The Creative Process #1 - Hand Me Down

They say the first draft of a story isn’t about telling a story for your readers, but you telling the story to yourself. That’s part of the nature of this newsletter, and, more immediately, this is the first of these posts and I’m experimenting with how to tell stories best by structuring a post.

So enjoy, but definitely send me any feedback (via @brettwitty on Twitter or email brettwitty@substack.com). If you’ve found this newsletter without subscribing, save yourself some effort and subscribe:

My current project: Hand Me Down

My current creative focus is my interactive fiction piece Hand Me Down. It’s about games a father makes for his daughter.

I plucked this project from the backburner as it was timely and doable. I had first started this project before my daughter was born. I have a second baby due Any Day Now, so it feels appropriate to work on it again. It’s a project that I can implement piece by tiny piece, so it might work well with the sleep upheaval we’re about to crash into.

They say “write what you know” and I know interactive fiction, creative projects, the way time is both slow and fast, fatherhood, and a few of my fringe interests. Yet, Hand Me Down is not about me nor my family. But there’s ideas that I’ve been thinking about for a while, and wanted to offer up for people to chew on.

Hand Me Down is about a USB key that a daughter, Ruby, is given at her father’s funeral. A family artifact, of sorts. A hand-me-down. Her father, Miles, had a crazy idea before she was born to make a game for her. So he starts making what he knows: an interactive fiction parser game. Of course, life gets in the way and as she grows, his scope creeps and deadlines slip. A game meant for a 6-year old ends up being a Sweet 16 present.

As the realities of actual teenagers hits him, he ditches the old game to write a new one more aligned with the crazes of the time - an escape room, themed on teenage experiences. Time slips by and he doesn’t complete it.

He does, however, keep the projects forever open on his computer as a habit. It becomes an endless hobby, and a diary of sorts. Through the years his wife, Kim, grows dissatisfied with her lot in life and her work changes the dynamic of the house. Miles struggles with holding this together, his dreams of creative projects, and how Ruby grows up in a way quite differently to how he expected. Eventually Miles and Kim divorce.

Through a complicated series of new relationships for both adults, Miles is a part-time dad for Ruby, and also semi-adopts Kim’s new step-son, Will.

Time slips on and on. Ruby’s 16th birthday passes by like a bullet. Miles still keeps his old projects open, hoping one day to reshape them into the present he wanted to give.

Miles gets sick with cancer, and Will helps him through it. Will finds the old projects and helps Miles stitch them together before he dies. You play the two games inside a larger, bridging game.

Technically this is a Twine game that links to two TADS 3 games. In the Twine game, you play as Ruby exploring the artifact and playing through at the encouragement of Will.

I like the tension of using Twine (the new kids’ interactive fiction) with my favourite IF system (TADS 3) which is almost obsolete. Stitching them together isn’t too hard — it’s a few weblinks with web-hosted text games. I’ve toyed with the idea of the TADS 3 games being optional, with Ruby playing through an abridged commentary instead. I feel this is a great but simultaneously vastly stupid idea. Who puts effort into something people might avoid? Well…

Thematically, Hand Me Down is a combination of ideas I’ve been thinking about for many years. The one I’ll go into in detail today is archaeogaming, the application of archaeological thinking to computer games. It’s explored by the blog Archaeogaming.com.

Games are usually played on the surface level. What is presented is what you interact with. But games are made by creative processes by people over time. Occasionally underneath the surface level is a rich network of ideas and connections that you only uncover with dedicated work.

Heaven’s Vault is an overtly archaeological game. You discover an ancient culture by uncovering hieroglyphics and interpreting their meaning.

Unpacking is ostensibly a game about unpacking boxes into a room. But over the course of many levels, you discover who you are playing as, and how their life pans out. It never tells you directly, but the game mechanics and items tell a subtle, emotional story.

Archaeological games bleed into a related sub-genre where story is implied (Gorogoa) or uncovered (Her Story). Easter eggs and forensically-extracted deprecated content are another way of seeing the hands of the creator in a game that is supposed to be a carefully curated experience. The infamous Hot Coffee code in Grand Theft Auto is the computer game equivalent of a boarded-up and wallpapered-over attic room.

Another direct take on archaeogaming is Jason Rohrer’s Chain World. There is a real-life USB key that has a Minecraft world on it, initially worked on by the author. You can do anything except use signs to communicate. Once you die, you have to stop, save, and pass on the USB key. Each player gets to experience an accreted world of different ideas, ambitions and fates. I really like this idea although the real Chain Worlds turned out a bit weirdly.

In Hand Me Down, the step-son Will has an interest in archaeogaming. In the future he tracks down the old documentation for TADS 3, fixes bugs and repairs Miles’ games. This is akin to dusting off an old vase, reconstructing the chipped-off edges and presenting it in a museum. Except that these excavated games are just meant for one audience: Ruby.

As an archaeological decision, he keeps Miles’ diary entries in the game, but hides them like a subtle maker’s mark. Which is a fantastic excuse for the old, tired trope of littering a game world with audio logs.

I’m really excited about these ideas, but the work is in actually implementing them and giving the audience a handle to pull on to reveal the ideas. Execution is always critical, but at the moment, I’m telling myself these ideas in code form, and we’ll polish it later.

This month it’s meant dusting off my old code, including some Makefiles to allow technology to make my creative process smoother. I’ve been implementing rooms and NPCs. Through a Herculean strain I’ve put in descriptions and tried not to polish them a hundred times over.

As a side note, the names of the characters have nothing to do with my family. Although my daughter has an imaginary sister called Ruby, which spooked the heck out of me. While Ruby is a problematic character in Hand Me Down, I couldn’t have a more lovely daughter.

I started writing Hand Me Down in January 2018. I wrote out a long timeline for the family, starting in 2004 and ending in 2032. It covers inspirations like the “I love bees” ARG in 2004, and escape rooms in 2013. For story reasons I suggested in 2020 there’d be a global recession and rough times for everyone. I initially blamed it on the rise of automation and economic inequality. Then the pandemic happened, which is some real monkey-paw shenanigans.

Inspirations

In amongst this month I chanced upon a number of inspirations for current or future projects.

I’ve been on a Blender hiatus this month. I feel a deep pull towards Blender and procedurally making 3D scenes with geometry nodes. I’ve tried them, but ran into a bug, so threw in the towel for now.

Naturally, a lot of good tutorials and inspirational images using geometry nodes came out this month, even though I’m supposed to be cross with the renderer.

At the more artisanal end, I really like Nicky Blender’s art, and would either be inspired by her (or try to commission her) for some game cover art when I needed it.

I played around with Midjourney to create incidental art for my games, which is hit-and-miss. The banner images of this very newsletter were created by Midjourney’s AI, which is cool. If you’d like a free trial, let me know.

I’ve long been on the look-out for self-hosted text-to-image generators for my projects. Lynn Cherny had pointed out Disco Art, a perfect solution for me. You should read her newsletter about generative art and other topics. It is way cool.

I’m learning the art of prompt engineering — telling the AI what you want in an image without getting garbage back — which is fantastic and frustrating in equal measures. At least I can experiment cheaply now.

I also liked this discussion on collaboratively creating art with an image generator:

Recreations

Computer games

In my computer game forays this month, I’ve dived some older games that I had played before but hadn’t completed. I’ll mention just one.

Convoy

Convoy is Mad Max, the roguelite. You drive a convoy of heavily-armed cars through a weird wasteland.

I suspect rumours of the new Furiosa movie tickled enough synapses that I needed to find a game where I could ram an opponent into a canyon wall. Convoy scratched that particular itch. I think I also got as far as I ever had, but a long way from victory.

Tabletop games

Chariot of the Gods

Our tabletop role-playing group continues on despite the plagues and chilly weather outside. We had just finished the tense Aliens game, Chariot of the Gods. My character died an ignoble death. We had found a hidden escape pod off the alien-infested ship. I was trying to steal anything I could to support my dying brother back home. The mad captain ordered me to prepare the escape pod, and shoved me and the pilot in. The situation was tense with alien attacks, corporate espionage and quadruple-backstabs.

We pressed the buttons and launched the escape pod. At a random angle. Out into the depths of space.

The captain, the pilot and I performed some kind of Mexican standoff getting into the cryopods. I went to sleep, firmly believing that I had somehow snatched victory from the acid-dripping jaws of defeat.

The xenomorph plans I stole? Basically the Powerpoint slides for the corpo's pre-flight briefing.

Our trajectory? Random. At some point in the distant future our tiny pod would streak across some remote system, chirping distress signals as it sped past. Someone may spot the signal, but by then, our makeshift tomb missile would have been on its way out of the system and onto the interstellar void. I wouldn’t die for a long, long, long time.

Endeavour

Our new game is Endeavour, written and run by my mate Mike Purcell. It is a post-scarcity sci-fi reskin of the game Agon (of the Paragon system). Mike had GMed Agon before Chariot of the Gods.

In Agon, you are a ship of Greek heroes sailing from island to island, finding or inducing adventure wherever you land. You accumulate glory and try to top your latest amazing feat. I played Theo the Bold-Chested and punched A Lot of Dudes, including a giant crab.

Endeavour replaces some of the tropes but comes up with a uniquely different game. Instead of islands, there are planets. Instead of villagers, there are alien civilizations. Endeavour recognizes Star Trek as a series of anthropology and ethical challenges, instead of RPG Monster of the Week.

My guy is Trizzt K9, from the Keeker Belt colony. He’s an insectoid Environmental Specialist, having grown up in the harsh realities of a civilization living on an asteroid belt. I’m part OH&S rep, part Zoidberg (“So this… lightning… is it bad for Terrans?”)

Mike has done a great job of the game. Each week has involved interesting ethical dilemmas. I encourage you to grab it on itch.io. He’s also made a bunch of other abstract puzzle games, if role-playing isn’t to your fancy.

His recent surge on making games has given me good food for thought on how I approach my creative projects. Sometimes you just gotta make a thing and finish it, and move on. Hence my focus on Hand Me Down.

Movies and shows

In amidst all of this, I’ve gotten sick from COVID and whatever other colds daycare deems worthy of sending home. Which means more movie watching!

Everything Everywhere All At Once blew my head clean off. It was a vast, incomprehensible mess that in the end, came together beautifully:

After that, the crazy Bollywood action extravaganza of RRR drove a motorbike through my recommendations (slow mo, defying physics like it defied the British Empire). It’s a long movie, but reminded me of the crazy stunt stories I used to play with my Lego as a child.

The superhero genre continues to drag on. I caught the irreverent The Suicide Squad, and liked it. I obsessively watched The Boys roll through an impressive Season 3. Everything Everywhere…, RRR and The Boys’ Herogasm episode, all in one month did some psychic damage.

That’s it for the month. Please send me feedback, so I can improve these posts. Feel free to share to anyone you think might like this.

Wish me luck for the next addition to our family! It’ll be a bumpy road but I’m looking forward to it.