we’re still not at the end. Might be a couple more entries. Let me know if this ‘a little at a time’ writing schedule is too jarring. I could imagine that most people would like to just read the whole thing in one go when it is all done (which is why I put these little blurbs at the top. So you know what weeks to skip if you are waiting for the end), but I also thought it might be an interesting document of the process. Each week, I change a little more of the previous entries. Not sure if that is the best way of working, but what the hell, it’s a lot better than thinking about writing stories and not doing it.

Still going. I’m probably at about the midpoint now, but we’ll see. There are always either more or less words than I anticipate between each natural stopping point. I could just stop mid sentence, but that doesn’t seem very reader friendly. So probably 2 more posts, maybe 3 before the conclusion?

we’re hitting the twist now. it might have started as a cute, first date story, but it’s gonna get weirder from here on out. The line shuffled forward a few steps and Kaitlin shuffled with them. She was fairly sure that she had forgotten how her knees worked. Was she being awkward? Maybe? Oh god, she was. She absolutely was being the most awkward. All she had to do was walk a few steps and not act like a doofus. Hundreds of times, many hundreds of times, she had stood in this same line in front of this same counter in this same coffee shop waiting for the same low V-neck wearing barista taking his slow ass time. Sometimes she felt tired or irritable, sometimes she felt rushed and overextended, but never awkward. Now she was feeling judgemental and guilty for feeling judgemental. Or maybe she just felt anxious. Did it show? Could Malcolm tell? He totally could. How could he not? Anxious was leaking out of her pores. She pressed her arms a little tighter to her sides so the smell of anxious couldn’t escape from her armpits.

Here’s the start of a new story. Same drill. I’ll write and edit it a bit more each week until it’s done, but I went and did something different this time. I actually wrote the ending first, so I know where it’s going to end up. Or at least I do if I don’t change it. If you have any comments or feedback, let me know and I’ll try to edit accordingly.

​My past post was the game that I made for the Ludum Dare game jam. It was a text based game using the interactive fiction engine Twine. Twine started out as a modification of the HTML and JavaScript modifiable web page thingy tiddlywiki http://tiddlywiki.com .

I took part in the Ludum Dare game jam this weekend and thought “what if I couldn’t use any of my normal tools. No 3D. No graphics. Just text and a lot of scripting. So I installed the new version of twine, a text adventure engine, and tried to make a mostly random story-type experience. This is what I came up with in 48hrs, while also learning how scripting in twine works. It’s weird. Enjoy.

Best games - The Outfoxies Wanna play a game? Sure what you got for fighting games? Fighting games. Let’s see. Street Fighter, more Street Fighter, Tekken, Mortal Kombat …

Well that’s a finished story. I think there might be a lot of editing left to do, and maybe I will add a few more paragraphs, but that’s it. It’s complete and might be a jumping off point for another story sometime later. I think there is quite a bit that I could explore in Uniune culture and history, so maybe I will. we’ll see I guess.

I recommend that you don’t read the story now. You could, but it isn’t finished and I’m still changing a lot of it. If you are interested in reading a story in a very scattered condition just to see how or if it comes together, then go right ahead. When I actually do finish it I will make sure to start the post with a note that says so. Don’t worry, you won’t miss it.

This is what happens when a story starts heading off in the wrong direction. like most of these posts, in my original document I have a bunch of half formed ideas, paragraphs that weren’t working, and other notes. In the case of stories, the notes include a short outline. Despite revisions, the outline just wasn’t working the way I wanted. I figured that if I wanted to understand out how to fix it, I would just need to write a bit more. So I did. This is the process, or at least my process. Next time I post progress on this story, I will have gutted, rearranged, and rewritten large chunks of it.

Well, time for another story. I’m going to do the same thing as last time, writing it out across a few posts, editing and revising as I go. I don’t think this one will take quite as long as the last, but we shall see.

many lovely games whirlwind week wondering which dev secret dirt bag

Best Games - The Oregon Trail The phrase “you have died of dysentery” shouldn’t really spark fond nostalgia. The prospect of adhering to a grueling pace on meager rations shouldn’t elicit joy. There is narrow demographic for whom choosing to ford or float across a river while several of your family members suffered from measles and fever was the best part of the school day. Presented as educational fare, I think the only thing that anyone ever really learned from The Oregon Trail was to buy lots of bullets instead of food. Food you could hunt 100 pounds at a time while on the trail. Money was next to worthless west of the 100th meridian but life and death pivot on oxen and wagon axles. Finally, and without exception, all pioneers must float down the columbia river. These are the lessons taught by The Oregon Trail. This was the information that a generation or three retained, extracted from Apple II computers lodged at the backs of classrooms across north america. I played it again today. The Oregon Trail is still one of the best games.

Since I am always anywhere from 6 months to 3 years behind on games, I recently started playing Metal Gear Solid V. So far I find myself in agreement with 90% of popular opinion on this game. I think it is fantastic. That would be the smart place to leave it. Just acknowledge that I like the game and move on. I can go play it, enjoy myself, and not try to overanalyze it. If you have read any of these posts, you know that isn’t how I function. Figuring out why one game is more enjoyable than another game is sort of my jam. Saying things like “my jam” is also my jam. The full extent of the jam. So, getting back to it, this is what I think makes Metal Gear Solid V a good game. It waits. This is a trait in great games that I have written a little about before. The Souls series of games is probably the most celebrated for waiting. By waiting, I mean that the game is happy to wait for the player to initiate play. This doesn’t mean that the game is slow or that it lacks intensity. It means that the design of the game is player reliant. When you start a game of Robotron 2084 your character appears at the center of the screen and a horde of robots converge on you until either you clear the level and move on to the next or they touch you and the game ends. If you start the game and then lift your hands from the controls the robots will quickly close on you and end the game. The game system is player centric, but not player reliant. It will play itself to an end state with or without you. With the exception of a few timed missions, MGSV is pretty willing to let the player take everything at their own pace. Want to lay down by a rock during a mission and research dog armor? Go for it. Want to retry that mission but only use grenades / sniper rifles / inflatable decoys? Not a problem. Want to run one mission over and over until you can finish it in a minute and a half? You can, and the game even expects that you might. This waiting is different from a game that simply has no combat in an area or requires you to move to a new arena passing through an invisible switch that starts the next wave or puzzle. Even fairly sophisticated games that fall under that category, like the Uncharted series for example, really aren’t that much different from Robotron. You move from level to level, often without any indication that you have, and the game presents you with challenges that, in the case of combat, play out with or without your input. Waiting is when a game operates in one state until the player chooses to trigger a new state through interaction. If the game provides a lot of options for how, when, and why the player triggers a new state, manipulating the system becomes the source of fun. This sort of goes back to my theory that fun is when our brains predict patterns from apparent chaos. A game system that waits until poked by a player offers pattern resolving opportunities by the bagful. This isn’t to say that level or wave based games aren’t fun, they can be phenomenal, but they are player centric not player reliant. The player centric system will play out the simulation to an end point regardless of what the player does or doesn’t do. The player reliant system will just run. It’s possible that it would run forever while waiting for the player to interact with it. Even after the player manipulates the system it can keep running and never actually end the simulation. You as the player are required for the system to change, but the simulation is never driving toward any particular state. It just waits. It waits for you. There, I took the time to write this, when really what I wanted to do the whole time is go back to playing MGSV. It’s late now, but maybe just one quick mission.