The Creative Process #40 - Going Out There and then Coming Back

What a month! It's been such a busy time that Halloween isn't even a blip on my radar. At daycare pickup there were windows covered in red handprints and an educator was dressed in a Stitch outfit and it took me a second to figure out that I hadn't walked into some blood-stained insanity.

IF Comp Results

After a long and anxious six weeks of judging, the results finally came out. I had been working on my games for so long and waiting through the judging period to see how my entries would go, it was finally a relief to get to the results. Of course, the morning of that I had a 4am video chat with the Interactive Fiction Tech Foundation on the unrelated-but-still-important microgrant proposal committee (grants are open! please apply!) The IF Comp results were live at 8am my time, and at 9am our family needed to be on the road to go to the annual Granny-gives-grandkids-boxes-of-hand-chosen-books Day.

As a reminder I had two games in: Anne of Green Cables and Cart. Anne was my favourite and I had invested the most effort into it, but I was pleased with the both of them. Reviews through the judging period felt like both games were decent, but a qualified good. Anne turned out to be the more divisive in reviews, which was the opposite of what I expected. Anne also got the only strong negative review that I saw - it got a strong "did not play" after the reviewer hated the introduction from concept to writing. Cart missed a review by one of the prolific reviewers because the content warnings and general gist were absolutely not his cup of tea and he politely stepped around it. And hey, both reactions were fine.

After voting was done and before the results came out I wrote and published post-mortems on both games (Anne and Cart). I try to do this so the results don't influence my reflection. Obviously there is some influence from reviews, but the worst thing you can do is make your post-mortem a retort to reviews and results. I think people liked the write-ups, although re-reading them I think I was a little bolshy in places where I needed to be humble. After the post-mortems I wrote up a deep-dive into the design of final puzzle for Anne, only because that felt fun to write about.

In the end, out of 85 places Anne got 25th and Cart got 36th. I was hoping for 16th for Anne but the Monkey paw gave me different square numbers. The entries this year were really, really strong so I felt less bad about it. And as my wife reminded me: top 30% and top 40% in an international competition amongst actual game developers and people who write for a living... not a result to be sneezed at. I did, I admit, frown for a little bit, but it's all good now.

What Did I Learn?

While I think I'm a decent writer, I can always do better. A consistent story with the top-performing entries was their commitment to beta-testing. Not just in having a lot of testers, but thoroughly testing it throughout development. Cart had trouble getting anyone to look at it because of the content warnings. I got a few testers early on for Anne, but I didn't utilise them later in the process because I was stitching it all together just before release. Hand Me Down had this criticism in 2023 and Mix Tape had it in spades in 2005. Maybe this time I'll learn!

Both games also got dinged for having less interactivity than they could have. Anne, in particular, had a lot of reading per choice point. Both stories echoed choices throughout, but not strongly enough for many readers. Mere recognition of choices is not the same as taking the game in a new direction because of them. I feel like my next project might be a lot more systemic and thus interactive, but will be less focussed on the writing.

The graphical design work I did seemed to pay off, so more of that in the future.

Anne of Green Cables has since been released on itch.io with some updates, so it will be interesting to see how that goes long-term.

A Return to PAX

The start of the month saw our family head down to the coast on a holiday for a week. It was a thoroughly great trip, but my kids got into the habit of yelling "Dad! Hey Daaaad!" across our tiny bungalow for every trivial thing, so often that my wife almost went insane hearing it and she wasn't even being summoned. Gotta love `em.

The morning after the drive back from the holiday I got back in the car to drive down to Melbourne for PAX Australia, where I was to be the booth babe assistant for my mate Mike's board game Aloft. It had been many years since I had been to PAX. It was the much the same, but I was different.

Aloft went as well as one could hope for. We had two long slots to demonstrate the game in the Collaboratory, and I think every play went well. We had return visitors. Mike even got applause at the end of some games as appreciation for his excellent design.

It was a really interesting situation for me. I had given Mike feedback and ideas through his many iterations of Aloft, but it's 100% his baby. I'm not a salesperson or natural extrovert, but as we brought people in to play the game, I gave it my best making jokes, gently explaining rules, and keeping the game running smoothly. It was deeply satisfying to see the game do so well. I had invested so much of myself into my IF Comp games, but to have this opportunity to help someone else's big personal investment with no real skin of my own in the game... It was nice.

Having an exhibitor badge was super baller. I loved being able to walk onto the show floor early, or duck back in after they stopped letting people return late on the last day.

I spent waaaaay too much money on RPGs (solo / indie / with great artwork, pick at least two). Solo RPGs are very interesting to me. They sit in a funny niche of being relatively cheap to make, easy to stock and sell, are often incredibly idiosyncratic in style, but there are a number of established mechanics that are tried-and-true if a little uninspiring. They are hard to advertise, though unless you have a very visual game or invest heavily in art. I wouldn't mind writing one some day, but I don't currently have a compelling project for it.

Next steps

I'm trying to recalibrate what I want to work on, and what I should work on, that is, improve. After my time in the sun with IF Comp it's probably time to sink below the waves and just tinker.

Life is (and will be for the near future) quite busy, which puts up bumpers to thinking about this creative life. Thoughts like: Why do I do it? What do I get out of it? What sort of creator am I? Should I attempt to be more professional? Commercial? Widely-enjoyable? Do I need to do more time improving my craft? Do I need to share my creative journey, or should I just present the best that I can after it is polished?

One very specific idea I had along these lines: early in this newsletter I used generative AI for pictures. That's not my jam any more, and I moved to Unsplash. I've been uncomfortable with using their nice-but-generic pictures. Unmoored from reality, I had an idea that I might just illustrate the newsletters with my own pictures. Get back into sketching, or learn to make art fast in Blender. Given how I write these and my already-squeezed free time, this might be foolish. Feel free to share your opinion in the comments.