The Creative Process #34 - The Plan

By my accounting, I had 16 weeks until intents were due for IF Comp 2025. I had finished my plot outline for my next game, Anne of Green Cables, and it was 10 chapters long. A week a chapter plus some time to develop some required tech, and some art design, factor in some leave or down time, and we're at 16 weeks.

Last time I did this sort of accounting was for my previous big project, Hand Me Down, at roughly the same distance out from IF Comp. There I had about thirty rooms to write, nearly thirty puzzle objects, and a finale Twine game with about 170 story passages. On the upside, I was going to take leave to work on it. Twice. This time I don't think I'll be so lucky.

Also about this same time last time I tried an experiment. I asked good friend of the newsletter, Mike, to be my accountability buddy. An accountability buddy is someone willing to learn about your project and be your taskmaster or at least progress-feedback person. Mike's good. He gets it. He's worked on many creative projects himself and is also a mathematician like me, so we share wavelengths. He's more pragmatic compared to my starry-eyed artistic vision, which is exactly what you want. He's not really a collaborator, which would have a different feel. But he is involved in the process, and interested in making it succeed.

I finished Hand Me Down and felt like I did a good job, and it was partly due to having Mike as an accountability buddy. So for Anne, he volunteered again and I pounced on that opportunity wholeheartedly.

We met at the university and bought some Chinese. Over a hefty bowl of beef with black bean sauce, I explained the project to him and asked for help with expectations.

Anne is a different project to my previous ones. It has some technical programming, but nowhere near the volume of Hand Me Down. It's a Twine game, so has similarities to my mini game One True Love. But it's a weird game. A complicated game. An ambitious game.

The basic idea, as I've mentioned before in this newsletter, is that it's transplanting the classic pastoral story of Anne of Green Gables into a cyberpunk setting. Initially this was because of a malapropism of my daughter's. But I've got this narrative and philosophical through-line that I think is really interesting, and this is what drives me. And even if you don't go for all that, I think the game will be entertaining.

Mike did the same calculus on chapters vs time, and agreed it sounded doable, as far as the constraints were known. I had already prototyped one of the bits of technology last year, so that might just be a matter of improving it.

The hardest part and the biggest factor was the writing. Anne is mostly just writing. Over the last 25 years I've inadvertently trained myself to be able to write a decent volume of words, if need be. I can smash out a blog post in a few hours, requiring minimal editing, and it'll be acceptable.

For something like One True Love, where the writing was stylised but casual, I had no trouble writing that in a week or so. The introduction section of Hand Me Down took about a week.

Anne is slated to have a week per chapter. And that is daunting. It's the combination of keeping some familiarity with L.M. Montgomery's classic text, but also weaving in a believable and non-cliche cyberpunk setting. I've read the original a few times over and the characters are incredible. I've also read a few different adaptations and have often felt that they didn't quite bring over the characters dutifully enough. Marilla might be strict and Matthew shy, but that's just a surface reading of them. They often miss Marilla's wry but fair sense of humour, or Matthew's slow boiled wisdom. I hope to capture that with a cyberpunk twist.

As a writer I fully embrace the idea that the first draft of a story is the author finding out what happens in the story, even in the most meticulously planned works. Part of the cheat of this is that the characters will tell you who they are and what they want, and so if they change from some initial vision, that's great. But it's hard working with a form of someone else's characters, and indeed, not characters I would ever invent myself (or corral onto the page). Add into the mix the demands of a cyberpunk setting, and just keeping the characters straight is a tough ask.

I'm also trying to evoke L.M. Montgomery's style. I always worry that my writing is too loquacious. I pack too much into every sentence. Montgomery's style is a level above. Take the very first sentence of Anne of Green Gables:

Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies' eardrops and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place; it was reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade; but by the time it reached Lynde's Hollow it was a quiet, well-conducted little stream, for not even a brook could run past Mrs. Rachel Lynde's door without due regard for decent and decorum; it probably was conscious that Mrs. Rachel was sitting at her window, keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed, from brooks and children up, and that if she noticed anything odd or out of place she would never rest until she had ferreted out the whys and wherefores thereof.

Whoa. My draft attempt at a similar feat:

Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just at the junction where the Avonlea main road dipped down under the highways towards the flats of the vertical farms, fringed with thick data cables whose root source was known to be the old Cuthbert place; it was reputed to be an intricate, forgotten bulk of undersea cables in its earlier course, sporadically garlanded with dark fiber splitters and routers; but by the time it reached Lynde's apartment it was an unassuming little data stream. Mrs Rachel commanded the unused bandwidth through clusters of surveillance cameras, and in her place by her wall of monitors she could keep a sharp eye on all the comings and goings, and if her algorithms noticed anything odd or out of place, she would not rest until she had ferreted out the whys and wherefores thereof.

Montgomery does a better job, but I think I've done an okay job mimicking her style whilst also trying to do some very rapid world- and expectation-building.

Translating Gables to Cables isn't just a job of finding and replacing "alders" with "data cables". Metaphors might be transformed. The focus shifted slightly. Divergences omitted or inserted. I try to keep the general feel similar, but my writing has a few more requirements it needs to satisfy. And over the game, even the writing has to change.

So a chapter a week might be luxurious compared to other projects, but it might be tight for Anne of Green Cables. And so now every week I'll be giving Mike an update and the latest build.

"Begin at the beginning, the King said, very gravely, and go on till you come to the end: then stop."
Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

Now that we've agreed to the cadence of a chapter a week with some wriggle room, do I just eat the elephant by starting at chapter 1 and moving through to chapter 10? Does it matter if I have a full plot written out?

I know the writing will be tough, especially the start where it'll be more faithful to the original. At the end it will be much more cyberpunk, and likely closer to my own style. Mike asked if I was going to work front to back, or just pick off the bits of writing that I wanted to do at that time, or do a bit from the start then the end and meet in the middle?

My feeling is it'll have to be dynamic. There are sections that I could probably write at any time. Others need to have known the intricate details of what came before. Some will be very fun to write, others a bit of a slog. Eating my dessert before finishing my vegetables will make for a very disappointing trudge through to finishing.

Which, to be fair and Mike picked up on, is a cop-out. It will likely be front-to-back, with spot rewriting, because I'm building to an ending. Compare with a puzzle murder mystery where you figure out the ending and then try to carefully unravel it.

I also have grand desires to make the game aesthetically pleasing with art. But without the words, the game is nothing. Without the art, it'll be okay. I'm saving up money in case I need to commission an artist, and will have to make that decision late May to have time to go hunting and give the selected artist enough time. I already commissioned some art early on from a lovely artist in Bogotá that I found via Ko-Fi. I know where in the game I'll use it.

Aside from all the Anne work, I've been following in the same twisty corridors as my cohort and have been playing Blue Prince. It's an explorative puzzle strategy game where you build out a manor room by room, uncover puzzles and secrets, and try to get to Room 46.

I've clocked up 34 hours in it and have done 60-odd "days" in it. I've gotten to Room 46 a few times, but am exploring the further gameplay. I know of a few things I need to achieve, but if the fanbase is to be believed, there's quite a lot more. It's very much replaced my previous gaming addiction of Balatro because Blue Prince feels like a proper gaming meal whereas Balatro feels like a giant box of popcorn. I like both, but the chill, thoughtful pace of Blue Prince is very much welcomed.

Of course during the month I went through my usual cycle of creative feelings about Blue Prince:

1. "What is this?"
2. "This is great, I must make one of my own!"
3. "Aw man, I could never make one of these!"
4. General acceptance of the game as just a nice game.

I briefly considered a radical revision of my plan for my future game Puzzle University, but I think I've landed on not doing that. It'll take me long enough without trying to make it asset-heavy like Blue Prince.

In any case, it's a fun game and inspiring in many ways. If you want to learn more about it without toooooo many spoilers, then Myster Rogers' interview with the developer Tonda Ros is great.

So I have a plan. A map, really. There's some good landmarks sketched out, but the project is just about steadily putting one foot in front of the other. Next time we meet, Anne should be a quarter done! Or Mike will have his grumpy face on!

Although, luckily, I think I've hooked him on Blue Prince too!