The Creative Process #37 - The Burn-Down
Intents to enter IF Comp 2025 are due. I've got mine in. And while it's not quite shackling yourself to committing to submit, it's a strong step towards it.
My work is not yet finished, but I'm quietly confident I can get there. I've been working for a while so it feels like rounding the last corners of a marathon. Other people I hear are deciding on a mad sprint in August while they're still sitting on the couch. And both approaches are fine, really.
The Shape of My Projects
While not exclusively so, I tend to have a "shape" to my projects. In novel-writing they split authors into two camps: the planners and the pantsers (as in, by-the-seat-of-my...). I often plan because I can generate new avenues of story forever. In recent years my focus on creative projects has been to complete them, and so defining and understanding the ending to them is crucial.
One facet of this is having an idea of length. I'm getting better at knowing what certain ideas entail in terms of the audience, and am less inclined to have fractal plans ("So there's 4 acts and 8 sections per act, and in each section there's..."). It's still quite difficult to gauge exactly how long it might take a person to play a section, but it's better to have "thirty-minutes or an hour" rather than a series of infinite holes of content.
I'm not, however, someone who plans every scene to a minute degree. It's not clockwork, it's brushwork. Sometimes a stray detail picks up a life of its own. So long as the general gist of the scene lands, everything else is gravy.
I'm getting more confident in my work and the quality that that requires. Not every work has to be The Best Work Ever™. But there's at least an acceptable bar per work. One True Love, for example, is meant to be fun. If I can wring a smile or two out, then job done. I'm not trying to change anyone's life with a game about kissing frogs.
And while I have a decent grasp at the above constraints and am getting better, one surefire way to prevent any backsliding into infinite projects is by introducing a deadline. IF Comp is great for me because it's a set time of year, the quality bar is set appropriately, and games are encouraged to be of a maximum length of two hours to be nice to reviewers. If I'm not ready for IF Comp, then I just don't do it.
This year, I think I'm quite ready – even though I'm not finished yet.
Accountability and Burn-Down
I've mentioned in previous posts that I like having an accountability buddy for my main projects. Mike (aka Armiger Games) is my go-to guy there. I only look for accountability in projects with defined deadlines and quality levels.
Earlier this year, having worked on my main IF Comp project for a while and feeling confident in the project, I decided the goal was to enter it. That gave me 16 weeks at that point. My outline had 10 chapters – some more in-depth than others – so that was a chapter a week, plus time for mini-games and polish.
To make this firm I wrote each section into a series of story beats. Even at this granularity a two-line joke has the same level of detail as a multi-page monologue.
As I was watching the weeks go by and I was not quite doing a chapter-per-week, I turned the sections and story beats into a checklist. Using some programmer wizardry, I turned that into statistics and charts. And I inadvertently reinvented the burn-down chart (or technically, a burn-up chart since I like to count up in terms of completion).
Software engineers in the agile project management world use burn-down charts. They divide the work up into estimated chunks, set a deadline and graph how they are going versus how they should be going.
My approach is not meant to be like engineering. Especially how lax I am with the stats. While this graph began as predicated on story beats to-do vs story beats done, the specifics have gotten fuzzier. I didn't initially include art or bugs. Now I do but the stats are roughly the same percentage-wise, although they aren't in absolute terms.
Ideally I'd keep a nice even pace through my project but that is absolutely not how it works. Even ignoring my other considerations in life, some sections are vastly harder to write and it's sometimes difficult to estimate that beforehand. Emotional scenes are harder to get into, but flow more once I am in it. Light, breezy scenes can be fun to write but can fizzle out quicker. Sometimes I'm attempting to do something quite technical, even though the reader may not notice. There's analogs with software engineering, but with one key distinction: I won't know what a scene actually is until I've written it. And maybe not even then. It may take a few goes and not because my assessment is changing, but because my understanding of the thing I'm creating is changing.
If you look at the chart you can see various trends. There's good weeks and bad weeks. I took two weeks off to relax and work on Anne, and you can see the progress rocket up (and then level out). Some of the long stretches of nothing aren't me avoiding the project – sometimes it is experimentation with software or design, or writing the blurb for the game in the comp.
Much of July was taken up with creating cover art. I had hoped I could commission an artist, but my main choice fell through and some attempts I had at prototypes were doing really well, so I doubled down on it. So while you might see a period of no contribution, it was extremely valuable. And ticked off a single task of "cover art".
I could be a lot more precise, and estimate work packages against each other, but it's a hobby. The more it feels like work, the less I'm inclined to do it. I still like to see vaguely quantified progress, but I'm not beholden to it.
So Where Am I?
Anne of Green Cables is 10 chapters long. Chapters 2,5 and 9 have meaty gameplay bits to them, although I have jettisoned Chapter 5's due to time (and I think I wrote a great alternative).
I'm halfway through Chapter 6, and the remaining parts in that chapter don't require anything particularly technical or emotional. One section involves hacking and I could go deep on the details for that, but I'm likely to just smash something out.
Chapter 7 is a reflection of Chapter 5, and is shorter. There's a temptation to deepen it, but at this point in the story, I need to build momentum both as a writer and a player.
Chapter 8 is an emotional one, and a technical one because it needs to set up the ending correctly. It also requires me to finish the requisite section in the book, which I've put off because I know it's gonna be a tear-jerker.
Chapter 9 is the apex. The villain of the piece gets a turn and it's going to be so deliciously evil to write that bit. I'm going to love writing it and hate myself for being able to write it. There's more technical work in preparing the player for the final challenge, and the final challenge itself. Luckily that challenge is written apart from some details. I spent some time this week (which on the chart looks like no work) taking my prototype and welding it into the game proper. There's some actual tricky mathematics to get the thing I need, and I hope that there's a solution. The player won't notice any of it. I hope to do a write-up of the puzzle constraints later.
Chapter 10 is the denouement, which are fairly swift to write. I don't feel like the game wants a long goodbye, so it'll be punchy.
Overall, I have four weeks and it'll be tight. August is going to be terrifically busy, but I can make it work. I feel like it's less "fixing the wings mid-air" than it looks.
In this whole last effort I'm very much trying to burn-down the project rather than burn-out myself. I've committed to pulling out if the game isn't ready. Many years ago I did not do that and it was disastrous for me.
After submission, the project is with the people and we see how it goes. My brain is itching to do other things (solo RPGs and write a campaign for my weekly D&D crew). One last burst of diligence and I'm done.