Valor's Minion

Patterns Emerge

I am fording ahead into the Afternoon section (just fleshing out the barebones, so it can be played decently. Will add the complex dimensional stuff after that)

Patterns are beginning to emerge. The obvious ones, about life-choices, yeah, but also the moral layout of the game (which isn’t something that can be visualized. As of yet.)—that is to say, that now I have the story and characters all set up, I can begin to give them definition through the choices the player makes, and how they choose to see different facets of the people around them.

29,473 words

Phantom Fury: Day One

I haven’t been documenting my progress on the game until this last week (via Tumblr & screencaps of the growing Twine-web, which is very cool to watch emerging as I write it), but I just went back to one of my earlier saved drafts, from the first week of writing the game.

Thanks to a date in a side-entry (in-game note-to-self), I can date this version to the first 24 hours of writing it (or just a bit beyond that). Since I started it the afternoon of April 27th, and the note is conscientiously marked as “4-28-13. 11.09pm.”)

What you see there is what I did in 24 hours or so. 9,548 words; 57 passages. That is the whole Iraq sequence. I’ve shifted plenty of stuff, and polished it enormously since then, but the initial thing just came out of me in a torrent. It was one of those writing-sessions that feels like lava pounding through your blood, that just crackles down through your fingers and out into the world.

I try not to brag, but I work hard, and I know when I do something worth bragging about. And for having only found out about Twine the night before, I’d say this was a pretty good start.

It’s grown far and fast, and only keeps getting bigger. I’m just trying to keep up with it as it comes to me.

Early Bird

Got up at five ayem. Been working for three hours now, on various things (catch up on journaling, working out, revisiting an old webseries script that I want to try to adapt with a friend, and now the game again).

This is the BBQ. Slowly but surely pushing on. It’s tricky, because I want all of the conversations to feel realistic, and also for the damned PACING to work. Out of necessity, this first run is just sketching major events, so it feels like the world’s shortest BBQ—probably not more than 30 min subjective time, if you play through it.

But it is really hard to replicate the feeling of walking around, slowly talking to folks, every tiny interaction that you have while wading through a crowded backyard full of people & unwelcome stimuli (which is what it NEEDS to be, when it’s done….)

I’m just skipping the second, longer, round of conversations for the moment, and pushing on into the afternoon part of the game now. If I can force myself not to be too wound up over the shit pacing during the BBQ (and, as noted in probably every other entry about this, at several other points as well)

But I am writing a bit every day. This earlybird sesh has yielded 300 words or so. (Total count: 29,015 words)

I can easily have a rough playthrough in three weeks. And if we’re talking rough, like how I’m glossing over the BBQ—which I’m probly gonna do with the shrink as well, just cuz I don’t want to get super-involved in that & then have to disentangle a bunch of pseudopsych stuff. Want to consult with AB first, before scripting that out fully—I could maybe have THAT done within two weeks.

I would hate it, because it would be sloppy and unacceptable by my standards, but it would be a workable model. Ahh well, you gotta start somewhere.

Filling in Holes

I just woke up and filled in a bunch of the little holes in the narrative that I’ve been avoiding. All but one of em are taken care of now, so the game is fully playable up to just after the Grill (with that one minor exception that I will get to in a bit).

27,873 words.

No reason I shouldn’t be able to get the rest of the BBQ playable (with the caveat that ALL of this is very rough, by the standards of what I want it to eventually be capable of) by the end of the week.

P.S. I’m averaging about 1000 new words a day, looking back over my progress. Which is pretty good. I don’t HAVE to have a fully-playable version by the end of June, but I think it’s a realistic goal.

Fires of Pompeii

Just realizing, after rewatching it, that “The Fires of Pompeii” may be my single favorite episode of DOCTOR WHO. People don’t talk about it a whole lot, but it’s really tightly-done & brilliant and funny and tragic and everything you could ask for from it.

Also you don’t have to know the canon at all. Which is great for teaching-purposes. Like, they would ideally go over the relevant names, cuz of all that soothsaying stuff that plays on their names (“you are [Donna] Noble”; “you are a Lord…of Time”, all that). But that aside, it plays w/a lot of great time-travel ideas & themes (paradox, speaking Latin, fixed points in time, the guilt & majesty of being able to see all Time & Space like him)

It’s wonderful. Will 100% be using this.

P.S. For kadolf1012, who said “Funny does not describe this episode” <— Not the episode as a whole, not at all—but for anyone who’s taken a few years of Latin, or is interested in Ancient Rome, there are several great little jokes sprinkled throughout (like the Latin phrases they say, which are translated into Welsh).

Doctor: Morituri te salutant!

Lucius: Celtic prayers won’t help you now!

Latest Puzzle Solved!

My puzzle of the day has been to work out how our character will interact with a variety of people when he first arrives at the BBQ. Now, I’ve written out all the permutations (the basic ones, anyhow) of that:

….which means that I can move on to the NEXT part of my growing web of possibilities, in this very long Day.

It’s fun, but also a good deal of work. Especially to make it feel real, and to flow naturally. Like real conversation.

Word count: 26,723.

Tangled Twine

Here is a cross-section of today’s big tangle:

The game is fully playable up to the BBQ now. That section, the part up and on the left, is the part where you can talk to folks when you get to the BBQ, just before you get called over to help at the grill.

The general pacing is still abysmal (i.e. if you go the route that leads direct through the Library, it’s glaringly obvious that the necessary three hours can’t have passed), but I’m just gonna grit my teeth and agree that I’ll come back to flesh that out once there is a fully-playable outline (which is much more important anyhow). Irks me, as a perfectionist, but there you are.

So what I have is: 24,683 words. Fully playable first two sections (of the planned seven), and I may be able to have the BBQ-sequence done today or tomorrow. This glum rainy day is perfect for it.

My self-imposed deadline of three weeks to a FULLY playable version of the game (counting from Thursday, May 16th) may be realistic after all.

My PTSD Twine Game

I’m gonna start getting back onto Tumblr as of now. I’m graduating from college in a week, and I’ve got this game well underway, so now I’ll use this to give updates to anybody interested.

For those of you (i.e. most anyone reading this), I have been working on a Twine game about the Iraq War and PTSD.For anyone not familiar with Twine: it’s like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book, but being coded with HTML.

I’ve been working on it for the past three weeks (when I haven’t been finishing school/my internship), and now the map looks like this:

Not a bad start, I know.

I started it the afternoon of April 27th (the day after I found out about Twine), so as of today, I’ve been on it for 20 days.

The game begins in Iraq, and then the rest of it is a Day In The Life of the same character (living with the trauma of what he/you did in Iraq). At the last count, it is 21,160 words long. Not sure how you’re supposed to judge length in a Twine-game, but that’s a novella. By the time I’m done, this will be a playable novel.

Huh. I think I just made that up, but I like it: ‘playable novel’. Or ‘interactive novel’. Because no matter what path you take, there is an emotional-arc built in, the journey of the character in the course of this day. I’m combining my writing abilities with the limitations and—especially—the advantages of this medium, and seeing what I can do.

Well, I think that’s enough of a start to whet your appetites for now. If anyone has questions, comments, or wants to play what I have of the game, message me—I’m looking for as much feedback as I can get on this thing!

I will be giving periodic updates from now on, as I build the game. I hope to have a playable (although very rough) version in another three weeks.

Quentin Tarantino on Schultz' Poor Decision Making