IWSG: Roller-coaster ride...but in a bad way

 

    So...August has not been a pretty month for me.

    (I mean, it never is, but worse than usual.)

    On the real-life side, a huge thunderstorm hit in the middle of the month, and a massive branch ripped the phone/internet line right out of the back of my house.  I was without electricity for about eight hours (as was like half the county, because it was a power station thing), and without phone or internet for a week.  This would be bad at any time, because it's surprising just how much I've come to depend on my WiFi (esp. since I have a very low data cap on my cell phone), but for it to happen while I was leading a team on a game jam...ugh.  So much extra stress that I did not need.  :(

    As to the game jam, that's where things get weird.  So, I was--of course--writing the game, a visual novel loosely based on about the first 2/3 of the Iliad.  (Well, on parts of the first 2/3 of it.  Like, you know, leaving out most all of the battles because it's being narrated by Patroclos...)  A visual novel, for anyone who might stumble across this post and doesn't know about them, is like the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books from the '80s, only it's a video game, and there are pictures of the characters and locations.  (And there are typically a lot fewer choices to make.)  From a writing perspective, it's a lot like writing a screenplay with a very verbose narrator.  ;)  (Remember the Jim Henson TV show The Storyteller?  Writing a visual novel is a lot like writing a script for that would be, except no way would a visual novel ever be able to get John Hurt to voice its narrator. :P )

    I finished the script back in July--this game jam ran from July 1st to August 31st, and it's much like NaNoWriMo, in that you're supposed to start from scratch at the beginning and finish by the end, only in a game jam you're also supposed to turn it in when you're done, so everyone else can play it--and it was almost a full 50k.  (I may have unconsciously slipped into NaNo mentality there, and been subconsciously aiming for 50k, though I don't really know how much shorter I could have made it and still told the whole story.)  This meant I had fulfilled my primary role in the jam, yes?

    But since it was my story and I had become the de facto lead of the team, I couldn't just bug out and do whatever I wanted in the interim.  I had to be constantly in contact with everyone else (especially hard without reliable internet access!), and I had to deal with every little problem that came up, especially every little problem to do with all the incoming art, especially the background art.  (There are a lot of locations in the game, so a lot of backgrounds were needed, and although there are resources online to get free (or at least extremely affordable) pre-made backgrounds, almost none of them fit our needs, given that our game is set in the 1980s in a Detroit-like city, and most of the art assets for visual novels are modern and typically look like a Japanese suburb, and/or high school.)  There were a lot of problems, as you might expect, but eventually the art did all pull together, even if some of it is barely more than a placeholder.

    But then there's the coding side of things.  I've written a few games before, using a very simple engine called TWINE, which is designed to be pretty much nothing but text.  Here's an example from one of my previous games:

    As you can see, some images are possible, but it's not as big a part of the experience as this:

    (Yup, that's the game I've been working on for the past two months.  From left to right, that's Achilles (Ace Lee), Patroclos (Pat Rock) and A.J. the Axeman (the Greater Aias/Ajax)...so you can see I took more liberties than just turning them into '80s rock performers...)

    Anyhow, my point is just that coding with TWINE and coding with Ren'py--the engine for this visual novel--is very different, and the script I wrote would have been downright simple to code in TWINE.  (It's way simpler than Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon?, the game that first screenshot is from, which I wrote for a much shorter game jam.)  It is not so simple to code in Ren'py, especially since some of the nitty-gritty stuff (like positioning the character sprites) can't really be done until all the art is in.

    Consequently, we were only able to submit a demo instead of the full game.  :(

    And the stress of this whole thing has murdered my diet.  I feel like I've put on twenty pounds.  (Dunno if I actually have, but it feels that way.)

    Not that any of that is even really the point here, or what I'm talking about in the title of the post.  This experience has been murder on my self-perception as a writer.  As I mentioned last time, at no time was I ever truly satisfied with the script of this game.  That has only intensified as the month has progressed.  In fact, I was so unhappy with it that I decided to break the seal on an old NaNo novel in an attempt to cheer myself up by the comparison.

    I should probably explain that.  See, my second NaNoWriMo novel did not go as I wanted it to.  In fact, by the time November 30th rolled around, I was so disgusted with it that I closed the file and never opened it again...until this past month.  (Not quite a full nine years later.)  My idea was to reread it and reassure myself that my writing has at least improved.

    Only...um...it hasn't.

    Now, don't get me wrong.  That old NaNo novel was terrible.  Half the cast--or more--was directly stolen from various JRPGs, and very blatantly so.  (Admittedly, half of them were ripped off from a more obscure JRPG, so most people would be able to read it and think they were actually original, though they certainly scream their original characters' identities at me.  The ones so very obviously based on Final Fantasy VII characters, on the other hand...)  What little of the heroine that was unique to her and not just lifted from Yuffie Kisaragi was very much, well, what's known in fan fiction circles as a "Mary Sue."  Not as bad as most--at least a large chunk of the cast genuinely didn't like her--but she was very much "the special" and...ugh.  It was just so bad.

    But way more happened in it than usually does in my novels.  Every chapter had new events, new places, new people, things happening.  Most of my stuff is slow as molasses.  Whatever it was that I tapped into for that novel that let me actually have things happen...I've lost it, possibly forever.  :(

    Finding that out--that my writing is actually getting worse with time--was supremely depressing.  Like, I've been on-and-off mentally composing this post for about a week now, and some of it was very much "I'm the worst writer in the history of ever" kind of melodrama.

    But getting to play through the first few scenes of the game I wrote, with the sprites and the music and the backgrounds all coming together...that was pretty thrilling.  And it did make me feel a lot better about myself, and about what I'd written for the game.  (Though I still hate that my stupid script is why we couldn't finish on time...)

    Which isn't to say that I'm feeling great about myself or my writing, but...I guess it's left me in a slightly better headspace.

    At least for now.

IWSG - It's like NaNo only twice as long and with art

 

    So, I am deep into the creation process on my visual novel.  Or rather, I'm out of my depth on the creation process on the visual novel.

    Aside from needing to make one tiny edit to the text to remove some extraneous descriptive material now that I know what the background will look like, the script--which is to say, my role--is done.  (And clocked in at nearly 50k, so the comparison to NaNo is an appropriate one.  Although the script also includes notes to the programmer, information about changing sprites and backgrounds, and when sound effects are called for, so the actual text the player will see is probably no more than 45k, maybe not even quite that much.  (I should delete all the notes and such to find out...only that sounds like a lot of work for zero reward.))

    That means, of course, that my job has become largely "artist wrangler" as I try to explain to people who can actually draw what I want things to look like and then try to make sure all the art gets drawn in time to be put into the game, which has to be uploaded by August 31st if it's going to count for the game jam.  (In a pinch, of course, the game can be uploaded with some graphics missing, using blank jpgs that just say "art in progress" or something.  Or for that matter it could be uploaded like a demo, only running partway through.  And, in a super-duper pinch, I could forget the pictures and music and all that and shove it into TWINE in a few days of hard coding, if I really, really, really had to.)

    What I am learning about myself through this process is that I am not a team player.

    I mean, I kind of already knew that, from my experiences at the museum, but this is a whole different ball of yarn.  Because this is "my" project, and as an unemployed person (who has enough money saved up that I can afford not to be hunting for work) I have all the time in the world to work on it.  Which of course makes it frustrating that no one else on the team dedicates all their time to the project.

    Which is, of course, totally unfair and unreasonable of me.

    I'm aware of that, but it doesn't make me any less frustrated by the fact.

    I am doing my best not to blame them--it's not their fault, or even a problem in any logical sense, that they have lives and I don't have one--and I don't think I've said anything to make them think that I am upset that the art is not done when the script is, but trying to stay calm and rational is not successfully preventing me from feeling like a caged tiger waiting for its first meal in days.

    However, I still like the idea of making a real, honest-to-goodness game that people can play, and which isn't 99.9% text.  And I have some ideas of things I want to do in future games.  (After I write the next draft of the second novel in my YA series, as the current draft needs soooo much more work!  I expect next month's post will be me fretting about how I'm going to work in all the characterization changes from the rewrite of book one that somehow didn't make it into the rewrite of book two...)

    So I'm thinking I'm going to learn how to code.  Not like heavy-duty coding, just low-level coding.  I'm going to do some minor episodic games using assets posted to itch.io for free use (or relatively cheap use; I'll give myself a budget of, like, the price of a single console game or something) and use them to teach myself how to do it.  So, like, a visual novel to learn Ren'py basics, and then maybe RPG Maker will be put on sale and I'll do an RPG chapter (sadly, I passed up a huge sale earlier this summer, when one of the older versions was like $5 or so) and then maybe I'll see what other programs are out there to make game making a little easier that might allow me to make a puzzle game or an adventure game or a strategy game.  Actually, I should probably prioritize strategy game, since I already tried futilely to make one in TWINE and it could use a remake to make it a proper game.  (Which I'm sure a talented developer could do in TWINE, but I'm not that smart, sadly.)  Plus I have another idea for a strategy game where Achilles...hmm, no, actually, gonna keep that idea to myself.  ;)  It's an extremely alternate take on the Trojan War, let's say, and leave it there.

    But the main thing I want to do is cut my reliance on other people.  Hence learning to code and using already available resources.  But eventually the resources will dry up, and then what?  (I mean, really, where am I going to find pre-made game assets based on Mycenaean Greece?  Classical Greece, sure, but Late Bronze Age?  Nope.  Don't think I'll ever find that.)  If only it was as easy to learn to draw or computer-generate art as it is to write!  *sob*

    Of course, if there wasn't a deadline, it wouldn't bother me so much.

    And of course none of this actually has to do with writing *cough* though it's certainly a lot to do with my insecurities!

    To get back on the topic of writing...I can't say I'm totally satisfied with the script.  I feel like it started getting lazier and lazier the further in I got.  Like, early on, when the player can read newspaper articles, I went to a fair amount of effort to say where in the paper the article was, and what it said, etc.  By the end, it was just a couple of lines summing up what was said.  Hopefully the player will look at that as reflecting the mounting panic the main character/narrator is feeling, but...yup, I'm not pleased with that.  (And yet the game's already so freaking long that I don't want to go in and expand on any of that!)

    On the other hand, the sensitivity reader said they liked the main character and his boyfriend and their interactions with each other, so I'm at least pleased about that.  :)

    On a weirder note, I was getting punchy when I wrote one of the daily events.  (The game takes place over the course of two weeks, and for about a full week of it you get to pick from a handful of daily events, which go through three shifts as the situation gets more dire.)  It's one where the narrator's boyfriend is going to be interviewed by the local newspaper, and since one of the lead characters in Velvet Goldmine (my favorite movie, which indirectly prompted this game) is a journalist, I couldn't resist giving him a quasi-cameo, in that the fellow who comes to interview him is gorgeous and sending off "gay" vibes to our two leads.  (There are many differences between the character in the game and the character in Velvet Goldmine, I hasten to point out, however.  The game character is not English, he's a bit younger, and he doesn't have Arthur's serious social awkwardness issues.  Also he works for the Rock City Bugle, not the New York Herald.)

    But now I want to write a fanfic wherein the Velvet Goldmine character really does interview the two leads of my game...

    ...probably the only reason that I won't end up writing it is that I can't see anywhere the story could go other than what is called in fan fiction circles "PWP":  "porn with(out) plot".  And I can't write smut to save my life.  (Which only makes sense, considering that I'm aroace and have literally never seen a naked man in person in my life.  Nor do I want to.)  Still, I wouldn't lay odds on me not eventually trying to write it anyway. ;)  (Just hopefully without attempting the smut part.)