Ninefox Gambit VN: Prelude: text-only prototype, some cuss words, about 5 minutes to play (“choose your own adventure” or “hyperlinked game” style), with NOTES to myself in bold + italics. Drafted in Inkle Studios’ Ink (narrative scripting language).
I do have some graphics, sound/music, but for prototyping purposes, it makes sense to separate them for now.
Comments/feedback appreciated: please send to yoon@yoonhalee.com – also let me know how (if at all) you’d like to be credited for testing/feedback.
Progress lately:
- animation: firearms research (poses etc). Jedao is going to have a revolver, because Reasons. Cheris, as a Kel officer, is going to have a semi-automatic. That kind of thing.
- game design: calendars and narrative scripting (see above), with thanks to Chris Chinn for brainstorming help!
- music: more piano tomfooolery, with special thanks to Baton Rouge’s game store Little Wars and its delightful piano. :3 Also abuse of innocent VSTs.
When I’m scoping a project in a new- or newish-to-me endeavor, I think a lot about extensible design.
Have you ever taught a lesson, especially to a group of people? Not necessarily in the context of a classroom class—cooking, knitting, religious study, how to pet the catten.
One thing I struggled with as a student teacher (for secondary math education), and that I suspect many teachers do when we’re just starting out, is knowing how long each part of a lesson will take students to complete. Sometimes I could make an educated guess. Sometimes I wildly underestimated and sometimes I wildly overestimated. I’m good at improvisation (a useful skill for teaching high school math anyway!) so I could compensate, but I was often taken aback by what students figured out instantly and what they spent all hour unraveling. Sometimes the deficiency was my teaching or lesson preparation, but sometimes it was just inexperience. Every group of students is different, but after a few runs with a specific lesson, we get a better general sense of this.
When I scope a project in a new- or newish-to-me endeavor, in some sense I’m both teacher and student. I don’t know what will take a lot of time, what will be difficult, what will be nothingburger easy mode, problems that I didn’t even know to ask about, fun (or terribad) side quests. Fortunately, for a personal project, I can be lenient!
My main goals include “therapy” (in the sense of a fun hobby) and learning. For these specific goals, a certain amount of “inefficiency” is not only expected, but generative. Among other things, as I’ve said before, I’d rather be doing the R&D/exploration early in a project, not when I’m 73% “done” and dealing with sunk costs. I imagine people are all over the map on this, but for creative projects and processes, I’ve rarely found a straight-line algorithmic learning path to work well for me. I also like to give myself permission to ditch something for a better idea!
I get bored if I don’t have a specific goal or thing I want to make/produce. I envy people who are more process-oriented, but one positive of having a goal is that it provides a clarifying lens. I can organize my learning and/or planning and/or work around: Does this get me closer to the end product? Sometimes I decide I just want to explore something fun (again, remembering that this is a personal project) and that’s all right! But that lens enables me to self-direct my efforts.
I also prefer goals that are more ambitious in scope—there really is no rush like bringing a twenty-year plan to fruition—but I probably only have one more twenty-year plan in me at best because, y’know, human lifespan. :3 So I want to set a target that’s high enough to feel ambitious yet is theoretically within my grasp with hard work.
And this is where extensible design comes in: I want to leave room in the plan to expand the project in ways that are doable, if it serves the project and/or my goals, as well as room to shrink the project where I see scope creep or obstacles that I’m not able to surmount with my current resources and/or knowledge and/or skill. This will shift over time, and that’s okitty!
My experience from writing is that the best way for me to do this is by editing structure. I mean, there are things one could do to scope up or scope down that don’t involve the equivalent of structural edits (e.g. “placeholder piano soundtrack played by me” vs. “piano soundtrack as performed by a highly paid concert pianist”). For narrative, though, I’m looking at a structure that can be made more or less fractally complex. For example, if you’re creating a 5,000-word short story that’s in some sense encapsulating two hours of television (or the scripts thereof), you’re not just “cutting spare adjectives” anymore. You will have to change the narrative structure. This is a real example from a work-for-hire job I did in short-story-izing the four-episode Umbara Arc from Star Wars: The Clone Wars, by the way! (For starters, I chopped everything down to a single POV, Rex, because 5,000 words was a hard limit and there was no room for anything else.) For a more mundane example, one reason my first IF (interactive fiction) game, Moonlit Tower, was a tower: if I had time, I could add more levels; if I didn’t, I could get away with fewer. (As fantasy settings, dungeons also have this property!) Or one can structure an episodic story with mini-arcs, that kind of thing. But if one’s going to do this, I want to plan in the accordion nature of the structure right from the beginning.
That’s one reason I enjoy this kind of work: designing, manipulating, and revising this type of overarching structure is something I’m comparatively good at seeing and that I love digging into. A visual novel can be technically scoped up or down (…I could ditch the graphics entirely and write a text adventure, come to that) as well as narratively scoped up or down in ways that feel satisfying and play to my strengths. Also, I needed another hobby?
Oh, and favorite inks:
- India inks generally (dip pens)
- J. Herbin’s Emerald of Chivor and Vert Atlantide (fountain pen shimmer inks)
- Diamine Syrah (fountain pen ink)
- Colorverse Gravity Wave (fountain pen ink, which I obtained because my husband works for LIGO!)
- Montblanc Alfred Hitchcock (fountain pen ink, sadly long since discontinued)
- De Atramentis Document Black (fountain pen ink, reasonably waterproof)
Yours in calendrical heresy,
YHL