A to Z: Umbra the Unknown

 

    Yeah, this one's weird, but really!  How many names start with U?  (And yes, I do know that "Umbra" is not usually a name.  But it's what I had.)

    So...I wanted to make a quick visual novel for Winter Jam 2022, but I didn't want to have to deal with artists, because I don't work well with others.  Fortunately, there are plenty of artists who sell (or sometimes make available for free) their work on itch.io for people to use to make games.  And after looking around for a while at my choices, I decided on a pair of little cuties...

Character art by Minttydrops

    But the names they came with didn't fit what I was going for, so I wanted to give them new names.  And I settled on Lux and Umbra.  The plot of the game is quite simple:  the two little girls are on the wrong side of a forest and it's almost dinner time, so they decide--or rather Lux decides and drags Umbra with her--to pass through the forest instead of going around it.  It's a menu-driven exploration game, essentially, with a few adventure game-style item puzzles to proceed (though hopefully the puzzles don't quite exhibit the full moon logic of some of the classic adventure games of the 1990s), and it's impossible to lose, because the girls aren't in any danger.  (Plus they both pick up and use the necessary items automatically, so even if a player feels stuck, all they have to do is visit every single location and something will happen.)

    Umbra is an oddity of a character.

    On the one hand, she is serious and often left extremely alarmed by the actions of the zany, flighty Lux.

    On the other hand, she talks exclusively in emojis.

A to Z: Idomeneus

 

    Hmm.  You know, I bet I did an earlier April A-to-Z entry on Idomeneus.  (It's hard to come up with I-names, after all!)  Oh well.  This one is categorically different, as a good chunk of it will be talking about something I hadn't written yet the last time I took part in this challenge!  😆

    So.  Basics.  Idomeneus is the king of Crete at the time of the Trojan War.  He's a grandson of King Minos, and a cousin of Agamemnon and Menelaos.  He's a pretty tough warrior, but not quite in the top tier.  Frequently accompanied into battle by his nephew Meriones, who is particularly accomplished as an archer as well as with a spear.

    The main place he stands out in the Iliad is during the battle when the Trojans are burning the Achaian camp, when he pretty much stomps all over Deiphobos (who is both frightened of him and trying to dismiss him as irrelevant at the same time), only to be wounded by Aineias, who at least respected him as an opponent.

    As to what happened to him after the war, let's go straight to the quotes for that, because today I want to focus on my interactive fiction game Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon? in which you play a random, generic king no one's ever heard of, who is for who-knows-what-reason offered the reins of the Achaian army when Agamemnon suddenly drops out right as the fleet is about to sail from Aulis.  There are ten decision points for each of the ten years (though some of them lead to further decisions within the decision point), and I'm sorry to say a lot of them actually don't matter in the least.  😰  (Even sorrier to say that by the time you get to the last two or three years, the game is buggy as heck.  It was doing all sorts of strange stuff like forgetting Achilles was alive and sending Odysseus on missions when he'd been sent back to Ithaca in disgrace. 😰  I had to replay the whole game to get quotes for this post, 'cause trying to extract them from the Twine program files is really awkward considering how much code some of the text is buried under.)  Anyway!  I tried my best, back when I was making the game, to give a lot of alternate possibilities for individual events, leading to some very different outcomes...meaning that when the war is successfully won, the game gives you a long scroll telling you what happened to each character in your playthrough, and what happened to them when Agamemnon was running the show.  And this is what that said about Idomeneus' original fate:

         Under Agamemnon, Idomeneus returned home safely, but traditions vary as to what happened next: some say he made a foolish promise to sacrifice whatever first greeted him (which ended up, of course, being his child), others say that his wife betrayed him and he had to flee, and others say he ruled on in peace. Whatever the truth of his fate was, more than a thousand years later, the locals would point out a building they said was his tomb at Knossos.

    Yeah, not terribly exciting.  (Strange side note:  those same locals also claimed his nephew Meriones was buried in the same tomb.  I'm not sure why.)  That level of variation in post-war fates is strangely not unusual.  A lot of the others who fought in the Trojan War had both "happily ever after" and "ran fleeing from an adulterous wife" endings.  Large numbers of the latter ended up in Italy, for whatever reason. 🤷🏻‍♀️

    Anyway, the difficulty of writing about someone like Idomeneus is that he hasn't got all that much personality in the original work.  (By which I mean the Iliad, of course.  Most other ancient works that mention Idomeneus are mythographic works that don't go into detail about anyone's personality.)  Still, since he's one of the bigger players, he comes up pretty frequently in the game.

    The first major event involving him is almost immediately after the Achaian fleet lands on the Trojan shore.  At that time, in the original myth, Menelaos and Odysseus went to the city to make one last try at diplomacy.  It, needless to say, did not work.  😅  Anyway, in the game, you choose who accompanies Menelaos on the expedition, and Idomeneus is one of the options.  This is the first part of what happens if you select him...

        As Menelaos and Idomeneus prepare to depart, you call Agamemnon's herald Talthybios over and instruct him to attend upon them in their errand. He swears to report to you immediately upon his return to the camp and faithfully relate everything that should happen in the city.
         They are gone overnight--as you were expecting, given how long it would take them to reach Ilios on foot from camp--and it is late in the day when Talthybios finally returns to your tent.
         "We have returned from the city, Lord Creon," the herald informs you.
         "So I can see. I do not hear any jubilation in the camp, so I assume the mission did not succeed?"
         "Indeed not, my lord. We arrived at the city gates shortly before nightfall, and were admitted into the home of Antenor, one of King Priam's trusted advisors. First thing in the morning, he accompanied us to see the king, and Menelaos stated his case, requesting the return of his wife, and promising to do without the gold that was stolen along with her, in recompense for the lives taken on the beach. Idomeneus also spoke, as Menelaos' kinsman, and [as] he who had been host to the funeral games that had given Alexandros the opportunity to thus rob Menelaos of gold and wife. His words were measured, just and wise, and I was certain they would sway the Trojan court to agree to Menelaos' requests." He sighs sadly. "We were sent back to the home of Antenor to await Priam's decision. Much time later, Antenor returned, full of worry. He reported to us that Alexandros arrived in the council chamber with Helen at his side, and that the prince's honeyed words convinced the Trojan elders to turn on us with a murderous attack. Antenor came to warn us and help us escape the city alive."
         "And?" you prompt, when he does not seem to want to continue.

    Thus far, aside from Idomeneus' contribution, this follows what happened in the actual myth.  But--even though this is still super early in the game--there are actually two possible outcomes to these events.  In most cases, this would be the result of sending Idomeneus along with Menelaos:

         "Idomeneus said that he felt a measure of blame for what Alexandros had done. If he had followed what his deceased uncle would likely have desired, and not invited the sons of Aerope to his funeral games, then Helen could not have been stolen away. So he did not wish to run, but to stay and fight. Menelaos did not want to see his kinsman risk his life, and they argued long enough that we could hear the approaching princes in the street. Antenor urged us to flee at once, and Idomeneus insisted that Menelaos and I leave, while he remained to delay the enemy, promising he would escape on his own as soon as he was able. Alas, though we waited long in hiding outside the city walls, he did not emerge. Antenor sent word by one of his children that Prince Hector, though grievously wounded by Idomeneus, succeeded in killing the Cretan king."

    However!  The first (proper) decision you make in the game is who to have be the first man to disembark when the fleet arrives.  (Due to the fact that Thetis had warned/commanded Achilles not to disembark first, as the first to disembark would be the first to die.)  If you order Achilles or Aias of Salamis to disembark first, they're still the first to die, but they take Hector with them!  In which case, the result of sending Idomeneus with Menelaos is drastically altered...

         "Idomeneus said that he felt a measure of blame for what Alexandros had done. If he had followed what his deceased uncle would likely have desired, and not invited the sons of Aerope to his funeral games, then Helen could not have been stolen away. So he did not wish to run, but to stay and fight. Menelaos did not want to see his kinsman risk his life, and they argued long enough that we could hear the approaching princes in the street. Antenor urged us to flee at once, and Idomeneus insisted that Menelaos and I leave, while he remained to delay the enemy, promising he would escape on his own as soon as he was able. After we waited in hiding quite a long while, Idomeneus finally emerged from the city, supported by one of Antenor's sons. He is badly wounded, but he proudly reported that he had killed Deiphobos, the second most powerful of Priam's sons."

    To be honest, until I replayed it to get these quotes, I had forgotten just how much variation I had managed to put in this game.  I really need to give it a proper glow-up at some point.  (And make it actually keep track of troop numbers and rations and such so that the smaller decisions will actually matter...)

A to Z: Dejected Deidameia

    So, today I'm talking about a straight-up character from Greek myths:  Deidameia of Scyros.  (Often transliterated as Deidamia.)  The eldest and most beautiful of the daughters of King Lycomedes, Deidameia is the mother of Neoptolemos by Achilles, who of course abandoned her to sail off to the war in Troy.

    And, surprisingly, there's not a huge amount about her in the original material that's constant beyond that.

    But there are some potentially triggering matters discussed in this post--because they're part of some tellings of the original myth--so I'm going to end the main page preview of this post after this paragraph.  I don't go into any details, but do briefly mention sensitive subjects, so if you have any concerns, maybe don't click on the "read more" link.

IWSG: Stalled by Health

So.

March was horrible.

Not even midway through the month, I started experiencing heart palpitations.  (I'm not quite 48, btw, so this is not normal.)

After a few days of suffering anxiety over this, it slowly dawned on me that this was likely being caused by the stress of working on my script for the game jam.  I stopped working on it for a few days and the symptoms got better.

Of course, when I resumed working on it, they sure enough started up again.  😫  I had started the month hoping to write the entire visual novel's script in the first month of the jam and then get the programming done in the second month.

Because of this heart thing, I'm not even quite to the point I had decided would be a good stopping point for a demo version. 😭  Fortunately, there's another place that a demo can stop, but... 😖

It just really annoys me that my own body sabotaged me like this.

Honestly, if I hadn't spent ~$65 on various art assets for the game, and two artists hadn't generously donated their time to make character sprites, I'd just cancel the thing and say "well, this just means no more game jams!"

Admittedly, I've still taken a "no more game jams" policy, but...I can't just cancel the game now.  I'm just not sure how I'll ever finish it. 😩  (I can, at least, find someone else to do the programming, but the rest of the writing...that's harder to deal with.  Though at least that part won't have a time limit.)

I am going to spend so much time writing fanfiction to de-stress after this.  (Which sounds crazy, writing to de-stress from writing, but...🤷🏻‍♀️)

I think what most irks me about this is that I put off working on one of my novels to do this game jam, after rushing to try and get its next draft and release prep done first.  That may have added to the stress, actually... 😰

Ugh.

My life is just a wreck.

That's the short version.  Even my hobbies are bad for me.

(On the other hand, this forced me to finally get a new primary care physician, so small win?)

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.)

IWSG: July

     Love that creative title post, right?

    *sigh*

    Yeah.  That pretty much sums up where I am right now.  The game jam started on June 30th, so I've been working on my visual novel script for a week now, and I'm making pretty good progress...except that the early scenes are much better than the later ones.  Like, as soon as the conflict started, it all just went out the window.  :(  I just can't write arguments to save my life, evidently.

    Which makes me wonder why I chose to write a visual novel about a guy having an extended temper tantrum over an argument.

    *cough*

    To start over at the beginning, since I don't think I ever outlined this on the blog, the idea for this visual novel is that I am adapting parts of the Iliad through a 1980s rock'n'roll filter:  instead of being warriors on the fields of Troy, Achilles and Hector are rock performers, and Agamemnon and Priam are their managers (though Priam is also still Hector's father).  The fight between Achilles and Agamemnon is pretty weird and artificial:  Achilles and Hector are up for the same award, it's given to Achilles, but then Agamemnon is informed that the announcer lied about whose name was on the card, and that it was supposed to go to Hector.  Not wanting the bad press of refusing to return the award, Agamemnon sends it back, and Achilles has a conniption fit, but he's blaming everything on Agamemnon instead of on the people who run the award or on Hector.  (As to the reason it's set in the 1980s, it's complicated, but stems out of its origin as the capsule description of a movie in a Velvet Goldmine fanfiction I wrote a while back.)

    It was going great until I got to writing him blaming everything on Agamemnon's willingness to capitulate.  Suddenly he makes no sense and is acting like a sullen twelve year old.  (Which, admittedly, Achilles always did.  Only, you know, a dangerous one with a spear and divine blood to make him stronger than normal men.)  His immaturity is made rather more awkward since he and Patroclos have had sex like three times already at this point in the game.  (Never on screen, though.  One of the two game jams I'm submitting this to doesn't accept 18+ material, and I would never be able to write a convincing sex scene even if it did.)

    The worst part, to me, is that I'm part of a team here.  Admittedly, since the whole thing was my idea, I kind of ended up in the lead of the team, but that doesn't change the "team" thing in its most important respect:  if my writing ends up being utter trash, then everyone else will have wasted their time and effort.  :(  I did at least give them all a link to my writing on AO3 before the jam started so they would have the chance to back out if they thought my script would be garbage, but that doesn't make me feel any less nervous about potentially wasting everyone's effort.

    Especially since our composer has already produced a number of pieces (none polished and perfected yet, but still), and they make me feel all the more incompetent as a writer, because they're just so good!  It's like, how can my mediocre-to-awful words be on screen while that awesome music is playing?

    So far, our artists have only produced sketches, so I can't know for a fact, but I'm pretty sure the art, too, is going to overwhelm the words.  Which I guess is kind of the point, but...bottom line, I feel awkward and uncomfortable about it no matter how you slice it.

    On top of everything else, I'm afraid I'm getting sick.  Just an allergy-induced sinus thing, but still.  (It shouldn't be possible for it to be COVID-related, at least:  I'm fully vaccinated, and although a lot of people in my area aren't and the Delta variant has been making headlines as it tears through the local population, I've been careful about wearing a mask in public, so between the vaccine and the mask, I should be okay on that score.)  If I do end up sick, that could make finishing the game really difficult.  We do have two months, but sometimes my sinus things can hang on for weeks, even a full month if they're really nasty.

    (Also, yesterday morning a chipmunk decided to sit on my front porch and make annoying little chirpy noises that I fear are it trying to attract a mate.  I can hear it totally well through my front door (which is very near my standing desk), and it is super annoying.  It hasn't come back since I went and partially blocked its hole (leading under my front porch) with little rocks from the fill around my yews, but I'm sure it'll be back soon.  That is not going to help me concentrate on my writing.)