One might envision the ideal creative process as this: Quietly sipping a hot cup of coffee, gazing at a vibrant sun-drenched morning tableau, suddenly struck by a spark of inspiration, and declaring, "What a delightful idea! I shall implement it, post-haste!"

However, my recent creative journey has veered from this picturesque ideal. It has been more about navigating the arduous middle of a project amidst the chaos of life. Yet, it's a reality to embrace rather than reject.

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The Yearly Surge

Over the past few years I’ve established a yearly practice of taking an extended time off to focus on a creative project. This often coincides with the Seven Day Roguelike Challenge (7DRL), and I’ll spend a week trying to make an RPG and usually fall short.

Sometimes, this creative break extends to a month, consisting of a week each for the 7DRL, preparation, further exploration, and relaxation. However, this year, due to other commitments and a hesitation to take too long a hiatus from work, I limited it to a fortnight.

The usual plan is to spend a good part of the day and some of the night working on my creative projects, juggling this with my parental and housekeeping responsibilities. This would be my first creative break with two kids.

To cut to the chase, the metaphor I’ve used to describe how this time went is a little riff on a Jim Gaffigan joke: Imagine you’re running a marathon, but every 500 metres someone hands you a baby.

As much as I love my kids and harbour no regrets about spending time with (or for) them, maintaining momentum and a specific mood for writing while simultaneously tending to a sick child and watching my break time dwindle can be disheartening.

So, it was not as good as I had hoped. But — and here’s the important thing — I was still productive this month. I managed to find short sprints here and there. And I hope that I’m just a little bit stronger at running a creative marathon with the bonus baby load.

Twenty-five balloon festivals per second

The first task during my time off was writing a simulator for Aloft, a game by Mike Purcell of Armiger Games, a friend of the newsletter. Aloft is a game about competitively launching hot air balloons and creating a beautiful tableau. My objective was to develop a Python program that could rapidly simulate games, providing statistical insights into the mechanics like if there was a first player advantage, or the impact of changing the board's dimensions. It would even facilitate implementing AI players to help identify degenerate strategies.

Implementing a game uncovers subtle complexities that might not be apparent in tabletop play. I encountered issues like the AI occasionally launching a balloon within another, a move expressly prohibited, and misordering loops which subtly disrupted the scoring system.

Despite my initial aim of spending just a day or two on this project, I ended up investing two or three days. Though longer than anticipated, the time was well-spent. The simulator, complete with bespoke graphics, was capable of training a reinforcement learning agent and playing random moves against itself in an OpenAI gym at a rate of over 25 games per second.

The code's potential excited Mike, who is focusing on Aloft for his game design course. Unfortunately, the code wasn't as user-moddable as I had hoped, reflecting a twist on Mark Twain's quote - if I had more time, it'd be easier to manipulate.

Getting the simulator to a somewhat-complete state, equipped with PyGame graphics, was satisfying. Although my current focus is on a deep, long-term project, the accomplishment of shorter, tight-focus projects nourishes me creatively.

The Criticality of Alpha Feedback

The goal of my leave was to gather and incorporate feedback on the alpha version of my interactive fiction (IF) game Hand Me Down. I discussed my preparation for this process in my last post. I have been blessed with a handful of people willing to test the current early state of the game and provide helpful insights.

Despite spending time making a little website and a questionnaire for feedback, those weren’t useful and I received most of my feedback via email and transcripts.

By sheer chance I got a beautifully diverse array of testers: one relatively unfamiliar with IF; another who might possibly be the most familiar with IF on the planet; a tester focussed on puzzle/beta-testing; and another oriented more towards story. Everything was covered.

The testers were extremely generous and sent me heaps of feedback, comments and bug reports. One bug was so bad it would kill the game. I dutifully recorded all their feedback and translated it into a To-Do list. It’s a little daunting to see your to-do list blast through triple digits, but it’s useful. It warmed my heart to see that they had enjoyed parts of my writing that I was most proud of.

I had managed to prove that my Frankensteinian half-Twine, half-TADS3 game could work without any showstoppers. This was a relief.

When I had time to work on Hand Me Down, I had a immediate to-do list of shallow things I could attack immediately, as well as my own shortlist of more fun but labour-intensive puzzles awaiting implementation.

Although these won’t make sense now, I implemented the octopus and the observatory puzzle, as well as the snail and their puzzle. These required intricate work and I was pleased to complete them. As an example, the observatory is filled with electronic equipment and computers. I produced a new way to interact with computers (CLICK ON PRINT BUTTON etc) that hopefully makes for a smoother puzzle process with a tiny bit more verisimilitude than your typical IF computer puzzle.

The First verse, again

Following my disjointed two weeks off, I experienced a few days of creative exhaustion, akin to a mild burnout. More of a light Maillard reaction, really, than complete fizzling out. Not long after I returned to working on the game. Midway through driving my son to daycare I had a revelation about the Twine story. The finale required some tricky narrative maneuvers, and I had learned earlier in this project to recognize opportunities to simplify a situation.

The story of Hand Me Down revolves around a father sharing his thoughts and creativity with his daughter through interactive fiction games. The father passes away, but his daughter's partner assists him in completing the games, transforming them into a parting gift. The alpha version starts post the father's funeral with the partner presenting the mysterious gift, urging the player to unravel its contents. The finale was intended to explore the underlying themes and ideas through recorded conversations between the partner and the father.

Convoluted! My epiphany was to position the father directly in communication with his daughter, discussing the games he made, and thus providing an opportunity for closure. Weirdly in the alpha the main character is on the periphery of the narrative, and the partner in the middle. This rewrite fixes that silliness.

As a writer, you sometimes forget that you have complete control over events. You can choose to not kill a character. You can move events around. I had forgotten this control, and was stuck to a convoluted approach to the story.

I’ve rewritten the intro, spotlighting the main character, Ruby, and her father. I’ve enhanced her agency while structuring the choices in the intro to reveal more of the characters. This rewrite aligned with feedback from the testers, and resolved my worries with the finale. Although it will undoubtedly require more work and refinement, it currently feels like an improved version of the story.

As they say, the first draft is about telling the story to yourself. The later drafts are telling a better version of that story to others.

Solving bigger crimes with smaller crimes

This month I gave myself some creative downtime to avoid full burnout. I resumed playing the early-access game, Shadows of Doubt, which I mentioned last month. Now, with a better grasp of the game’s systems and expectations, my experience has improved.

Slightly.

I learned how to use surveillance equipment on the streets and within buildings to help me solve crimes. Oh, except for that time when I accidentally switched the security cameras in a building to “Everyone is a Hostile”, right at end of most employees’ shifts. Racing out of the building, peppered with gunfire from ceiling-mounted turrets, I barged past citizens who wondered what the commotion was before being gunned down at their mailbox. Oops.

I have managed to secure a particular Sync mod that lets me leap from great heights and land without any fall damage. It is by far the best addition you can get.

It came in handy with two cases that I was stuck on. The first case I had to get a photograph of someone with just their salary, blood type and the fact that they were “bald with ginger hair”. My other case was to retrieve a secret document from someone with short, green hair that was a QA Technician, similarly impossible to find.

Roaming the perpetually cold or rainy neo-noir dystopia, I had hoped to randomly run into either of them and get my investigation going. I had to avoid the occasional street thug trying to rob me for going down the wrong street. I was burning through my funds on heat packs, coffees and croque monsieurs, finding nothing.

While I was hunting around for tech companies that might have QA Technicians, I stumbled across an office in a dual-use residential-commercial building. The office was for the building itself and by flipping through the files on residents I happened to find someone with bald/ginger hair. Suddenly I had their address and almost every other detail for them.

I strode up to the 4th floor and knocked on the door. Someone was coming. I was ready with my camera… And someone with long, black hair gruffly answered. Goddamnit. With a bit of discussion and greasing palms with my dwindling cash supplies, I bribed my way into their apartment as a guest. This economy, am I right?

I hoped I could find some evidence about this person I was supposed to photograph. I wandered into the bedroom, finding someone sleeping on the bed… A bald, ginger-haired non-binary person wearing a bra and shorts. Eureka! But I felt uncomfortable about this photograph now. Who had ordered the photograph? Did they ask for underwear shots? Was this a hate crime?

The target’s partner conveniently flicked on the bedroom light, rousing the target from their sleep. As they stumbled around their room, intent on turning the lights off and going back to sleep (all the while asking who the hell I was), I panicked and took the photograph. Due to a bug in the early-access game, the first photo didn’t seem to have them in it. I took it again, finally angering this person into violence.

I burst out of their apartment with the target in hot pursuit. I took a moment and then quickly leapt over the balcony. The poor target watched me plummet several stories into the darkness and gave up their pursuit, assuming I was dead.

So where was I to deliver these salacious photos of our target in their underwear? Oh. The fourth floor. Next door to the target.

I did not feel good about cashing that case in. But it taught me an important lesson on how to find impossibly-hidden people.

Our QA Technician was found by a similar process of breaking and entering, canvassing and corporate espionage. In one office, I managed to get someone to give me a guest pass for their work. I stumbled in and even found our target working away at his computer.

“Don’t mind me,” I said as I rifled through his desk, hoping to find his secret document. Nothing. I looked for this locker. No locker. I found an unused corporate computer and printed out our technician’s employee records, including his residential address. I knew he was at work right now, so I could break in to his house hopefully unimpeded. So I did. Still no document.

I went back to his work, thinking I had missed something. There was a locked door with a keypad and some other tech inside. The employee who had sold me a guess pass was all too happy to sell me keypad codes. I snuck in. On the table was a secret document. The one I needed? Who knows!

In a split second decision I grabbed the folder in full view of the tech and a camera. The entire building screamed in alarm and I dodged the tech’s suddenly convenient shotgun. I raced outside with the staff angry at me. I slid under a descending security door. The cameras were still agitated! The cops were coming up the stairs!

So I did the logical thing. I opened the door to the elevator shaft and jumped down, neatly threading the needle and falling through the roof of the elevator at the ground floor. Rather than dodge and wrestle with ten floors of security lockdown, I merely walked out of the lobby and into the drifting snow outside.

I was free and notified to throw the secret document into the sea. I did, none the wiser to whatever chaos I had just brought down upon Little Kobe, but glad that I had snatched the correct secret document.

I was now a rich and successful private investigator. I was making my way up the social ladder. I spoiled myself with an apple cider and another croque monsieur. And another case to solve.

Set season to “Run”

Back in the real world, I have winter to finish Hand Me Down. Given the setbacks of the start of May, I’m not exactly where I wished I would be. But I was productive this month and the way forward is much more clear. I’ve got a lot of work to do, but I know what needs to be done. I hope to run a proper beta-test in a month or so.

Imagine that, a full game.

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