The Creative Process #20 - Sealed With A Kiss

February has definitely been a long month for me. I know, I know, leap day and all that. But I just seemed to have a lot more going on, without a frenetic pace. Something like Aperture Science’s 65% more bullet per bullet.

The Dip

At work I had interesting things going on. My creative hobbies had a few attractive things on my plate - a game for my daughter’s birthday, the continuing plan of my cyberpunk game Anne of the Green Cables, and somehow Smoochie Jam 2024 took my eye. My wife opened a new business which was exciting. There was a buzz of industry about every day.

But amidst all this our family had some sort of sleep regression. Little man was waking up a lot, hitting emergency level maximum from the get-go, which sometimes woke his sister, making things exponentially harder. These wake-ups would throw a spanner in the works of my late-night creative sessions. I’d sleep weirdly, impacting my wife’s sleep. Cluster bombs of fidgety people!

If I co-slept with little man, it wasn’t really a restful night with the occasional accidental assaults breaking up the general worry of pancaking him in my sleep. Protecting one’s nuts is not a relaxing way to sleep.

A few nights of this is just parenthood. I had a few weeks, on top of the bustle of February. So things got hard.

Dark days

Mid February, some of my work wasn’t quite getting the footholds I needed. At the same time, the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB) awards kicked off for 2023. These are community awards where they compiled lists of awards (per genre, or per system) and people can place multiple votes in a category. My work, Hand Me Down, was eligible for a handful of categories. I think I wrote an okay game, but doesn’t deserve to win awards in my reckoning.

Nevertheless I got obsessed checking the results as they came in. Overall I got votes in three categories: Outstanding use of interactivity (2 votes), Outstanding Twine game (1 vote), Outstanding TADS game (3 votes). This is at the liminal level of “was noticed for this category”. Which, given my mental state, only exacerbated things.

This metastasised into imposter syndrome and jealousy for everyone else in the IF world who were light years better than me and I should just leave the community. This is sheer lunacy, but you don’t control what you think.

Overall everything mentally got a lot harder. I know the signs now, but dealing with them is another thing. I got temporarily hooked on Universal Paperclips, even though I’ve played it and similar clickers before. I also returned to No Man’s Sky and pootled around on alien planets for my evenings. Both pretty much a waste of time.

My creative work tanked.

I didn’t get any game ready for my daughter’s birthday. But that’s okay because I never promised anyone.

I had a few bad days at the keyboard trying to work on cleaning up Hand Me Down, and trying to write something for Smoochie Jam 2024.

It was looking dire.

Kiss of life

But I was fighting back. I got a little boost from my favourite poetry podcast Poetry Says. In particular one episode on pushing back on wellness. Which might sound like the exact wrong thing to do, but it gave me strategies and the wherewithal to be proactive.

My wife sacrificed herself to get me back on track - diving on the kid grenades while I slept. She’s amazing and it helped me turn the corner.

What gave me traction again was my Smoochie Jam entry. So the whole idea of this month-long jam was to make an interactive fiction game inspired by kisses, kissing or related things.

My original idea was a bunch of short vignettes, entitled Sealed with a Kiss. Each story was about love and kisses. I had nearly a dozen ideas, but I whittled it down to five:

• A Family Matter: A mob boss deciding a person’s fate with a kiss
• Squeeze: Someone late for a date, trying to get out of a squeezy car park, with the only solution being to “kiss” another car
• The Chosen One - Puppy love of a schoolyard game of “catch and kiss”
• Sealed with a kiss - Saying goodbye to a dying relative
• One True Love - A princess just needs to kiss her one true love to break the curse. But there’s a wrinkle…

I liked these ideas, but only One True Love had a great setup and gameplay. As my remaining time got short (and ahem I read that games were only to be about 15 minutes long), I ditched everything and focussed on One True Love. It took a lot of fast writing by the seat of my pants, but I got there in time.

I don’t know where I pulled it from, but I wrote some stuff that I’m quite proud of. Players have also picked out bits as being well-written, so that’s a relief.

To my surprise I had written a game quickly and was pleased with the results.

Yay! The dark pall attempted a return when views/ratings seemed to dry up a day or so after the jam. But I was resilient to this second dip. I want to believe I’m just a little more battlehardened after this month. And I’m breaking down my old foe of not finishing projects. Two finished projects in 6 months, one big, one small!

The stats on One True Love are not too bad: currently 115 views, 34 plays, 1 rating, 1 collection, 1 comment and 2034 impressions over 3.5 days with a click-through rating of 3.15% (which is apparently a little better than normal). Not that stats matter or mean too much, but it allays my mathematician brain somehow.

If you’d like to play One True Love, it’s free and playable in your browser: https://brettw.itch.io/one-true-love

Marching Onwards

Where to now? I hope our kids find peaceful nights sleep (I had two interruptions just writing this newsletter). But as a mate said, “It’s not forever. It’s tough now or for a while, but it is not forever.”

So I intend to act like we’re on the mend.

I don’t think I’ll go back and write the other vignettes from the Smoochie Jam ideas. I may do a polish run on One True Love, but it’s self-sufficient at the moment.

I did a significant amount of thinking and research for my next game: Anne of the Green Cables. Everything is stitching together ever-so-slowly but surely. Speaking of Shirley, my little epiphany this month was realising that Anne Shirley is punk as hell, despite the pastoral environment she finds herself in the classic Anne of the Green Gables. This makes it easier to transplant her into the cyberpunk setting that I want to use.

Productive friend of the newsletter Mike has proposed a game collaboration. He has a fascinating combinatorial construction that leads to a game structure. I’m trying to evaluate if it’s doable from a writing perspective. It’s intriguing how mathematical structure impact narrative structures and the plain ol’ difficulty of getting words on a page.

I plan to keep kicking along on my game for my daughter. Programming in Rust gives me a different kind of smile than programming in Twine or TADS 3, or creating cool images in Blender. I like to bounce around forms, just to be capable and fresh.

I’ve also planned my move from Substack, coinciding with a rewrite of my personal blog as a digital garden of sorts. But if Substack wants to deplatform the Nazis, that’s fine by me.

But in any case, let’s go get some sleep!