The Creative Process #21 - The Value of Constraints

In creative work, there’s often nothing more oppressive than a blank piece of paper. And yet constraints are often invigorating. Even if logically it should be boxing you in, constraints give you something to bounce off, to react to, to direct your energy towards.

Smoochie Jam results: One True Love

Last month I submitted an entry to the Smoochie Jam - a jam set up by the Neo-Interactives group, a collective of interactive fiction writers who have been invigorating the community with regular IF game jams. Smoochie Jam had the loose constraint of requiring entries to be about love, romance or actual kissing.

Taking the idea literally, I brainstormed several different ways that a kiss could be important. A first kiss, the kiss of death, a goodbye kiss, a kiss that breaks a curse… Or even just a kiss of two cars - a minor bump that has an huge reaction in modern society.

I had a lot of ideas, but not enough time or energy to invest in them all, so I went all in on One True Love, a classic story of a princess finding her true love, kissing them to break the curse of being transformed into a frog. While others have played with the idea of subverting the curse (“Maybe the curse is to be a princess!”) I honed in on the numerics of one true love. Just one? And how do you distinguish that one from everyone else? And so the game had a core mechanic of a weird Turing test of trying to discern which of two frogs was your true love in disguise. If any.

This was fun to write as it was so constrained. I didn’t want elaborate mechanics or RPG-style random resolutions. I had a single scene in almost just one location (you can move to another area if you try to give up). The princess was very bound by your usual tropes, but I intentionally barged against the walls of those ideas as an act of subversion. The princess is very prim and proper, but gets frustrated and swears. The realities of a gross swamp are not ignored.

One thing that I enjoyed the difficulty of (but am unlikely to do again) was to be noncommittal regarding the gender of your One True Love. They get the name “Rana”, which just means “Frog”. If you find them, they transform back into human form but I never go into too much detail about that. Love is love. I would be ambiguous about the role of the protagonist, but using “Princess” gave me useful anchors via the usual tropes. It gave people something to hold onto without much elaboration or backstory.

At the moment about 160 people have played the game. I’ve gotten a smattering of feedback, but all of it complimentary. One True Love feels more successful per-pound than my previous big project Hand Me Down. I kept scope nice and tight, but provided a certain amount of depth for a tiny game.

Speaking of Hand Me Down, I joined the Neo-Interactives Discord since they are doing cool things in interactive fiction. I had received a few Comp-time reviews from people in that community, so I indulgently went searching through the Discord chat for any further discussion. Much of it was similar to the reviews I got, but it was nice to see a little more depth to their perspective. Reviews give you a decent examination of your work, but getting a few perspectives from the same reviewer - say, before and after a review - rounds out the review.

One thing that was noted and that I’m coming to grok is how crazy ambitious Hand Me Down was, and how this was part of its downfall. I tried to pack way too much in, and the framing story was complicated. This was part of the design and the story, but it needed more care and craft to match the ambition.

That said, the released Hand Me Down was very significantly trimmed down from the original ideas, and the more constraints made the game better. But I’m also okay with the game being a little looser and imperfect in the end.

As I’ve mentioned in many other newsletters, the main thing I’ve been learning in creative work is the balance between expansion versus contraction, breadth versus depth, ambition versus constraints. And at the very bottom of it: potential versus actual results.

Diving into PICO-8 with 2TRU2LUV

I’ve long been in awe of Johan Peitz - he’s a full-time games programmer, working mostly in PICO-8. PICO-8 is a fantasy console - a set of software pretending to be a games console that never was. It is designed to embrace the constraints of older technology, whilst being subtly informed by modern advances. PICO-8 is programmed via a Lua-like programming language with custom extensions to put sprites on screens and play sound effects and music. But it has 16 colours from a fixed palette, can play at most 4 sounds at once, and even has a limit on how voluminous your source code can be (8192 tokens).

Johan Peitz’ work revels in these constraints, but shows you what is possible. His games looks great, especially since he makes the most of the pixel art aesthetic. He recently released a Dungeon Master-style game called Orb of Aeternum, which is beautifully polished, if a little hard.

This month I dived into learning PICO-8 by making an arcade sequel to One True Love. In obnoxious Fast-and-the-Furious-style naming, I called it 2TRU2LUV which is appropriately only 8 characters long. You are a princess in a swamp chasing after a horde of frogs, trying to kiss the one true love before they get eaten by a turtle. I’ve already bookmarked the finale in the trilogy as One True Love: Tokyo Drift, which should be the same idea but in cars with sloppy physics.

2TRU2LUV is not quite finished yet due to illness destroying my productivity this month. But it feels good to write something within the PICO-8 constraints. Especially trying to draw a swamp with only two greens and a single brown available to me. I experimented with dithering which gave me a much better-looking swamp.

I’m not sure what I’ll do with 2TRU2LUV when it’s done. Throw it on itch.io? Slip it into a future project as an Easter egg?

Coincidentally the makers of PICO-8 released the first version of their new system, Picotron. Where PICO-8 is something akin to a Nintendo, Picotron is closer to a Windows 3.11 work station. It has more colours and a bigger resolution, but still relatively constrained.

I briefly considered moving 2TRU2LUV to Picotron, but it’s probably too early to move to a system that is still working out its kinks. Plus I’m enjoying the constraints of the smaller system.

Anne of the Green Cables

Despite being sick, I’ve been trying to advance my next big project: Anne of the Green Cables, a cyberpunk reimagining of the classic pastoral story. While I’ve had ideas floating around, it was still a little too blank-page for me.

This month I managed to crack the theme. My thinking is still a somewhat underdeveloped, but this seems like the one. Warning, it is philosophical, which you can read as “confusing” or “wanky”, however you like.

So the original idea came from me reading a much-abridged copy of Anne of the Green Gables to my daughter. She had the malapropism, and I liked it so much I thought about it for weeks. “Cables” suggests cyberpunk and I think a fair assessment of Anne Shirley could ascribe punk (if not cyberpunk) attitudes to her (rebellion against conservative authority, and fierce individuality). Her flights of fancy are a pastoral form of virtual reality that she overlays on everything.

Writing the story of Anne in a cyberpunk world is tricky. They are different genres, but with some touchstones if you look hard enough. The simultaneous constraint of staying somewhat true to the old tale, but also be true to cyberpunk aesthetics kept me creatively engaged.

Nevertheless it was still just a few vague ideas strung together.

So I have this t-shirt, acquired from a big store for a morally disgustingly low price. It’s browny-orange and has a vague tech/cyberpunk aesthetic with angular lines and illegible data graphs. In the middle of it is the random phrase “Control of Existance”. Yes, spelled like that. Many people ask me if it’s supposed to be mis-spelled. For a $8 t-shirt, who can say.

I wore it to my regular D&D night and one of the others commented on it. For him it triggered the idea of Derrida’s “differance” with the same sort of weird spelling, that is, being slightly French. In my mis-spent youth, I tried to get into philosophy. I explored a little bit of the post-modernists and critical theory. I read (but didn’t really understand) Baudrillard, Deleuze, and Sartre. So on the way home from D&D that night, I asked ChatGPT to give me a small lecture on Derrida and related topics.

It clued me into an idea (later verified to be not an AI confabulation) of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation by Deleuze and Guattari. The former is when a culture, identity or idea shift away from their traditional boundaries to something new. Reterritorialisation is the process of it adopting or adapting to the new. The combination is a process of moving something between contexts, which may end up messy.

This idea sounds weird, but that’s exactly what my daughter’s malapropism does: it takes the rustic Anne and recontextualises her in a cyberpunk future. And Anne’s original story is basically of her move from the world of the orphanage to Avon Lea and her attempts to adapt whilst maintaining her identity. De/reterritorialisation.

Much of a cyberpunk dystopia feeds off the displacement of people, of ideas, of reality. People are made to be wanderers in their own lands, eating things that aren’t food; forced into a world where their cultures are reshaped by context convenient for corporate control; very concepts like gender, race and identity are transplanted and reinterpreted, and their only escape is to virtual reality that nonetheless is the tendrils of the real world in a shiny new avatar. De/reterritorialisation is a weapon corporations can wield in the cyberpunk future and even in our reality.

Assuming, of course, I understand the concept.

In any case, I think displacing cultures from their context as a form of warfare is an interesting idea, and something that connects nicely to plot points I want to use. I even have the twist in the end pivot on the idea. And it might serve well as an anchor for my writing, but not necessarily be obvious to the player.

We’ll see how it plays out in the actual game.

Extreme Constraints as an Art Form

I’ll leave you with this video that a friend shared with me. It’s an exhibition from Revision 2024 where submissions are whole programs of no larger than 256 bytes. Yes, bytes. About as long as this very paragraph.

The demoscene have been renowned for their amazing abilities to squeeze amazing products out of a tiny number of bytes. But 256 bytes is something else. It basically means no libraries. No anything, really. Just some assumptions that you can write straight into a framebuffer and your mathematical magic will turn into beauty.

What constraints make you a better artist or a better thinker? Have you ever had an accidental constraint that made a work better?