Yeah, unique idea. Let me refine it. You have a story which is completely obsolete. And you can go on quests like:
- Get 10 wolf teeth
- Get 10 orc teeth
- Get 10 dragon teeth
- Get 20 wolf teeth!
Isn’t that great? -me running off to the patent office…
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Yeah, but it’s really about the struggles of the wolf pack and how they come to terms with the murderous player base. One wolf decides to make a stand and…
This is why we share ideas, man! 
Your game sounds very cerebral. Love it! You might want to watch the movie Cube for more inspiration for your maze concept. It might spark more ideas for you about how it connects physically and across time.
I also like the idea of time as a resource to manage. I like games that force you to make a decision, but don’t allow you to make all possible choices before proceeding. Being able to do everything gets very boring.
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It’s like we are, but it’s not necessarily that way.
We all have a right to boundaries, even among people we like and trust, and if we use them well, they can help us focus.
I am in essence saying, when I talk about my one white whale, “I have this great idea, but I do want it to be a surprise – but it’s not just something to post to get attention in a thread every now and then. It’s something I work at, and I don’t want to over-promise by getting it out there, but I also hope that when it pops up, people are genuinely somewhat surprised and maybe think gee, yeah, that’s the sort of thing Andrew might write, glad he got to it.”
Others may be saying some variation on this. But I think the Internet may have a general problem with oversharing and overpromising. So I go with what level of revealing my work will give me the most motivation, and I trust others to too. It’s fun to have mystique from this thread.
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To be very clear, participation in this thread, and the extent of that participation, was always meant to be entirely voluntary. While I understand the impulse to know more, I certainly won’t criticize someone for not sharing more than they’re comfortable exposing. Tbh, just getting a peek at how many big projects folks have percolating in their grey matter is exciting. 
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Alright. I wasn’t really going there, but that’s a fair comment.
I just wanted people feel like they can share more interesting details, and I tried to deliver an encouraging kick in the butt. I just find this topic so fascinating and most people were being a complete tease about it. I was definitely calling people out, for sure, but I didn’t see the personal therapeutic side to what was possibly going on. Still, you don’t have to say Darth Vader is Luke’s father, but damn, throw a guy a bone here.
Alright, you’re all off the hook now. Go on. Be annoyingly vague.
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I can see that. I don’t think anyone thought you had ill-intent. I similarly was hoping to encourage folks to take part, but I figured the best way to do that was to be very forthcoming myself, as you can see with the post I used to kick this off. Sort of like encouraging folks to swim by getting in the water myself. That said, some folks just don’t like swimming, and coercing them to get in is probably unwelcome as well as unlikely to work.
Anyway, my point is to let you know that our hearts aren’t too far apart, just our execution.
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It is just my guess, but I think people weren’t upset about you trying to encourage them. They just wanted to point out that it’s ok to stay vague, nothing less, nothing more.
Ok here goes my idea: There’s this guy (or maybe girl) and he walks around and picks up things (or not) and then there’s a problem (or two) and there’s the end. Is this great or is this great!?
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Aren’t you being too specific? I feel like you might pigeon-hole yourself there.
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Haha. This reminds me of how Harry Potter 6 spoilers were threatened with permabanning on a certain message board so someone posted something they were sure couldn’t have happened as a joke. It was, in fact, the climactic, dramatic thing that happened, which most of us know, but spoiler tags anyway: Snape Kills Dumbledore. I forget if they the person was actually banned!
But seriously … on rethinking, I think there’s still some residue from me for IFComp having a full gag rule where you don’t talk in advance about what you’ve written. I’m glad it was scrapped a while back, because it eventually became impossible to enforce without people constantly self-policing for any hint of describing something they might write for IFComp some day, but I think I still try to obey the spirit more than I should.
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Your post is what actually inspired me to share more openly in this topic. It was amazingly forthcoming and thought provoking. It’s refreshing to see people bare a bit of themselves like that. I hope others follow suit. It’s definitely okay if they don’t. I just didn’t expect others to justify not being more open with the ideas they were taking the time to share. Then I felt like an ass for suggesting there was anything wrong with that. I’m learning though. I’m learning.
Warning to everyone here, never invite me to family dinners!
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I think it sounds very cool. The graphics add extra complications – I mean, they totally frame how you relate to the people – but I also see a version of this as a really good all-text IF.
In that form it reminded me there was an IFComp game at least heading in this direction called J’Dal. The average rating and reviews (including one from me) say it was no great success, but it had a dungeon, a party and characterisation. It’s sort of weird to think there are so many dungeoncrawlers, but fewer in IF (combat’s hard work in IF) and fewer with actual character relations being important.
Maybe there are more like this. I’ve had opportunity to play fewer IFComp entries each year.
-Wade
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Hey, your post challenged me to think about what more I could say about the ‘actress game’ I abandoned… Well, there’s no way I’m going to share the title. It’s too good and the most stealable thing!
I opened the game’s Scrivener document and there is no plot, just blobs of prose and scene ideas I planned to keep stringing together until a story happened. Here are some (has one sexual reference):
Summary
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Red head Scottish family reading Italian menu on harbour
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"People will empathise with whatever you point the camera at. I once read about an experiment where they kept the camera trained on a slab of butter sitting on a table in a family home setting. Viewers started to feel sad for the butter when it was left in the house on its own.
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“They said could they make a mould of my vagina. For that project, no way. The FX guy seemed like some kind of mad genius but I didn’t trust the director.”
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- How do you cry?
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- I think of my parents crying. What do you do?
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- I just think of what’s happening in the scene, weirdo.
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Her calves were like she had a can of soft drink bolted to the back of each of her legs.
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An octagonal stop sign that says STOP - with a sticker underneath saying ‘eating animals’
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One take where she’s trying acting really slow. Taking twice as long to do any physical action as usual. The director goes, ‘Christ, what are you doing Kelly?’
-Wade
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I really appreciate the feedback. To be honest, the visual images of the characters interacting would be half the story. I just really liked the idea of silent story telling as much as possible and why I gravitated towards a sketchy style of art. Easier to produce and feels a bit more raw as well.
When injured, one could be gripping their arm when walking. When fighting an opponent, the injured person might stay behind the other character, being less effective. If you end up unconscious, when you come to, you might find yourself alone wondering where the other might be. I picture the characters being of different fantasy races, unable to understand each other’s language, but your character could learn some words from the other and, of course, body language would do wonders. Even just text-only descriptions would do what I want justice, I think. That was a good suggestion, actually. With the awkward interactions being more descriptive, I think players might be more attentive and interested in every word written. I like the visual potential, but I’m not married to it. Might have to revisit this idea one day.
Ha! I like those one-liners from your actress game. I know a guy who’s passionate about writing and your observations and embracing of awkward encounters is exactly like him. “I just think of what’s happening in the scene, weirdo.” I like stuff that keeps you on your toes. Reminds me of Aubrey Plaza’s kind of wit.
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I’m in this team !
I spent the major part of my youth trying to pursue white whales in tech, to no avail, then I figured out that it was much simpler to just throw ideas in the wind and enjoy them later without the hassle of having to have build them in the first place.
Fair enough : you don’t get credit for any of it. But credit wouldn’t have paid my rent anyway.
That being said, I have many white whales 
, one of the most enduring one being a game about Arsène Lupin : each time I (re)read a Lupin novella I keep thinking that they would make great and fun IF Games and I had pretty much abandonned the idea, think that they would be unadaptable. Until inkle published Overboard! and we’ve have three installments of Lady Thalia (see above) : I’m extremelly thrilled that those game exist and only encourage me in the pursuite of this white whale.
Random notes about a Lupin Game
- The game would be an open world, with detailed Paris and Normandy with occasional detour in France
- Things to steal would be plenty, and you’d have to come up with creative ideas with or without a team to organize a heist. I’m not sure if the situations could be procedurally generated. I’m always reminded of how Introversion Software failed making Subversion. And one key lesson I learned from both abovementionned games is that they are very authored.
- Team members could of course betray you, you could fall in love and/or romance NPCs (not mutually exclusive). That is a thing that would need to be heavily modified from the original work, because Lupin has clearly not lived through any “metoo” moments.
- One playthrough should be less than 1 hour long and should read like a novella.
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Oh my gosh it would be so cool!
I would end up hoarding all the stuff I could steal 
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I’ve been avoiding posting this because I’m sure its realization is just a matter of time instead of being unlikely, but this is definitely a persistent notion. So I guess it counts as a White Whale.
Something that’s been on my mind for nearly two decades is a game around the collision between the cottagecore pastoral fantasies fueled by people like Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver, and the realities of small farming: repetitive yet skilled and time-sensitive labor, the often frustrating detective work and wild-ass guessing of “why won’t this thing grow right?” And in the ten years pre-pandemic we had over 200 short-term live-in volunteers come through the farm (mostly through WWOOF, mostly well-to-do 18- to 27-year-olds) so we get to see a lot of those attitudes colliding close-up. “If you had a GoFundMe I’d donate, but I don’t see how anyone could enjoy this work,” etc.
I feel like I’m getting close. I have the core of a letter-based ecosystem that I think can let some of the complexities of English spelling stand in for some of the complexities of plants without being overwhelmingly unfamiliar (and allow throwing interesting and mysterious monkey-wrenches into the works from time to time). And a slightly cyberpunk slightly dystopian city-slickers fish-out-of-water premise that I think will let me do the story things I want and also poke a bit of fun at things like that hilariously-bad greenwashing Chobani commercial. And I even sort of have a set of four interlocking sketches and arcs for four characters that might sort of work?
But although I grew up reading everything in sight, and in a big extended family that did a lot of wordplay and word stuff, it was all abstract word games and people who did editing/proofreading/translation of nonfiction. So I’m still flailing around with “how do you even do this fiction-writing thing?” (and I don’t think my programmer-brain wants to approach things the way most fiction writers do, which doesn’t help in finding advice).
So at my current rate of chipping away at the idea, “close” could be another several years, who knows. I may well make a bunch more small unrelated stuff first to learn what I’m doing.
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Please use spoiler tags. We do have young people here.
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My vision is getting so bad, everything already has spoiler tags around it! 
Thanks for catching that one.
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Learning would disqualify you from some of my family dinners.
Seriously, though, another reason it’s good that people don’t explain everything out of the gate is … I come back to this topic a lot when new posts pop up, and it helps me push forward. If we showed everything too quickly, this topic wouldn’t have the shelf life and usefulness it’s had. It’s over 6 months!
I suspect I’m not the only person posting here who feels this way. Maybe people who haven’t posted (yet) feel that, too!
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Wow… that Chobani commercial is something else! The dissonance of the hopeful imagery and the utilitarian fact that its a multinational food comapany ruthlessly using it to increase their sales of yogurt of all things is intense. Absolutely wild.
Anyway, I absolutely love your attempt to grasp the vagaries of growing things. We started most of our stuff from seed indoors earlier this spring, and, amongst everything else, we planted maybe 50 pods of echinacea. Not one came up. Everything else had a good sprout rate of at least 80% or so, but not the echinacea. So, we got stubborn, bought more seeds and replanted another 50 pods of echinacea. Tented and carefully watered for weeks…
We got one. One sprout of echinacea, out of 100 seeds. We do not have a reason why. We used different soil and pods the second time around. We have sprouted echinacea farly successfully in the past, using basically the same techniques. Sometimes the plants hate you and you can’t determine why even if you try to control every variable.
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