Rewinding // Rewriting
Hi there! Here's the 2nd long-awaited (?) update, in which I have continued practically nothing from the previous two weeks. That's the danger of working on my own this summer, I suppose - I can jump around projects far too easily.
What I've been working on
Mostly writing, since writing is hard and for some reason I keep doing it. Also, I've got a bit of an announcement to make!
Champion of Molten Flesh
...so this is super-belated, since I made this game months ago for a college course, and simply haven't done anything with it, until now.
Anyway, this is champion of molten flesh. An interactive fiction horror game(?) made in Twine about asking the gods to cure an illness and accidentally becoming a hero along the way. Fair warning, it has some graphic description of flesh and disease.
It's my first foray into Twine and interactive fiction in general, and was mostly written as an exploration of choices and how games empower or take away power through those choices. It is also in the (surprisingly saturated) category of 'Twine body horror' games, which I could go on and on about if I wanted to. Anyway, I'm proud of the game, though I've also come to the conclusion that I probably won't be writing too much more of this kind of horror in the future.
I also spent too long making a cool cover image. You might've seen it floating around instagram a while back, but it's still cool:
Editing Crimson
Earlier in the week, I went through an old computer with a bunch of my old stories on it, and read them all for some reason. Like, think high school or early college me. I wrote some clumsy stories. But at the same time, there are a few that are more competent than I remember them being, and hold thoughts from the past that I can no longer replicate...so part of me wanted to edit them and actually do something with them beyond letting them sit in an old hard drive.
Crimson (working title) is one of them, and perhaps one of my longest stories - it's about two estranged friends, one who becomes a police officer, one who accidentally leads a criminal hacking group, as they slowly uncover a network conspiracy in the city. It desperately needed editing...so I spent some time doing that. It's coming along very slowly, in part because I've got so many other things to work on too.
Editing is harder to me than writing. Writing is about figuring out what to say, editing is how to say it. Editing is where the cracks in a story show through, and sometimes I paint them over and make things worse. Oops. Anyway, I have a bunch of stories I need to edit, some of which may benefit from fresh eyes. If you ever want to read stuff that I make, let me know.
Farsider Corner
Speaking of writing, Farsider is...also mostly writing. The script is about 60% written now, going at the general pace of writing a scenario a week (I've written 3/5). Haven't quite sorted out how we'll get it ingame, but I can worry about that later.
I also commissioned some environment art to help inspire me for the backgrounds of this game, so I've started working on a level editor in the meanwhile.
Level Editing
...the level editor doesn't really have (final) graphics at the moment, so is unfortunately unimpressive to show. It looks like this, complete with lamppost made in MS Paint:
The engine for drawing the levels actually works off a modified destructible terrain example, where each grid cell can have up to 3 triangles to represent how much of that cell is 'filled in' by walls. This is for the sole purpose of being able to represent curved spaces and walls that don't fit a particular grid, as you can see in the screenshot.
So yes, I did spend a whole lot of effort on implementing this just so that the Farside can have all these nicely curved walls.
The way it works is that you literally draw in the floor like a paint program, so that's nice. I still have to work on adding game objects and saving and loading, but the script writing takes priority so this might be a while.
Misc. Rambling
Let's talk a little bit about wikis.
I recently realized that I got interested in a lot of books/games/media because I read their wiki and read the summaries of everything
If I'm interested after reading the wiki, I read the source material for extra details. I jump around to all the parts that seemed interesting from the wiki, reading both forward and backwards. I feel like this is the only way for me to get into very long series, since otherwise the sheer amount of material is overwhelming to me.
(I'm also the kind of person that likes to skip ahead in a book to figure out what happens. Maybe the two are related.) I have my own little pet wiki for my stories / world that I maintain in whatever time I haven't spent doing everything else I do, and sort of wondering now if/how I should integrate it into my other work.
Other Rambling
So this is something that didn't quite fall into any of the above categories, but the past two weeks have...not been great. I'm in a bit of a slump right now, fretting over writing and spending a lot of time almost numb. I might also be suffering from a head cold, which might explain a few things.
Either way, it feels like I'm going through everything slowly, and I haven't been diligent in keeping up with, well, anything. If you've responded to my emails, I'll get back to you soon, once I sort out my inbox. If you want to talk about anything, feel free to ping me anywhere.
Next time I might do a worldbuilding post, since I've been knee-deep in stories (most of my stories take place in the same fantasy world...just across a very wide time range). I'm also debating opening a Patreon at some point, both to keep inspiring me to keep up with updates, and to help fund / assess interest of some of these smaller projects. I don't know, mostly just musing at this point. I make all these things and I'm never sure of what to do with them.