Creating an inherently pathetic protagonist: Six Months and its “reactive” choice system

I’d like to talk for a moment about the core mechanic of my current long-term IF project, Six Months. I recently asked two friends to do a test-read of the first 60% of the game, and the feedback I got from them has had me thinking about my work in new ways.

I’ve shared gifs of the game before on tumblr and twitter, but Six Months essentially uses the exact same mechanics as Swan Hill: a two-tone link system where black links change the text currently on the page, while red links commit decisions and advance the story. You can play Swan Hill here. Here’s a gif of the mechanic in action:

All red links appear in-line as part of the game’s ordinary narrative. I’m not an enormous fan of choose-your-own-adventure or RPG-style option-choice in my personal projects. I have worked on traditional CYOA-style choice stories for my day job, and for my side projects I’m interested in exploring systems which seem less ludic, less interrogative, and more fluid or seamless in their presentation.

However, every IF choice system enforces certain underlying moods or philosophies upon the story. The system that you use to convey choices to the reader can be as much a tool as a cage– each completely alters the way the reader will experience your story. Choice systems can affect moment-to-moment narrative rhythm, player-character characterization, story structure, and more.

We often tend to interpret the organizing system behind game choice as a sort of mental model for the protagonist. Let’s imagine a choice system where a bunch of choices are printed on a page, and the player must roll a die to select one. Telling an entire story in this inherently random, uncontrollable way would make the protagonist feel like an inherently random and uncontrollable person, wouldn’t it? Similarly, an “interactive fiction” art exhibit where players made choices by shooting targets with an airsoft gun would make decisions feel difficult and subject to error. The protagonist of such a story would feel like someone who tries hard but is liable to make mistakes. This is very similar to the choice system in Christine Love’s Twine story Even Cowgirls Bleed. Please, take a moment to play that game. Think about the ways that Love has taken advantage of her choice mechanics to convey certain things about the character.

Even traditional CYOA choice-list storytelling enforces certain ways of thinking and choosing, but we use it so often that these inherent characterization elements are often invisible to us.

The biggest difference between list-based storytelling and other methods of presenting choice, I think, is the addition of the list as an extra narrative “space” where ideas and solutions can be presented separately from the “real” continuum of the story. For example, putting choices in a list allows the writer to include unusual or out-of-left-field solutions that have not been presented anywhere else in the story:

A reader may learn something new in the CYOA choice list which changes their understanding of the dialogue they’ve already read. The author can use this to characterize the player character as an initiative-taking leader, capable of surprising enemies (and readers!) at the last moment.

Swan Hill, on the other hand, used a choice mechanic which made it very very hard for me to present moments where the main character surprised people or took initiative through choice. Swan Hill presents all choices through inline prompts. This means that all possible character choices must be “prompted” to the player before they have the opportunity to click one or the other. Sometimes these prompts come from thoughts the player character has. Sometimes these prompts come from things that other characters say:

So I was trapped in a situation where any time the player made a decision, they had to do so in reaction to things other people said to them, or to thoughts that I, the author, decreed from on high that they should have. And because each page has very little text on it– a style choice I clung to very seriously– the red choice prompts must often appear in the same paragraph, or very close to one another in a short conversation snippet. Essentially, every time the character makes a decision, someone has to swoop down and give them options immediately before they decide.

On a choice-organization level– a level deeper into the guts of the story, really, than plot or prose style– this characterizes the protagonist of Swan Hill as an inherently reactive person who is also often very unsure of themselves. Every time the player makes a decision, they do so in reaction to things going on around them. Whenever I wanted to make the player seem like they were taking initiative through choice, I had to make certain decisions for them. A good example of this is when the character gets into a fistfight with his brother. I choose to make that fight begin; the player ends the fight by responding to my prompt that they are about to throw a punch:

When I started planning Six Months, I knew that I wanted to use the same mechanics from Swan Hill and explore them in a deeper way. This time, however, I planned to really lean into their inherently reactive nature. You play SImon, the asshole duke brother of the Swan Hill protagonist. In Six Months, however, we learn that he isn’t really a self-assured countryside potentate– just a confused, overwhelmed, moderately-pathetic homebody who finds himself in trouble way over his head after foolishly declaring that he will personally execute a relative’s murderer. Simon must relentlessly fake it until he makes it. He’s got imposter’s syndrome all over the damn place, and other characters constantly pester him to make decisions without the proper information or context. I want the player to feel overwhelmed and reactive. What better way to do this than to use a decision system which forces the player to choose reactively?

The big challenge, of course, is to tell a story about a reactive, overwhelmed person that still feels exciting and interesting. My recent test readers found Simon’s attitude and problems compelling enough to keep reading; they have not reported that he feels like a sad sack. I’m pretty sure that I’m heading in a good direction with regards to choice systems, interactivity, mood, and character. Anyway, my testers report that I’m doing a decent-enough job.

Six Months is about 60% done and has over a thousand Twine passages in it. I was shocked to learn that it took one of my test readers over three hours to read. You can listen to me mope and groan about it on my twitter.

Monstr and Ludum Dare 33 – Notes

I did Ludum Dare for the first time this weekend!

Kent, Rosstin, and I organized a team for the Jam section of Ludum Dare (the compo is for solo submissions; the jam is the part of the event that allows team work). We found a bunch of friends who were willing to do art, and the final result is pretty amazing.

The theme this go-round was “you are the monster,” a theme I was admittedly not a huge fan of. (I predicted that a lot of people would just make sprite-swap combat games where the player character was a dragon or something, and boy, was I right!)

We decided to make a game where you are a monster seeking other monsters on a monsters-only dating service similar to OK Cupid or Tinder. We cranked out a randomized game with 60 different monsters in it, 52 of which you can fall madly in love with. Like the other two projects I’ve made with Kent and Rosstin, this game was primarily focused on humor, and used randomized text snippets as a good way to divide up the work and make the project approachable during the limited time of the jam.

Anyway, the final result is here! It is called “Monstr.” We plan on making a polished web version AND an iOS-based Tinder clone out of this project. Stay tuned! The final version will make you cry with joy, I bet.

And if you participated in LD33, please vote here!

Some additional, meandering notes:

Ford (the guy who composed the song with whale music in it for Slaughtertrain) did the music for us again. The track for Monstr contains ACTUAL HUMAN SIGHS OF UNREQUITED LOVE and it is absolutely 100% amazing
I grow increasingly convinced that the only reasonable kind of text game to make for team jams is one consisting entirely of short randomized text snippets. I want to write a Gamasutra blog about how wonderful these jams can be, someday. It is very easy to incorporate many team members into a game based around randomization. So long as you have a competent core coding team, everyone else can engage to the extent that they are able without screwing up the rest of the group. It makes the jam more relaxed and makes the final project better, too.
Games about sex seem to do MUCH better in my twitter sphere than games about literally anything else. I’ve been joking for over a year that if I only wrote sexy stories I would get a lot more attention, and LO AND BEHOLD, it’s true! Please don’t mistake me, I’m not bitter about this– it’s just that Monstr seemed to strike a nerve in the same way (but at a much smaller scale) that Verified Facts struck a nerve several years ago. Some things align with the stars to magically become Internet Candy, and other things do not. I struggle to get even five retweets for interactive short stories about space aliens, but I got a shit ton for an OKC clone full of ridiculous sloppy jokes. It’s a good thing I enjoyed writing all those sloppy jokes, though. 🙂
We used @mrfb’s Twine port of Tracery, a javascript library for making randomized text. It’s super easy to use and very rewarding to work with. Give it a shot!
This was probably the eighth or tenth game jam I have done. Not all of them ended up on the internet so it’s hard for me to make a final list, but I’ve done a LOT of game jams recently and they are definitely making me a better developer. I was talking to a writer at another games company about five months ago and when he revealed that he’d never done a jam, I think I scared him with the force of my enthusiasm. Game jams are GREAT. They make you better at working in teams, better at scraping yourself off the floor after a failure, and more confident in your abilities. Game jams generally make me feel great about myself, even if I don’t do so well. Relatedly: I can’t believe my alma mater still doesn’t do them! They have a games lab/tiny games company there and people who worked for it told me as recently as last winter that they had no idea what jams were. What?? As far as I’m concerned, the most important thing a games program can do for its students is build their confidence and give them shit to put on a resume, and jams do both.

Text game dev gifs are an unfilled niche (that I am filling)

I have created a Tumblr entirely of gifs of my in-dev text games. I know, I know, this sounds stupid and useless, but it’s definitely not.

There are a lot of people out there making text games right now, and thanks to Twine and Leon Arnott’s excellent macros, more and more of these games include text that moves or changes onscreen. This is the kind of stuff that interests me most. I like stories with text “mechanics.” Most of the stuff I make has this kind of thing in it.

It’s hard to excerpt out isolated little moments of these games so that I can discuss/brag about the cool shit I have done. Gifs work well enough, though. So that’s what the tumblr is going to be. Solid gifs of me clicking on shit.

This is not commonly done with, say, novels– nobody sticks two paragraphs of their novel on a blog to brag about some little technical thing they did and the thought process behind it. I am fully aware that the actual text content of a lot of these gifs will be confusing and meaningless to most readers. However, I think I can explain myself well enough to make some of these gifs a little bit valuable. There are “mechanics” that can be discussed even when the text content is taken out-of-context.

It’s important to think very hard about what you do, no matter what you’re doing. Even artists who cultivate an air of carelessness or spontaneity are thinking much harder about their craft and process than most of us realize. When it comes to Twine, we don’t often talk about the nitty-gritty details of hypertext. Twine has a low barrier of entry but you can do a lot of very complicated and weird stuff with it, and it doesn’t necessarily take a lot of practice before you can start to work at a high level of complexity. I think there’s a lot to learn and share there.

Basically, I want to talk about Twine craft and I want to do it with gifs of my unfinished projects. I hope you enjoy it.

Slaughtertrain has been judged “funny” and “charming” by the powers that be

So we finally saw the votes/rankings for the GameJolt Adventurejam competition that we submitted the first draft of Slaughtertrain to. (Don’t worry, the final version of Slaughtertrain is coming soon!)

And guess what? we were judged SEVENTH FUNNIEST and ELEVENTH MOST CHARMING

See our results here!

I can now proudly tell people that I contributed to a CERTIFIED CHARMING GAME.

I have a feeling that people were just fucking with us, though, since we got only 5 votes total and we got a rather high ranking for visuals (there were no visuals in this version of the game). I am however going to stand by those “funny” and “charming” judgments because that’s what we were going for in the first place. Overall, we were #16 out of 86 total games, whatever that means for a jam with so little judging activity.

The new version of Slaughtertrain is almost done. We’ve got art, sound effects, music, and ONE HUNDRED TRAIN CARS. It’s going to blow your goddamn mind.

SLAUGHTERTRAIN: Game Jolt Adventurejam

Kent, Rosstin and I collaborated again on another game jam game– this time for the two-week-long Game Jolt-hosted Adventurejam. You can find our submission here. If you like it and have a Game Jolt account, consider voting for it.

Slaughtertrain is a Snowpiercer parody made in Twine. We wrote over fifty different train cars with different bizarre, trainbound inhabitants, and gave the player an extremely limited, violence-oriented number of verbs. In each car, the player can either kill everyone present, steal the “bombdrugs” this society uses as currency (and bombs, and drugs), or pay 10 bombdrugs to avoid a confrontation and move to the next train. The player has two major stats: health and bombdrugs. They also carry a weapon, which has its own stats: power and durability. Health, power, and durability are never stated directly, but the player can learn to judge these stats by closely reading the game’s repeated text. Gameplay involves juggling weapons to maximize your chances of slaughter-success, and risking injury to acquire as many bombdrugs as possible.

You may be thinking to yourself, “gee, this doesn’t sound much like what I think of as an adventure game,” but the jam had extremely lax rules (that Slaughtertrain definitely fits) and we wanted a structured deadline to help us hack out this game as fast as possible. We were planning for 100 train cars but didn’t get that far; a second version will probably have all 100. Kent will also do a balance pass on the entire game to make it more challenging and interesting to play. We may also get some art in here? We haven’t thought closely about that part of the game yet.

Slaughtertrain is also notable for containing the most original code I have ever written for a game project. All of the stats, randomization effects, and weapon handling processes are carried out with javascript macros.

Anyway, expect to see a fuller, polished version of this game in the future. We’ll release the .tws sourcefiles at that time too, most likely.

Six Months Inspirations

While working on Six Months, I haven’t done a lot of explicit “worldbuilding” work. There are no documents or maps or world bibles describing the places in my story. I do a ton of that for my day job, and I don’t really welcome it into my personal projects. Besides, I’ve spent so long working on this particular story that I’ve learned its world through dumb rote, like a student in a history class.

I do seek out visual inspirations for various locations in the story, though. I did this for Swan Hill, too. I mostly use the Getty museum’s open image database, because it has a lot of chalk and charcoal drawings of early modern European villages, landscapes, and cities. Here are some pictures which I’ve been using as inspiration while working on Six Months.

Rindberg – View of the Rhine River Vallley

Six Months mostly takes place in a large city called Rindberg– the same city where the Chancellor’s university is located in the story Swan Hill. If the capitol of the kingdom is similar to New York, Rindberg is more like Boston– not as big, not as cosmopolitan, but a successful trade port nonetheless, and vitally important to the region.

This drawing of the Rhine river valley was made by a Dutch artist sometime around 1651-1652. The low, flat basin in the image is how I imagine Rindberg looking from the surrounding hills– though Rindberg would be bigger than the town in the drawing. The time period and architecture also fit the story. Simon Villano, the protagonist, would see a similar view as he approaches Rindberg in the few hours immediately before the story begins.

The road to Swan Hill– View of the Residence of Archduke Johann in Gastein Hot Springs

Simon Villano lives in a fertile valley around a week’s journey to the northwest of Rindberg. The same river connects Rindberg and Swan Hill, his home– but to save time on the trip, road travelers will cut through the mountains around which the river winds. They might travel through other towns and aristocratic holdings along the way.

On his journey to Rindberg to make peace with his estranged brother, I imagine that Simon might take a mountain pass that looks a little like this one. This valley contains the mountain stronghold of a baron or baroness whom Simon knows very well. He will stay here one night before continuing on his way in the morning.

Simon’s social network, so to speak, is very small– and made entirely of people he’s known in one way or another since childhood. He does not often leave his home. Although traveling to this mountain pass for business discussions with its lord or lady is normal for Simon, going beyond– to Rindberg– is not. The buildings and trees and winding road in the foreground of this image would represent almost the very edge of Simon’s known world.

Swan Hill– View of Benevento

This is the image that I used to represent Swan Hill in this Twine story. I always imagined Swan Hill as more of a manor than a castle– remodeled in recent years, as the kingdom strengthened and wars subsided. But I enjoy the shape of the river and the buildings next to it, and the thick bunches of trees mixed throughout. I also enjoy the fact that it is a view from a road. When Simon and Robert pull up to the manor in the beginning of the Swan Hill, they see a view quite similar to this one.

This duchy is Simon’s whole world. He rarely leaves for any reason. He has immense power in this little region, but he is provincial as hell– the biggest fish in a tiny little fishbowl. From Robert’s more-cosmopolitan perspective, Simon may as well be trapped here.

Mirian – Landscape with Hilltop Village

There are two major rivers in the story– the River Scoven, along which Swan Hill and Rindberg sit, and the Taschender River, home to an ethnic group which has been oppressed by Simon’s dominant one throughout the history of the kingdom. When Simon was a teenager, his father brought him on a campaign in the Taschender river valley. This troubling experience with an unjust, messy war dramatically changed Simon’s personality and attitude toward life.

The city from which the local lord rules the Taschender river region is called Mirian. I imagine that a forbidding castle prickling with cannons sits in the corner of this city, overlooking a blighted, rocky valley and a rebellious populace. Simon’s father fought up and down this valley twenty years ago– but Simon got out as fast as he could by marrying young and taking over the family business. This view probably brings him many unpleasant memories.

Salienburg– Toledo??

The capitol of the kingdom is a city called Salienburg. I’ve recycled this name throughout several abortive fiction projects over the last ten years (!!) and it is probably the oldest element in the story. The only firm qualities it has retained throughout all its various ghostly incarnations are:

It is dominated by a large castle or fortress,
It is extremely urban (compared to other places in the kingdom, anyway),
It is fairly large,
It is near the ocean,
Most of the architecture is stone (compared to RIndberg and Mirian, which are mostly wood-built).

I have toyed with the idea of using Rome as a kind of inspiration, but I’m super sick of stuff based on Rome, and no city in this story is anywhere near as big as Rome was. But the city of Toledo looks a little more like what I’d imagined, so here’s a picture of it, I guess.

About The Hive Abroad

The Hive Abroad began as an experiment to see if I could write a short story consisting of discontinuous, kinda-“randomized” vignettes which nevertheless maintained a sense of emotional heightening despite their non-linearity. I wanted the reader to choose the order they read the passages, but I also wanted the experience to feel as if it had a proper beginning, middle, and end.

The challenge in writing this story was that although I had some knowledge of what the reader’s experience would be like, and some control over the order in which they read the passages, I did not have complete knowledge or complete control. Writing like this for a game is much easier and more comfortable, because in games we’re used to giving the player agency, used to urging them to take responsibility for and ownership of their actions. But when I write something where the reader has NO agency in the story’s events, I am used to being the one with all the responsibility and ownership. But this isn’t the case in The Hive Abroad.

So, this felt weird to write. It was sort of an exercise in psyching myself out.

—–

Basically, the story is made up of around 25 short vignettes arranged in four major “tiers”. The later tiers contain more serious, sad, or frightening events than the earlier tiers. The later tiers also require you to have encountered certain setting information which is explained in the earlier tiers– for example, the nature of Marun’s morphing abilties, or the names of the three different planets on which Sam lived his life.

When I first began writing the story, I was using weird Twine passage setups to create “loops” that were otherwise impossible in Twine’s markup language. However, this became very tedious; every time I wanted to add a passage or move a passage from one tier to another, I’d have to make huge changes all over the project.

During Indiecade, however, Andi McClure graciously wrote a little piece of javascript which allowed me to make these changes much more quickly. The final version of the story would not have been possible without her help.

An earlier, appealingly-symmetrical version of the story. Andi’s macro allowed me to restructure this story many times before picking my favorite version.

The macro she wrote allows me to name all the passages that I wish to include in a timeline of sequential events, then allow the player to explore left and right along that timeline. I always start you off in the middle of the timeline, giving you options both forward and backward in time. If you read in one direction for a while, then “turn around,” the macro will skip you over the passages you’ve already read and take you beyond them to the next unread passage. If you reach one end of the tier, you will no longer have hands pointing in that direction because you won’t have the option to proceed any further that way.

Here’s a diagram of one way you could possibly read the second “tier” of events:

So, I know which passage in the timeline the player will read first: the middle passage. I also know which two passages they may read last: the earliest and latest passages. This means that I can put more “intense” events at the beginning and end of the timeline, and I know that the reader won’t encounter either of these until they’re at least halfway done with the “chapter.” This will result in gradual emotional heightening throughout the chapter, and allow the transitions between the tiers to feel stark and interesting.

However, this control is incomplete. I have no idea how the player will explore the middle of the tier, how many times they will double-back, or even how many pointer-hands will be on screen for the second half of each tier. My control over your moment-to-moment experience is incomplete and uncertain. But– to take a step back– I have much more complete control over the emotional heightening of the entire story as it progresses from the beginning tier to the final tier.

For example, I can put more disastrous, intense, traumatic events in the later tiers. I can put events in the later tiers which play off the reader’s familiarity with the characters. I can do a lot of different things to ensure that the reader’s experience– although unpredictable– has the overall average emotional arc that I want it to have.

This is pretty amusing to me. Although I have no idea what any given minute of your reading experience will be like, or how jarring any individual transition may be, I do know what the “overall experience’ will be like. I have more control over the general than the specific. I’m usually all about specifics: in my current project, there are sections I’ve played close to fifty or sixty times, slowly changing the wording and the interaction sections bit by bit. The Hive Abroad forced me to take a step back and let things go.

—–

Aside from Twine, I know no other tool that would have let me write something like this so easily. In the future, I’m interested in possibly using Twine for other non-“game” writing projects– projects which use randomization and non-linearity to expand their stories in ways that don’t necessarily involve game-like experiences.

Here’s an example of a project which actually accomplishes that: a fan-made web version of Cory Doctorow’s novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town which randomizes several characters’ names every time they appear. In the original version of the book, the characters’ names change every time they are used, keeping only the same first initial. Reading it as a text which actually changes the names randomly for each reader creates an experience which is more personal and, I think, better representative of the book’s core themes. If you’re going to have a story with themes of uncertainty and ambiguity, why not use digital tools to actually create that uncertainty in the text itself?

And, going forward– if I’m going to use nonlinearity in a story again, why not use it in a story where disorganization, randomness, uncertainty, or disjointed time are important themes?

If I ever had to write an “artist statement,” I’d probably say that I think the way in which a digital story is told should somehow reflect or enhance its themes. Swan Hill was about a guy buried in his own thoughts– so I used digital tools to actually bury his thoughts inside other thoughts. I’d love to write a nonlinear, non-game story where the core themes of the tale are more deeply expressed by the story’s non-linearity. I don’t think The Hive Abroad really does this, but for me it’s a good stepping-on point.

—–

When it come to games, my favorite story-games all use unique story-delivery methods to further express their core themes, pulpy as those themes often are. Pulling the trigger in a Mass Effect interrupt feels as brazen and ballsy as an action-hero must feel when they step into the middle of a discussion and escalate shit with a gun. The thing the player does– the physical action of pulling the trigger during the NPC’s speech– mirrors the emotions in the scene and the overall escapist fantasy of the game itself.

The best recent example of this kind of wizardry is Pry, a mobile game nominated as a finalist for the Narrative award in the 2015 IGF. The player navigates the story with pinching and spreading gestures on the touchscreen. The text opens and closes like an accordion of folded paper, revealing or hiding details. These same gestures are also used to control video storytelling moments: sweeping your fingers apart will peel open the character’s eyes and play a video of the world around him. Pinching them closed will pull up the character’s “unconscious,” where rapidly-flashing images and text give you hints about the deeper meaning of exterior events.

The physical actions Pry forces you to perform while reading actually mirror the themes of the story. Eyes, wounds to the eyes, photographs, bright lights, moments of peeking voyeurism, and other vision-related themes and symbols are important to Pry’s plot. The protagonist spends most of his interior time agonizing over his motivations for the deeds he regrets, and the player slowly learns more and more about the degree to which he is culpable for the story’s central tragedy. You peel apart the text to open an eye, reveal a truth, expose a guilt– first-person video sequences are literally hidden between the lines of the story. If your finger slips on the screen, the pages may snap shut again, hiding the video behind a glut of evasive, frantic, stream-of-consciousness babble. This “prying” motion makes the story more than it would otherwise be. This is the kind of narrative magic I’m interested in. It doesn’t have to be about physical motions or touchscreen gestures or polished video sections, either: some Twine games have already accomplished stuff this dee using only text change macros.

Anyway, bottom line is that I’d love to write a non-linear short story that uses its non-linearity to create something big and resonant by uniting plot, themes, and narrative delivery. I’ll be thinking about this while I work on my other projects this year, that’s for sure.

The Hive Abroad

The Hive Abroad is an experimental, nonlinear sci-fi short story about friendship, community, and changing yourself.

You can read it here.

It is also available on itch.io, because that’s where the twines are at now, apparently

I began working on this story in 2013. I finished it in early 2015 with the help of Andi McClure (code) and Julie Fiveash (art).

Andi wrote a Twine macro for me which allowed me to queue up passages for the player to navigate as if they were a timeline. Having this code made designing and testing the story’s structure 10000x faster and easier. Take a look at Andi’s website.

Julie drew images used in the story’s navigation UI. Take a look at Julie’s website.

This story was written in Twine 1.4.2. You can find the story’s .tws file here. It contains all the javascript used to make the nonlinear navigation work.

Progress on Six Months

I’m still working on my sequel to Swan HIll, a novella-length twine game called Six Months. I’ve been working on it now for about six months off and on. (Ha!) My recent move to Los Angeles has left me pretty isolated, without a lot of things to do or people to hang out with IRL– so I’ve had a lot of time to work on this project. So I’m charging ahead!

I’ve got the feel and direction of the experience nailed down, I think. Six Months is a murder mystery, but it’s not a solveable murder puzzle. There’s no inventory, no clues to pick up. You see, the joy I get from reading detective novels has never been in the solving of the mystery or the revelation of the killer, or anything like that– I like detective novels because they’re often great character studies (of the detective). I want this game to be more like that.

The main character in the tale is the asshole duke brother from Swan Hill. Before I wrote Swan Hill I was actually writing a story in which Simon played a major role and his brother Robert, the Chancellor wizard guy, was only a background figure– so I’ve had Simon in my head for much longer than I had the protagonist of Swan Hill. Simon’s a bit of a fucked-up guy. He’s very much at home in his duchy, where he’s been in charge of everything for years– but he’s heavily reliant on his family and on the privileges he gets from being the biggest fish in that little pond. When he heads to the city to solve this crime, he has to figure out how to handle himself alone for the first time in his adult life– which is hilarious, because he’s around 40 years old.

Six Months focuses on a ridiculously risky situation Simon puts himself in after an emotional reaction to a relative’s murder. Instead of letting the young, incompetent king and his grasping military policemen handle the investigation, Simon invokes an old-school rite that gives him jurisdiction– so long as he successfully finds and personally kills the perpetrator within six months.

My focus in college was medieval and early modern Europe. During this time, extensive urbanization changed the way people related to their superiors, inferiors, and governments– specifically with regards to the amount of casual violence between individuals, and between individuals and the state. Simon’s problems in Six Months were written with these changes in mind. Although these fictional “six month pledges” are still legal in his country, nobody does them anymore. Culture has changed, but the law hasn’t, and powerful people like Simon still have access to legally murderous acts of revenge. Simon’s friends and family often argue that he shouldn’t have ever made this vow, and while playing as Simon, you may find that you agree.

So Simon has to figure out how to resolve this oath without completely destroying himself and his family. Would it be better to deliberately fail the oath? To accuse the wrong person? To solve the case properly and do the duty everyone expects from him? Because his case is so public, he risks causing harm to various suspected minority groups in the kingdom if he encourages the military police to pursue them. And on top of this, his family has a certain ‘history’ with both of the major groups that may have been responsible for the murder.

Add to this the enormous unresolved emotional baggage Simon had with the murdered person, and you’ve got a mystery that’s less about finding and punishing the evildoer and more about “how do I fix all of this while feeling the least like shit?”

In order for the audience to feel like this is a worthwhile tale sitting through, they’ll have to desperately want to see the solution to Simon’s problems. They’ll have to want him to not feel like shit! To this end, I’ve reduced his assholery. He also spends a lot of time in “fish out of water mode,” so that I’ll have excuses for explaining things to the reader. I feel like this is a big contrast to most of the standard “gritty fantasy” fiction that people read today. In stories like Game of Thrones, we expect to see clever characters brilliantly tricking one another in the gilded, got-your-shit-together halls of cackling political genius. But in Six Months, for reasons both mechanical and thematic, you’re gonna be piloting a guy who does NOT have his shit together AT ALL. (I sometimes worry that too many of the characters in this story have too little of their shit together!)

Anyway, that’s where my brain is on this story so far. If you like slow-burning low-key mystery stuff, and if you have great sympathy with people who don’t have their shit together, you’ll probably like this story a lot.

For a different view on where my head is right now, here are the kind of books I was reading immediately before drafting out the first outlines for this story. They all influenced me in different ways while I was figuring out what kind of story I wanted to tell. I wish I had a list of all those early modern europe urban history books I read in college, but I don’t, sorry. 😦

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John LeCarre
The Dogs of Riga by Henning Mankell
Shriek by Jeff Vandermeer
Good Bye To All That by Robert Graves

Spaceship Carptain — Naked Twine Jam

Spaceship Carptain is a game I made for the Naked Twine Jam taking place today.

Solve a puzzle/mystery as a giant fish covered in worms!

The theme of the Naked Twine Jam was Twine games without CSS or Javascript. I plan on adding both of those things to Spaceship Carptain after the jam, before I host it here in my own site.

If you are stuck, try combining actions in different orders and repeating certain actions over and over again like a robot.

There are two deaths in the story and one ending. The difficulty is low, particularly if you read all the text closely. This is the first puzzle game I have made with Twine.

Laura Michet's Blog

Tag Archives: Twine