The Creative Process #41 - Turn To Page...

Following the results of IF Comp, I've been keen to shift my efforts around to be a bit smarter and more effective. My standard mode of creation over the last few years has been to make things to a deadline like a competition, or the monthly newsletter. I tend to finish them just before the deadline. This is a vast improvement over my previous mode where I never had deadlines and never finished anything. But I feel like it might be worthwhile finishing ahead of the deadline and spending a lot more time on refinement and polish. Reading through the post-mortems on the top ten IF Comp winners, and there was a strong representation of people who spent a lot of time testing, tweaking and improving their art.

So that's the current goal. I'm in the early stages of my next project(s). I haven't committed to anything yet. As part of showing what happens behind the scenes, I'll talk to some of the ideas that came to the forefront this month. I'm trying to evolve my craft and process, and there's inevitably going to be some steps forward and slides backwards. You're welcome to join me on this journey and chip in your opinions.

The gamebook pivot

For the last few months I've gone off my more traditional interactive fiction, and have been looking into different things – but not too far afield. I was extremely keen on solo RPGs, but need more space in my life to really get stuck in. Life has been exceptionally busy and I've just poked my head up over the water in time for the Christmas wave to dump me back under again.

I like the variety that solo RPGs offer. It's not just your standard attributes-and-hitpoints that the usual tabletop roleplaying offers. There's diceless systems. Journalling games. Or games with intricate systems that really only work with a solo player because your buddies aren't going to wait around while you fiddle with mechanics.

Unfortunately I don't have much in the way of ideas here. Solo RPGs often remove the story element and I like to write stories.

My roots, however, go all the way back to gamebooks like Lone Wolf, Advanced Fighting Fantasy, and Choose Your Own Adventure. These are close analogues to table top roleplaying games and traditional interactive fiction like Twine games, but there's a different feel to them. I love the continuing legacy aspect of Lone Wolf and the light mechanics. Of course as an adult I hate Choose Your Own Adventure, but it might be nice to write a game with sudden endings. In normal IF I feel like I want a player to get through the content to the finale. Gamebooks offer no such comforts.

I also like the idea of making connected content rather than one-off projects. I am very unlikely to ever return to my cyberpunk world of Anne of Green Cables. I couldn't do anything episodic, without radically changing my understanding and feeling of the source material and what I wrote.

Another aspect I like the idea of is aiming to sell my works rather than try to summit the peak of acclaim. That was implicitly the goal of my last few projects and it didn't work out. Of course, I can just work harder, but I feel like selling gamebooks to a very modest audience might be a more achievable goal. The parameters are different and it's potentially easier to iterate and improve myself. My goals would be to sell products on itch.io and DriveThruRPG. I wouldn't expect to get much money from it, but the goal is currently "more than zero money".

Cutting my teeth

I've written interactive fiction before and have a good understanding of gamebooks, but I don't pretend to be any good at actually making them. The obvious thing to do is make a bunch of them that I don't care too much about. Not slop, but works to improve my craft with, and then move to more meaningful projects.

My idea here is to make gamebooks for kids. They have a lot of things going for it:

• Kids can be voracious readers.
• As a writer you can have a lot more fun with it.
• Expectations don't have to be as high.
• Mechanics have to be minimal, evocative and foolproof.
• I know a bunch of potential beta-testers.

Even if my kids don't test the books, I would like to write for them.

I have an idea for a series about a spy agency for kids. Think Odd Squad, but less batty and less educational. The silly premise allows for humour, any scale of action and any location/situation I might want.

A 40-to-60 section book might be a sufficient size to train my skills on. I'm okay at writing moment-to-moment scenes, but I definitely need to improve on offering choices, honouring the choices and balancing difficulty.

My research hasn't uncovered any strong theory on how to craft these games, and I think it comes predominantly down to feel. So it requires a lot of experimentation and building up a repertoire of tricks.

The bigger adventure

Assuming I can get some skill in creating little gamebooks, and some experience in trying to sell them, I had an idea for something more substantial. Again, it wouldn't be staking myself on a serious project, but is primarily designed for fun.

As I was exploring solo RPGs, I tried my hand at a solo Pathfinder campaign with an old character I enjoyed and had played for years: Emerson Sprylock, a gentleman rascal, a Sherlock without all the baggage, an everyman but not just any man. Pathfinder is dreadful to do solo, but the ideas that came out of my initial sessions were fun and intriguing, and I could take in absolutely any direction. Emerson was desperate to get into the exclusive group The Epistolary Few, a loose collection of letter-writing adventurers always trying to one-up each other in etiquette, excitement and exploits.

A series built around the thrilling tales of Emerson Sprylock would suit me to the ground. I think he's an interesting character and you can do interesting things with him, and he's not your standard One Man Army, dungeon-sweeping barbarian. Ideally if I finish my time on this earth with my own Lone Wolf equivalent, that'd be rad.

I am also not against further recycling of old tabletop RPG work I've done. I ran a long campaign in Apogee, a fantasy city of superheroes I built from the ground up. I also ran a long campaign called House of Limen, an inverted mega-dungeon made from the wildest variety of environments from the universe connected by magical doors. Bringing Emerson to Apogee, or through the House of Limen, offers me a lot of exciting story angles, and I've already devoted a lot of time to developing these campaigns so why not capitalise on that?

While I'm being bold, I'd like to offer a series that had a variety of stories. I loved the Lone Wolf series, but many of them were variants on "get the macguffin from the dungeon in this different biome". Which were fun as heck, but they are all haunted by the spectre of world war. I'm kinda tired of fantasy wars. I want a rascal who gets entangled in murder mysteries, or blackmailed into heists, or dragged into petty rivalries with dastardly scoundrels.

Of course, I need to pause here. Spinning out enormous, overly ambitious projects well beyond my abilities was the Me two Me's ago. It's good to have a goal, but the true goal at this stage is practice, iteration and refinement. Small investments that pay off, rather than big investments that never see the light of day.

Nuts and bolts

To this end I've been looking for tools, knowledge and opportunities. I'm not averse to building my own tools, but there are already some decent ones out there. I'm well-acquainted with Twine and there are tools for using Twine to make gamebooks destined for outlets like DriveThruRPG.

I built some small tools to test and analyze my IF Comp games, like to ensure no dead ends, and that the choice structure was what I intended. Elaborating on these to build a dependable workflow won't be too much work.

I'm listening to gamebook podcasts, and trying to acquire a variety of different gamebooks. I want to experiment with mechanics to have something neat and effective.

The slow tanker of my creative energy is aligning itself towards exploring gamebooks. I haven't abandoned my other projects like The Submariner or Void Space Pirate Radio, but those have hit a blockade in design. I've seen other creatives keep a variety of projects on the boil and I'd like to emulate that. My recent approach of picking a single thing and burning myself down to meet a competition deadline seems undesirable. It has no long-term momentum, as I've seen in the wake of IF Comp.

While life is currently busy, I'm ready for some new creative work now and into 2026. I'm keeping some of my old ideas available, like they are extra fingers as bookmarks in a gamebook where I'm not too sure if I'm about to make the right decision. But at some point, you get far enough ahead and be confident you can let those old pages go.