The three best things about writing IF? In alphabetical order: feedback, feedback and feedback. I’ve never written anything that got 20 reviews before; it’s intoxicating! But even beyond that, and best of all, we are permitted— nay, encouraged— to make big self-indulgent posts about how great we are and how smart it was to do things this way and how it was much smarter than doing it that way… anyway, yeah. Even the feedback gets feedback!
My warmest and most grateful thanks to everyone who played, and who enjoyed, and who responded to Put Your Hand Inside The Puppet Head. Now let’s pull that hand out and look at all the scars and rashes it accumulated along the way!
Don’t Let’s Start
Put Your Hand Inside The Puppet Head sprouted from two seeds.
First of all, take a look at this:
This conversation happened on May 17, 2022. Take careful note of the time stamps: after being given the initial prompt, I generated the concept for this game, basically in full, in EIGHT MINUTES. Talk about being struck by inspiration!
The only element of this initial description that I couldn’t do was making it a VR game. Well, not giving up on that just yet…
The second genesis of the game is this video clip from ten years previous. It’s only a few minutes; I recommend you watch it in its entirety.
When I first saw this video, I had a hard time believing it. Imagine anyone, even a cop, not recognizing LeVar Burton! Then I realized that LeVar himself could literally never afford to make that assumption. It could happen tomorrow, and the headlines would be customized to imply it was his own fault. “Celebrity dead after law enforcement mix-up,” or “LeVar Burton: No Angel”.
It’s the kind of bitterly unfair thing that makes you want to jump up and down and tear at your hair and shriek with rage— just like I felt (I suddenly realized), all those years ago, when Jim Henson randomly died of a rapid infection. And then we were off.
Unpronounceable
Where did this title come from anyway?
The puppets themselves had a lot of working names: Ernest’s Crew, the High Fives, the Lumpen Proletariat. Once I hit on the name Handfuls, that left me with three options for names:
- A Handful Of Secrets
- A Mystery On Your Hands
- Put Your Hand Inside The Puppet Head
You can see why that was the obvious choice, right? An eye-grabbing title can carry you a long way!
Obviously I’m a big They Might Be Giants fan; I didn’t realize when I started this that I was carrying on a long and proud tradition of building games around TMBG songs, though! It’s not just a funny title: the song itself does in fact factor into the overall plot of the game. You can find the most references to it in the best ending; see below (under “Stuff is Way”) for a full explanation.
Of course, now I regret that it never occurred to me to title the game Ernest Weasel Gets Kicked In The Nuts.
Meet The Elements (the illustrated portion)
How do you invent the Muppets when the Muppets already exist?
From the very beginning it was a tightrope walk. It’s no secret the Handfuls are inspired by and homaging the Muppets, but we couldn’t just use Shmermit the Shmog or anything. The Handfuls needed to be a group of distinct characters, with a clear history that synced up with Mal Newsome’s career, and still contain nods to the Muppets.
However, the Muppets aren’t the only long-running properties with a wide cast of colorful characters! The answer was to look to other series with a lot of evolution in their history, and match the Muppet character I wanted to homage with a couple of others that fit the same basic roles.
The recipe to create a Handful is to pick a Muppet, then combine them with an equivalent character from the Mario universe, and another from Homestar Runner.
I actually went back and forth on whether to include illustrations of the characters in the game. Eventually I chose not to for time budgeting, and also because I was curious if anyone else would be inspired to draw their own takes on the characters? Either way, here are my interpretations.
Ernest Weasel: The Male Lead (Kermit + Mario + Homestar)
These three are defined by their earnestness, which is where Ernest gets his name. He’s a weasel because they’re hyperactive and bounce around, like a puppet trying to upstage a celebrity, and he became a “least weasel” so people would underestimate him, just as they might underestimate a frog or a plumber. Like Kermit, he’s Mal’s avatar, who shows up on every show that Mal appears on, from “Things” all the way to Something New.
When I started writing Handfuls dialogue, I realized one issue with the name Ernest: any Muppet fan would be confused if the others called him “Ernie”!
Sherri Cola: The Female Lead (Miss Piggy + Princess Peach + Marzipan)
These three women have only a couple of things in common: their relationship with the male lead is kind of ambiguous, they hold a certain level of power over him, and they’re named after food. Sherri homages the Muppet commercial era, where some beloved characters like Rowlf got their start. Piggy’s dislike of being reminded she’s a pig led to Sherri trying to hide her origins as a gummy worm entirely.
Balzac: The Second Banana (Fozzie Bear + Luigi + Strong Sad)
These three characters are all sort of timid and a little pathetic, which I tried to reflect in Balzac’s concern that his character wasn’t likable. He represents the Muppet Show era, where years of experience combined with brand new cast members led to magic. I wish I’d had the chance to show some actual sketches by the Handfuls; I kept thinking of hilarious ways for Balzac to bluff his way through a sport he knew nothing about.
Blintz: The Gremlin (Gonzo + Toad + “Modestly Hot” Homsar)
Several players expressed their enthusiasm for Blintz, so it shouldn’t surprise you she’s my favorite too. Every pack of weird characters needs someone that’s weird even for them! Blintz’s origin as a character in a Christmas/Kwanzaa special homages Gonzo, who first appeared as “Cigar Box Frackle” in a Muppet Christmas special.
Moist: The Antihero (Cookie Monster [& co.]+ Wario + Strong Bad)
Isn’t there always a gross weird thing that captures children’s hearts and becomes a star? Belch Moistly, a name specifically chosen to make you squirm, of course homages Sesame Street and several other children’s shows. He’s influenced by more specific Muppets than anyone else: Cookie Monster, Oscar the Grouch, Guy Smiley, and one very obscure early character called Mushmellon.
The Ork: The Steed/Pet (Landstrider + Yoshi + The Cheat)
This character gave me the most trouble. He’s intended to homage Jim Henson’s fantasy movies. Originally his name was “Gavelock” (don’t remember why… pun on Grimlock?) and he was supposed to be a fierce little watchdog like Fizzgig from The Dark Crystal, but I kept thinking about Yoshi and the knights mounted on stubby dragons in Labyrinth, and the Ork started to emerge. The movie he’s part of is based on the book “The Scarecrow of Oz”, where there is indeed an Ork, but it can talk; the literal parrot bill suggested directly imitating Mal, so my Ork stays quiet the rest of the time to emphasize the rarity of that speech. I always wanted to do a fantasy with Orks instead of orcs!
Princess Koy: The Rising Star (Clifford + Rosalina + Trogdor)
Probably the most literal fusion of three influences of this group, I just wrote “Princess Mustache Dragon” on my phone and pretty much stuck with that idea. She homages The Jim Henson Hour, the final show of his life, which showcased incredibly elaborate puppetry and animatronics; this led to the idea that Mal’s most advanced puppet could be his saving grace.
The Co-Stars:
These puppets don’t normally speak, mostly serving as collectibles. However, each one can be used to rescue the character they formerly starred alongside, and when that happens you get a nice reunion scene where they speak.
Dull Thud: This blocky iron puppet (who talks like Ben Stein, naturally) homages very early “abstract” Muppet characters like Yorick and Wontkins. That’s actually an unstated difference between Jim Henson and Mal Newsome: Mal never created abstract characters, always finding something from mythology or biology (or metallurgy, in this case) to assign them as.
Sour Apple: Another character from the commercial era, a gummy worm who didn’t go on to fame and fortune like her sister Sherri. I was thinking of Baskerville, a rarely seen dog Muppet who was once co-stars with Rowlf.
Proust: The inert soccer ball that Balzac calls “Mom” isn’t based on any particular Muppet, so much as the creative spirit that turns props into characters. It does remind me of the “Rocco” segments from Sesame Street, though…
Devan Pfeffernusse: Homaging the Sesame Street tradition of celebrity caricature Muppets, like Placido Flamingo and Meryl Sheep. His namesake changed halfway through— I was going to call his celebrity voice Desmond Pfeiffer, after the infamous sitcom, but that would have been distracting.
Mince Churlishly: A cross between Grover the waiter and his irritable blue customer, and maybe a little bit of Don Music too. Mince gets his distinctive name from the hilarious graphic novel The Cowboy Wally Show, and his unique species is another example of my love of yokai, also on display in The Hole Man.
Cap’n Bill: My sole decimal point in the Boatiness Quotient is that my game contains a sailor, and a famous literary one at that. Cap’n Bill starred in several books by L. Frank Baum, but the story in which he met the Ork had him transformed into a grasshopper for most of it! Since the Ork doesn’t get abducted in this game, their happy reunion happens at the van rather than in the complex.
Dennis The Hopper: Since Dennis is “your” character, the best ending implies a potential star turn for them too. This nods to Clifford, a minor but memorable character on The Jim Henson Hour, being bumped up to host for the post-Jim show Muppets Tonight. Dennis is another example of Mal’s (and my) love for monsters and mythology. (Dennis is always they/them, despite the masculine name.)
My Evil Twin
It is “mascot horror” after all, so there had to be some horror.
It is, unfortunately, the best-kept secret about the game. The monsters are capable of stealing the puppets, wearing them themselves, fusing with the puppets, and then they will fuck you up good and give you a Game Over— if you don’t have the single puppet with you that can talk their counterpart down from this berserker rage. You lose the co-star puppet, but you get the star back, and now that Morpheme is neutralized and you can explore the building at your leisure.
Disappointingly, most people didn’t try this! If you haven’t seen any of the puppets’ monster forms, maybe this will inspire you to try the game again. I’m not just blaming the players here, though; my first post-Comp update will include a new sequence with your partner in crime (Rici) where she explains the system in more detail after you lose a puppet for the first time.
The Morphemes:
- These are the “blank” forms of the security monsters which patrol the complex. They’re not inspired by the Muppets at all, but by Mummenschanz: a long-running mime and performance art troupe who are known for bizarre costumes that play with your idea of proportions. You only encounter four of them (Hyper, Viper, Sniper and Dave— you can find their discarded employee IDs by searching certain rooms), one per building, each one color-coded to match the border for the building they’re in.
- Initially I had no explanation for the Morphemes’ presence, nor why they could merge with the puppets to form murderous mascots; then the Hollywood strikes happened, and it all fell into place. The Morphemes are AI-driven animatronic scab replacements for actors, commissioned from Something New by Cheney; Mal cut ties with them when he found out what they were intended for. Like any LLM, they aren’t aware of what they’re doing, and their attempts to emulate the Handfuls become nightmarish and a hazard to life and limb.
- There is a fifth Morpheme, Diaper, whom you won’t see in normal play; it was in the proof of concept demo, and can be seen again in the best ending.
The Berserk Handfuls:
- The same six monster forms are shared by all four Morphemes, so you won’t see a different monster if Viper gets Ernest in your first game and Hyper gets him in the replay.
- None of the monsters seek to injure the player, even in their berserker forms. All encounters are intentionally claustrophobic in nature; you’re either swallowed, smothered, or… whatever the hell Blintz is doing.
- Ernest’s monster form is basically an animated mink stole, playing off his sock puppet-like nature.
- Sherri Cola turns into a big game of Centipede, with literally cherry-flavored gummy segments smushing you.
- Balzac simulates the horror of drowning in a ball pit. Yes, Proust can save you from him! Don’t ask how!
- Blintz is… I honestly don’t know, but if you had survived, you would probably turn into Dr. Manhattan.
- Moist becomes a pool of rotting fur that resembles an anaerobic lagoon, inspired by “The Greedy” from the frightening children’s film Raggedy Ann & Andy.
- Princess Koy has the most explicitly Henson-themed transformation, a towering but unfinished animatronic that picks the player up and taunts them, homaging the Ultragorgon from Jim Henson’s “Monster Maker”.
Let Me Tell You About My Operation
I keep thinking "there’s probably an easier way to do this".
I’m not an advanced Twine codesmith. My first game, The Hole Man, used as little code as possible and mostly tried to wow the player with lots of wacky stuff to read. In fact, neither The Hole Man nor PYHITPH have a StoryInit card! Aren’t they all supposed to have those?
Still, this game needed a whole lot of new stuff. I recycled “rummage rooms” from The Hole Man, which enabled the room-search function and also the tense key-fumbling sequences, but a lot of it is new and doesn’t come from any template.
The one major function I learned for this game was -include-. I ‘included’ everything in this game! It kept astonishing me with its utility; how easily you could turn a given room into a block of invisible code, include five of them in another room, then include that room on all the other rooms and have it run everything for you. The one problem with it is the “naive” nature of Twine to run any code it reads in the order it reads it, so there was plenty of trial and error to get the events to sync up and match the numbers needed.
I also used “include” for the HUD, instead of making a separate subheading in CSS. I’m sure there’s an easier way to do that too.
The clock in this game is not tied to the move counter: I didn’t want time to pass while you were managing your puppet inventory, or various other out-of-game tasks. Every time you move into a room, or search a room, or otherwise load or reload any room that contains the clock, the clock ticks, from 1 to 12.
When the clock ticks one, all of the Morphemes are “home”— that is, they’re in the room in their building with an air vent. This is also when the roller coaster goes by in the Quadrangle, enabling savvy players to track what rooms the Morphemes are in by counting moves. Of course, having Moist with you is even better!
Hopeless Bleak Despair
Spring Thing didn’t go as planned.
Hey, how many of the rest of you are also shameful procrastinators? Whoo, that’s a lot of hands, including mine. Although I sat down and built the basic demo for how the game works when Spring Thing was announced, I then ignored it until there was only about a week and a half left. A lot of that time wasn’t precisely wasted, since I did spend it inventing the characters and working out the plot progression, I definitely didn’t leave myself enough time to write it all. I skipped work on the last day to try and finish it, but that just wasn’t enough and I had to bow out at the last second. It felt like a crushing failure at the time, but all the work I had done was still there, only needing a few additions.
Can’t Keep Johnny Down
IFcomp was happening before I knew it.
So after licking my wounds and resolving myself to finish in time for IFcomp (thanks to the encouragement of many of the cool people here!)… I proceeded to forget about it for a month and continued with my summer plans. I visited my friend in Wisconsin and saw the House on the Rock, that was awesome! I nearly died in Chicago on the hottest day of the year! Vacation!
I returned home from my vacation with a bunch of great new ideas buzzing in my head, and started writing one right away, a brand-new isekai novel. I was 5000 words into that when I realized “hey, the IFcomp deadline is two weeks away… and I have another getaway with my girlfriend planned then.”
Look, I’m not great at staying on task, but I’m very proud of myself for the way I did a complete U-turn on my isekai novel and slammed right back into writing for my game, now officially titled Put Your Hand Inside The Puppet Head (not the title I’d planned at Spring Thing). The first three buildings were complete, but now I had to write the Ork rescue sequence, and build and implement the Ork and Koy, and even after that, those big honking endings to reward my dutiful players! Once again I dove into work and spent every spare hour (and some hours at work too) writing and testing. Some things got reworked at the last minute: the conversations between two Handfuls, originally slated to happen in various rooms, were relocated to the van, since no one was going to go exploring and find them with two hands filled! Everything was coming together: Definitely headed for the finish line this time.
Certain People I Could Name
None of these things happen without support!
Interrupting the story to mention the friends who made all this possible:
- Nola / Finalposs: A saint who spent so much time testing and reporting bugs, I gave her a special thanks: the van conversation between Moist and Blintz is her composition, plus or minus a little editing. Yes, this also saved me the trouble of writing it, but what’s important is that she appreciated it!
- The rest of our motley crew: Glumdrop, Jac, Slug, Arcadeengineer, who all joined me for bug-hunting streams and freeze framed every bug they saw.
- My first playtester was Li’l Brudder, who also played much more than I would have dared ask. For as many bugs as folks found in the final comp version (including the dreaded “Fingertips” bug that made the monsters invisible), there’d have been so many more it wouldn’t be playable without the help of these devoted friends.
- A special thanks once again for TitleKnown, who provided the original prompt. This is a friend I sometimes get frustrated with because he keeps giving me “homework” like that, making me feel like ChatGPT or something, but I have to remember it’s because he appreciates my creativity— as long as AI can’t do what I do, I have job security.
- Most of all I have to thank my girlfriend Seana, because I didn’t put off the getaway we planned and didn’t cut it short, but she was absolutely fine with me spending hours of our free time in the hotel room typing away on my iPad. We still had time to walk on the beach, eat delicious sandabs and cioppino and visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium, so I don’t regret it a bit.
- The hard part was finishing the game, which was due the day I dropped Seana off at the airport after our trip. I spent some nice productive hours at the Miyako Mall in Japantown San Francisco, then started the long drive home, planning to finish when I got home… just in time to hit the traffic. After an hour and a half of struggling across the Bay Bridge and beyond and still having four hours to get home, it became clear that if I wanted to beat that 9 PM deadline, I’d have to stop somewhere and write! This is how the very last parts of Put Your Hand Inside The Puppet Head got frantically typed and submitted, with four minutes to go, in a McDonald’s in downtown Modesto.
- This is also why the version without updates starts on an editor’s cheat screen— D’OH! The updated version fixes that and also includes character dialogue I forgot to paste in.
Stone Cold Coup d’État
Six weeks and 20 glowing-to-puzzled reviews later...
Here we are, proudly placed in the top ten! Bottom of the top ten, sure, but that’s not nothing!
It’s not a surprise to me that PYHITPH scored a lot higher than it was predicted to by the algorithm, which had it hovering around #20. I mean, everyone has a right to their own preferences, but I definitely see some unfairly dismissive attitudes toward choice-based games around here. Myself, I would argue that choice-based games are a high-risk, high-reward option: they’re easier to fart out something disappointing with, but putting the same effort into a choice-based game that you do with a parser will often lead to superior results. And yeah, I’m including the parser games that scored higher than mine here— your games were indeed great and success was well earned, but I still think a choice version would be even more accessible! Spicy take, I’m sure, and probably one that was already argued to death before I even knew what IF stood for.
So! Number ten! Not number one, but it’s still a big deal in an event like this!
Stuff Is Way
You probably guessed I’m a huge Muppets fan, right?
This game is stuffed with Muppet trivia and homages to their history. Here’s some of the deepest cuts I didn’t expect anyone outside the tribe to necessarily get.
- Mal Newsome’s name is a reference to the Muppets’ first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show, where Ed fumbled the line and introduced the act as “Jim, uh, Newsome’s puppets”.
- The other puppeteers have names derived in very punny ways from other Muppet performers and known figures. For example:
- Frank Oz: Xanthe Gallo
- Richard Hunt: Kitty Peck
- Joe Mathieu: Fritz Matthew
- Jerry Juhl: Lawrence Ruby
- There’s an incredibly obscure Muppets reference in the R&D warehouse: a random search can bring you a book called “Watermellon’s I Don’t Know”. This is an unfinished children’s book by Jim Henson, never published, which starred Kermeena (Kermit’s feminine alter ego), Yorick and Mushmellon.
- I’m still way too amused by the cast of The Things, Mal’s original show, and the implication of a conversation where someone said “Animal, vegetable, mineral… and Plasma”.
- Some reviewers became curious about the song, which made me happy. Although the song is never directly quoted in the text, the whole game is in fact based on it; the song tells the story of Mal Newsome’s life, in reverse order. Almost every line is acknowledged somewhere in the story: the “zombie” who knocks at the door is the Cheney corporation, a face from his past; “you need some loving arms” is Cheney sending Xanthe Gallo to seduce him (and failing); “If the puppet head were only busted in” refers to how all the evidence is in the camera in Princess Koy’s head! Some of this information is revealed in the three different endings.
Happy Doesn’t Have To Have An Ending
What’s next for the Handfuls?
Well, I don’t have any sequel in mind just yet. There’s a post-comp release coming, at least. Still, I love my dumb animal characters and I want to see them again someday!
I have a bunch of new game ideas churning for attention, including one I’m already planning for Spring Thing (and it already has the best title ever: PEOPLE ARE CRUNCHY) and one that’s less experimental in theme for the next IFComp. Gonna win someday!
One more addition about PYHITPH; it wasn’t originally conceived of as a Twine game. Anybody know anyone who can get me in contact with a VR game developer? I know I said I didn’t have any ideas for a new game, but an awful lot of good ideas got shelved when it got reinvented as IF…
