Form & Void — 1 of 22

Lea

Release 1

"Form & Void" by Lea.

The story headline is "An interactive creation myth"

Release along with a website, cover art, an interpreter, and the source text. Release along with a file of "World map feelie (color)" called "map-color.pdf" and a file of "World map feelie (black and white)" called "map-b&w.pdf".

The story description is "Just so: there's not a lot to see here, nor much light to illuminate the void. But up ahead is a glimmer of something interesting.

A Goer drifts around in the aether at your fingertips.

--

Presented for Bring Out Your Dead, a jam for unfinished/incomplete/in-progress/experimental works that never quite got off the ground: https://itch.io/jam/bring-out-your-dead

More history and brief postmortem thoughts are available in the game itself (type 'about') or at the top of the source text.".

The story creation year is 2009.

To say some intro text:

say "This work-that-hasn't-been-in-progress-for-some-time is presented for Bring Out Your Dead, a jam for unfinished/incomplete/in-progress/experimental works that never quite got off the ground: https://itch.io/jam/bring-out-your-dead

The timestamps show that I worked on this on and off starting in late November 2009. In September 2012, I reached out to Sam Kabo Ashwell for feedback, which he graciously supplied; my main takeaway from his comments was that the piece was not doing anything awesome enough to justify its sprawl. I also read his feedback to mean that the piece needed more narrative structure or at least some kind of set piece, although I'm re-reading his email now and it doesn't really say that, so perhaps that was more of a projection on my part.

So I put the project down for a short while that became a long while, and now it's 2016 and it's a perfect candidate for this jam. Some of the cool stuff (limited verb set, for example) has since been done better by other folks, some of the other cool stuff (the 'make' verb, the NPCS) was going to be a whole lot of implementation work, and I never really figured out the narrative punch that I was hoping for.

Since I didn't touch this after 2014, this won't compile with the latest version of Inform. I used 6G60 for this release. The game uses the following extensions: Basic Help Menu and Plurality by Emily Short, Default Messages by David Fisher, and Conditional Undo by Jesse McGrew.

In the spirit of this jam, I've done just enough to make the game compile -- it's probably practically unplayable as-is. I consider the source code to be my submission."

[

----------------------------- Spoilers below:-----------------------------

]

To say spoilers:

say "Things I liked about this project:

- the idea of a creation myth for text adventures, with verbs as discrete entities and a narrator who is only an amnesiac because it's the beginning of time and there's nothing to remember. Similarly, IF-jokey stuff like dealing with someone else's hunger timer.

- the scene where your NPC opponent captures the Undoer, even though I never crafted a truly interesting puzzle for this part

- the scene where you either have to keep producing fish dinners for your ungrateful offspring NPCs, or chose to give your Maker to them

- the mental image of a busted-up Maker that can only produce fish -- for some reason, this makes me giggle every time

- the ending, in which the PC must drop all but the Goer (yes, including the Taker) to escape the planet

- my lovely papercraft globe feelie (although I'll note that I've definitely improved as a graphic designer in the intervening years)

Things I didn't like as much:

- overall, while I think there could have been some memorable moments, I'm unconvinced that there was much to hang together as a *story*, especially as the expectations of story richness have increased since I began the project. What story is there is not really a story I'm interested in telling, since it seems to be about how human needs -- loneliness, hunger --inevitably lead to downfall.

- specifically: the railroadiness of the plot structure leaves a lot to be desired. There were things that I wanted to have happen -- see above -- that, as of the current draft, the player might only do because there's nothing else to move forward with. This is particularly disappointing within the story context of being in a brand new, fertile universe.

- also: the narrative tone. I like parts of it, but I didn't get far enough to try to make it consistent, and I suspect I would have had a very hard time with that. Some of the verbiage uncritically evokes various colonialist and paternalistic stories (Kipling, Eden) which, again, is not really a story I want to tell. Some of it is vague or weak instead. For what it's worth, the tone I was striving for was that of [italic type]Cosmicomics[roman type].

"