp ’26, and we’ve settled on an idea that we like. I’ve even started drafting, tentatively. After that, we’ll take a break for a bit. We’ve got a few bugfolk game ideas we might visit in the future, but there are other types of projects we’d like to explore (slowly) first.
Thanks to everyone who played strings, especially those who shared their thoughts. Everyone was kind and constructive. That willingness to engage with new creators is really special. More importantly, thanks to my fellow participants; you can’t jam alone, and I’ve had so much fun sitting in this metaphorical circle with you all and sharing what we made!
Outro
I listen to a lot of music when working on a game, and I was pretty deliberate in what I sought out for both strings (orig) and strings (remix), so I wanted to share some music I came back to multiple times while I was drafting. I listened to more than this, but this was music I came back to multiple times:
- Purity Ring (a lot of Purity Ring, because they’re one of my favs and their earnestly weird storytelling is perfect for getting into that flow state for story drafting)
- Robert Johnson (king of delta blues!)
- Yank Rachell (king of blues mandolin; it’s not a big kingdom. He traded a pig for his first mandolin!)
- Justin Johnson on youtube has a lot of 1 hour solo blues guitar vids that were great during the last stretches where I just needed something vibey to listen to while I poked and tweaked minutiae
- Joshua Burnside
- Ye Vagabonds
- Saintseneca
- Ali Farka Touré & Toumani Diabaté (if you’ve never seen/heard a kora, check this thing out)
- Chris Thile (his new Bach album in particular was pretty exciting. He recorded some of it in a public park!)
- John Oeth’s classical guitar covers of the Baldur’s Gate 3 OST
- Ravi Shankar
- My playlist titled ADD Brain Partytimes (used only for non-story drafting or edits; the first song on there is 1000 gecs, so. You get the idea.)
- My YT playlist of jam recordings. There’s something really special about regular folk making music together. No matter how bad things gets, however few people are left, even if they’ve only got rubber bands, tin cans, and their voices, some folks somewhere will be making music together and feeling a little better.
Secret Bonus Track
After we started work on strings (orig), I started playing Silk Song, and the noise I made when I saw that Hornet gets the ability to string silk and play the needolin… listen. I swear it’s a coincidence, I’m not consciously taking inspiration from the HK games, I made a bugdolin pun at the end of warden before Silk Song had even released! Team Cherry is actually stealing from ME!