Month: June 2016

IF for tough times

What a fortnight it’s been. Here is some free feelgood IF.

Birdland (Brendan Patrick Hennessy)
Bridget, an anxious moppet of a fourteen-year-old, is miserable at summer camp: she doesn’t fit in, she’s tongue-tied around pretty much everyone (but especially the tough-talking teen detective Bell Park), and she just wants to go home. Not only that, sinister birds are invading her dreams and the adults are starting to act very strangely indeed.

Bridget’s behaviour in dreams affects her personality, which in turn opens up different options in the daytime. It’s a really nice mechanic, giving the dreams concrete purpose as well as humour and flavour. It’s written in dialogue only, and in the hands of a less capable writer might not work, but Hennessy’s dialogue zings. I challenge anyone to get through a couple of pages without laughing. Also GAY TEENS WHO DON’T DIE.

Feelgood Factor: HILARIOUSLY ADORABLE.

QUEER TRANS MENTALLY ILL POWER FANTASY (baphomeme)
“TODAY WHEN YOU GET UP IN THE MORNING YOU FIND THAT YOUR BODY HAS BEEN REPLACED WITH A GLITTERING IRIDESCENT MECHA SUIT ENCRUSTED WITH EVERY NICE MESSAGE YOU’VE EVER BEEN SENT”

I play this game every so often and it always gives me warm feelings. It’s about an ordinary day of going to class, being comforted, giving comfort and destroying capitalism whle encased in an iridescent mecha suit.

A short game, it nevertheless packs a punch and, wonderfully, the nice messages from the quote above are crowdsourced by the author, spreading the warmth and love around.

Feelgood Factor: EMPOWERINGLY EYE-MISTY.
Notes: swearing.

Child’s Play (Stephen Granade)
It’s playgroup day and that other baby Zoe keeps stealing your favourite toy. Outrageous!

I haven’t got very far in this because I don’t have much patience for puzzles, but the writing is delightful and getting into the head of a baby is actually quite relaxing. I feel like I have a bit of insight into how Alistair might feel (certainly I felt “cry” was the right solution in a lot of situations…).

Feelgood Factor: BABIES.
Notes: If you are not fond of babies or find them stressful, this is probably not for you.

HIGH END CUSTOMIZABLE SAUNA EXPERIENCE (Porpentine Charity Heartscape)
The breathless, high-octane tale of a CYBER HACKER who just wants their SAUNA EXPERIENCE. It’s nowhere near as dark as most of Porpentine’s games: the dystopian setting is played for laughs rather than the usual feeling of plunging one’s hands into the world’s grimy innards, and it is gloriously shameless about its genre conventions and shortcuts. I love this game for its reeling excitement followed by the delightfully relaxing SAUNA EXPERIENCE.

(I got a huggable manta ray. This is a major life goal for me now.)

Feelgood Factor: REELINGLY ADVENTUROUS.
Notes: swearing, also if you’re like me and are squicked out by plant-human hybrids choose Crystal or Robot hacker rather than Plant.

Tiny Utopias (Caelyn Sandel)
All the Tiny Utopias are good to check out when your mood is low, but Caelyn Sandel’s gentle, soothing landscapes are marvellously meditative. There are four: Palm River, Tiny Home, Tiny Beach and Tiny Sea, and within each are a host of nodes leading to descriptive text.

Sandel includes lovely soundscapes in the background, adding to the sense of gentle relaxation. I return often to these pieces, enjoying the feeling of a few moments of calm.

Feelgood Factor: GENTLY SOOTHING.

(Many thanks to the &if folks for recommendations!)

Bring Out Your Dead: The Wedding Party

Bring Out Your Dead is a game jam for unfinished work that never quite worked out. It’s primarily for IF pieces, but has expanded out to non-IF games, prototypes, and pen and paper storygames. As a rampant perfectionist and someone who has a habit of keeping projects clutched close to my chest, this jam makes me very nervous, which is exactly why I figured I should enter it.

The Wedding Party was my first non-Twine, non-mod IF piece. I wrote it during 2014 until it stalled. Its setting and characters are roughly based on those in a novel I was drafting at the time.

There are things I like about it: deciding the PC’s preferred address rather than their gender, the characters, the setting, the ridiculous intricacy of the breakfast scene in which vast nests of conditional text display depending on who you’ve spoken to and who you happen to be romancing.

However, in my excitement to get the story down, I didn’t really plan it in advance, resulting in a lot of early quest-giving and not as much problem-solving. There’s a fair amount of binary choices which are clearly “do you want to raise X stat or Y stat?” and I’m not sure about how well the PC signalling their intent works. Ultimately those things could have been fixed (maybe will be fixed at some point in the future?) but the lack of planning meant that I had, and still have, little idea of the project’s scope or where exactly it’s going. Which resulted in stalling and other, smaller projects being more appealing.

Still, I’m fond of it and it certainly taught me a lesson: keep a strong plan and outline in mind at all times, as it’ll help with pacing and story structure.

Failbetter Workshop: It’s Complicated; IF Meetup

Between a cold hitting all three of us in the household in quick succession, the baby having a plethora of teeth coming through, and a deluge of heartbreaking things happening in the world (let’s euphemistically call them “current events”) it hasn’t been an easy couple of weeks. In the middle of it all was a day of respite.

Failbetter Games (Fallen London, The Last Court, Sunless Sea) regularly hold workshops, both for their writers and for visitors to come and see the process, and join in if they wish. Last Tuesday was It’s Complicated: Writing Relationships in Interactive Fiction, which is so much My Kind Of Thing that it’s not even funny. When the tickets came on sale, I dithered in a cycle of money?-childcare?-travel?-how? but Fay encouraged me to go for it, saying we could sort something out. I’m really glad I did.

Olivia Wood (Failbetter’s editor) has talked about romance and sex in videogames for Videobrains hilariously and sensibly, so I knew I was in for a treat. She gave another talk about the issues that face writers when portraying friendships and romances: how to make characters feel real while still having a point plotwise, how to avoid a situation where an otherwise strongminded character agrees limply with whatever the PC decides they should do, how to balance showing a relationship changing and growing with avoiding interminably slowing the pace.

There aren’t easy answers to these and the other issues we discussed – if there were, decent relationships would be far more common in videogames – but talking about them was inspiring and invigorating.

We looked at several pieces of work from Fallen London and Sunless Sea, plus a piece from Harry Tuffs’ House of Many Doors: a diverse selection of NPC-focused plots, scenes and conversations. It was great to have insight into the writing and editing process, and hear from the writers where they had run into problems.

There was a delicious sushi lunch and a chat with the other attendees and the Failbetter folks, which was lovely. The Failbetter office is a converted Victorian chapel with a heavy wrought-iron gargoyle doorknocker, vastly high ceilings and a spiral staircase; it feels very appropriate for the strange, Gothic games they make. The atmosphere was welcoming and friendly, as was everyone there. It must be weird having interlopers all up in your workspace, but everyone was gracious and I felt at ease. Especially nice for me: I’m a social creature, but pick up awkwardness and start getting self-conscious easily.

Over the afternoon the other attendees and I chilled out, chatted, and walked. I hadn’t been to Greenwich since I was tiny but the tube journey there was surreal: a combination of bright, beautiful Regency pompousness with gentrified Mirror’s-Edge skyscraping dystopia. A rainstorm sent us scurrying back to the offices where we hung out and I fiddled around with writing until it was time for the IF Meetup Group.

We had three presentations: Tory Hoke of sub-Q (a project especially close to my heart), Derek Moody of Whodunnit Manor, and Nathan Penlington of Choose Your Own Documentary. Choose Your Own Documentary was particularly exciting as it was completely new to me and was fascinating – it made me wish I’d known about the show when it was on! Emily Short has done a rundown on the talks here.

My friends Mary and Grant kindly had me to stay with them and their marvellous giant ginger cat, and early the next morning it was time to head for home. The sunshine was perfect, warm and bright but not overheated, and even the rush-hour-packed tube didn’t dampen my spirits too much.

It was a break for meeting new people, discussing fictional friendships and romances, hearing people’s stories, and seeing friends: just right. Talking about nerdy writerly things that make my brain fizz helps bolster me for dealing with the world, and with life, when both are making me wilt.