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radsunny · 4 months ago

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CHURL - PUBLIC VERSION 1.0!

The end! The end is here! CHURL is finished! BEED is dead? What now?

Well, for now, that is how it all ends…

I wrote about this during the last update, but I have had this ending written since last summer. Mitski’s new album came out and I listened to “I’m Your Man” way too much. The screenplay came to life on a blisteringly hot summer day spent napping with my cat. It is now February, it is -20 Celsius on a Saturday, and all that feels like a fading memory from a different time.

I had a lot of fun writing the GRENDEL THE RULE-BREAKER portions, I think his character design is some of my best artistic work so far. I wanted him to look fucked up and silly. The digression he causes in the overall narrative needed to feel somewhat antagonistic but ultimately fruitful to the project. Grendel’s request to be helped needed to feel understandable, to engender some kind of sympathy for him and his mother. Why? I just think Grendel and his mom are cool.

On the real, I kept telling people that I had the entire narrative of CHURL figured out before I started designing it and that’s partly true or it is a white lie or it was mostly delusion because I knew how it needed to end but I had no idea how I was going to get there with the shortened timeline for the thesis submission in April. So, I had to improvise a huge chunk of Month 2’s back end. GRENDEL THE RULE-BREAKER’s arc was written almost entirely in Twine while putting the passages together.

The only sort-of sketch I had was this batch of Sticky Notes:

"I avenged them all, so that none of Grendel’s tribe needs to boast anywhere on earth of that uproar at dawn, whoever lives longest of that loathsome kind, enveloped in foul evil." (direct quote from Beowulf)

"WE HEARD THAT HE FELT SO CONFIDENT IN HIS FIGHT AGAINST THE SEA-WORM BECAUSE HE MANAGED TO DEFEAT US A HUNDRED HALF-WINTERS AGO..."

Grendel's pouch - he mentions it as his way of eating people. And????

"SO WHAT IF WE HAD A GIANT HORSE-LEATHERED POUCH THAT WE MAINLY USED TO COLLECT VICTIMS TO EAT LATER ... ... ... WE CANNOT DO ANYTHING WITHOUT OFFENDING LAND-WALKERS' SENSIBILITIES APPARENTLY"

Beowulf is given seven thousand hides of land by the Geat King - and does what with it?! Different names for Beowulf: Prince of The Weders, Joy-Giver of the Geatish People, War-King, Shepherd of the Geat Kingdom, [King Beowulf, of All The Kings of the World, The Mildest of Men and the Most Gentle, The Kindest to his Folk, and The Most Eager for Fame].

propaganda poster: BEOWULF, WHO SOLD HIS PEOPLE FOR A GOLDEN CUP, BUILDS BARROW INSTEAD OF PROTECTING HIS BELOVED PEOPLEc …

A cup is stolen from the dragon's hoard - Wiglaf, Weohstan's son, Swede and Waegmunding, his father fought for the Swedes in their feuds w Geats but he is Beowulf's most trusted thane. Propaganda poster attacks him for it.

Beowulf's Barrow is built, and The Swedes are ransacking it, mocking it

BEED has no idea that Beowulf fought the dragon and built the barrow, asking to see the gold one last time.

It breaks her.

The problem I realized I have with “outlining” is that I think of funny bits (the Grendel pouch, the quote from Beowulf) and then treat them like big set pieces that should be part of the outline. They’re very clearly not. But I’m like, I need this bit to be REALLY fleshed out dude. I spent a whole day making the RAT EXCHANGE PROGRAM page. Unclear how to fix having terminal bit commitment disease (BCD).

The main point though is this: I knew BEED was going to eventually get hit with a setback that destroys her will to continue the project. Mimicking the pattern from Month 1, I built up her confidence with obsessing over the remains of kings, lords, warriors + sending the boys out to find burials. In turn, the chapter draft is focused on her imagining what horrors plagued Heorot before Beowulf single-handedly ended Grendel’s life. In small pinches (commentary on the draft, deleted posts, hidden glitches), throughout the month’s posts, the research bibliography brings in seeds of doubt that BEED has attempted to delete (literally and figuratively) from her sight/site.

When Grendel snatches the TYPEWRITER, I wanted him to take over the site aesthetically as well. His voice is so distinctively loud and different from the main characters that his presence should be felt throughout the entire blog. So, naturally…I thought: he’s hacking BEED’s blogge!!!

This question of polyvocality in my RQ, the argument I am trying to make about Beowulf being open to fragmentation and nonlinearity, really gets to be center stage when I pull control away from BEED. The more the narrative slips away from what BEED wants to write about, say, research, or really…do in general, the more the voices surrounding the blog shift the game’s “objectives” from the rigid structure set by her.

One of the reasons I really wanted to implement the sidebar is because I love the idea of meticulous (AND DATE-STAMPED!) note-taking in CHURL, an interactive fiction game that genuinely feels overwhelming and batshit insane almost on a page-to-page basis. It can lead to so many different playstyles – in one feedback session, one person told me that they used the notes a lot and found them super helpful, and another just completely ignored the sidebar function entirely.

In that vein, I also acknowledge that I have not talked enough about close reading as gameplay which is supposedly the main thing I’m trying to prove with CHURL. Well… I tried my best with this final push to complete the writing process and design the ‘final’ choice tree of the game:

Selfishly, I will always choose to LIE and hide BEED’s last post from the world. It is my preferred option, and I purposefully wrote the TRUTH ending to be more punishing. I don’t know how much I want to get into that right now.

In any case, the ending is built up to with the assumption that players have perused through at least one month before heading into the last month of content (it’s why I added that mouse-over tooltip on SUMER MONTH TWO warning players to save their progress, kind of a “you are headed into the final battle” thing). And that the abrupt way in which BEED’s site collapses, her ranting last blog post revealing what has happened over the last few months, would shock players into really caring about the breakdown of THE ARCHIVE and BEED’s site. Because players have looked into every nook and cranny of BEED’S RESEARCH DISPATCH and analyzed the content, the structural collapse is both inviting and terrifying.

So, when the game asks you to choose what to do with the remains, salvaging or disposing of them, I want that final choice to be informed by players having done the act of close reading throughout the game – I tried my best to encourage this practice by emphasizing it in the tutorial section, implementing the sidebar function, and re-formulating the EOM data logs after I got feedback about adding guiding questions.

The DATA LOGS, in previous versions, would just give you a text box to describe what happens in every week of the month without any other suggestions from Prof. Hagard. In this build, I decided to scratch those weekly sections and just go with some overall guiding questions addressing the 4 main aspects of the site/game:

WHAT HAS BEED POSTED ON THE MAIN PAGE? HOW IS THE PROJECT GOING ACCORDING TO HER AND THE CHAT?

HAVE ANY NEW DRAFTS / CHAPTERS / NOTES BEEN ADDED TO THE RESEARCH PROJECT? WHAT ANGLE OF BEOWULF'S LIFE IS BEED WORKING ON FIGURING OUT?

WHAT ARE THE DISPATCHES ABOUT? FROM WHAT LOCATION ARE THEY BEING SENT?

IS THERE ANY CONNECTIVE THREAD BETWEEN THE HIDDEN / DELETED / BROKEN PAGES THIS MONTH?

I think these work for now, but I am still unsatisfied with how these are worded. I don’t know how well these sections address the issues brought up by past playtests about the EOM reports, but conceptually, the questions still focus on re-centering the player’s mindset on mining the text for meaning, themes, symbols, characterizations…elements of literary close reading practices that will make the end-choice more meaningful.

I talked to Yeager a few days before finishing the game about CHURL as an adaptation of Beowulf and though I think it definitely belongs in that category, it also feels like its own thing existing at the edges: the edges of interactive fiction games, poetry, speculative fiction, and adaptation. BEED’s descent into madness and subsequent self-made funeral pyre death are representative of a certain kind of dedication to close reading of Beowulf, but pushed to a degree that creates a feedback loop between her and the text.

I dug back into my thesis archives for some of the research I did to get into the INDI program and start making CHURL what it is today, and Nicholas Howe’s chapter in The Postmodern Beowulf was one of the first sources I saw in there, especially what Howe says about the transference of Beowulf to readers (or listeners!):

“[They] could not imitate him by slaying mythical monsters, but they could approach that feeling by transferring his story to other settings or languages” (63).

One of the few instances in which I quote Beowulf directly in the game is the final dispatch WORLD sends before BEED goes silent for months, and it is a series of titles, superlatives that Beowulf is referred to as throughout – the longest title being the last line of the poem.

I know its cliché and boring to say this, but that last line in WORLD’s dispatch about the encroaching and growing presence of Geats, priests, and other actors in Denmark on the same day as BEED writes her “On legacy…” main blog post is what I hope players keep in the back of their minds as the game forces them to choose between TRUTH + LIE:

Prince of The Weders, Joy-Giver of the Geatish People, War-King, Shepherd of the Geat Kingdom, [King Beowulf, of All The Kings of the World, The Mildest of Men and the Most Gentle, The Kindest to his Folk, and The Most Eager for Fame] ------------------------------------------- what does fifty winters of peace look like to a warlord? what does fifty winters of peace look like to a warlord? what does fifty winters of peace look like to a warlord? ------------------------------------------- “the will as disposition may be good or bad, but choice, the endpoint of any process of the will, is the action in the world” (scroll 16).

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radsunny · 4 months ago

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sidebar about the sidebar (2.0)

Step six: add a download button for the notes container because you realize every time a user closes and reopens the game, the notes disappear – spend another week doing JS shit on your own for a button with a download function. it somehow works, in a janky way.

Step seven: pretend like the download buttons being wonky is part of the media studies portion of the thesis’ methodology. find some way to justify the GeoCities of it all.

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radsunny · 4 months ago

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sidebar about the sidebar

Step one: try to implement a navigational sidebar that is attached to every page in the game and allows players to take notes that they can save + use when writing their EOM reports.

Step two: fail miserably at trying to do step one because you don’t know how to code JS except for the styling grammar, Harlowe hates user-inputted JS on account of its complexity, and story-wide variables keep resetting when you want them to not do that.

Step three: crash out for about a week about it. then, beg your brother who teaches software engineering at a university level to help you figure out how to add a sidebar.

Step four: ???

Step five: he comes over and does it for you – you style it and break the code a few times, but manage to fix it because you don’t want to bother him about this again

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radsunny · 4 months ago

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CHURL - VERS 1.5.2

As soon as I sit down to write about how I want to be able to hide the fact that you can’t really have a responsive loop for the ‘end of month’ reports, I get feedback after playtests about how it’s hard to care about the report writing because players don’t know what to put in the text box (no guiding questions, for example) or that the game world changes because of it. Yikes!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Got a ton of great feedback though, and I am working on how to fix a lot of stuff now.

This post though - I finally want to dig into documentation related to the writing process, theory implementation, and overall themes of CHURL.

The narrative arc from Month 1 to 2 is supposed to represent a pattern of perceived triumph and then unexpected loss. BEED is established as the main narrator of the project at the beginning of Month 1, and just as she says that she is getting somewhere with the biography’s focus on Beowulf’s status as a ‘hero,’ she posts the dispatches from Heorot: WORLD and RIM talk to actual Halfdanes and report back information that feels if not contradictory, maybe more telling of what the passage of time has done to the idea of Beowulf’s Heroic Identity. If 50 years have passed and BEED still thinks of Beowulf as the young hero, what can the narrative show that contradicts that myopic POV?

The woman WORLD talks to is largely uninterested in his legacy and is more pre-occupied with trying to survive rather than remembering what the warriors of a past generation fought for. RIM’s short lesson on riddles/poetry is all about contextualizing heroic poetry like Beowulf in a specific time & place – tall tales from lord-warriors are being told and re-told over and over, the cultural practice of hearing a scop perform these stories is perhaps fading but RIM, an outsider, is willing to learn from him and continue participating in it.

These are narrative branches that can only really stem from Beowulf’s arrival, stay, and departure from the Danes’ shores, and the hope for BEED is that Heorot is rife with opportunities to bolster the imagined heroic identity Beowulf has kept throughout the 50 years he’s ruled from the Geatlands. WORLD and RIM question that assumption: their dispatches are completely devoid of any heroic exploits, but the echo of Beowulf’s presence in the conversation trees speaks to what his legacy is vs. what BEED thinks it is.

But these moments are crucial because the Heorot scenes transition the blog’s activity from the project drafts to the beach scene on Day 27. The beach script was the first big screenplay I wrote for the project back in 2023 when I did the initial CHURL prototype. It felt, at the time, like a potential final scene for the entire game (until I wrote the ending for CHURL last summer). The idea for BEED’s first big setback for the project was always about the dragon’s carcass floating up to the shore after the Geats throw it off the cliff where Beowulf’s Barrow is built (the end of the poem).

I knew, early on, that BEED needed to continually cycle between the HIGH of writing about Beowulf (writing more and more on the blog) and the LOWS of interacting with the material reality of Beowulf (hitting a wall with WORLD and RIM out in the world). That sentence makes sense to me, but I have a feeling it’s one of those things that will inevitably get me yelled at by my supervisors for making no sense to regular people.

ANYWAY – Month 1, Day 27 is the first opportunity BEED has to actually touch a part of Beowulf’s life, and she has to be saved from killing herself in an attempt to sample the dragon’s flesh. To analyze it. To have it to herself! And it just can’t happen. WORLD and RIM, who actually experience the world in a visceral real way, must stop her. It leads to a moment of silence, pause, inaction…

Month 2 starts with the beach scene looming in the background, because it’s clear that BEED never really recovers from the loss that she felt on Day 27. The structure is set up so that the fragmentation between calendar days is felt just as strongly by someone choosing to play day-by-day or not.

And a lot of what I yapped about in my thesis proposal lit. review related to analyzing the poem’s structure: What events matter? Which ones don’t? How do you summarize the plot of Beowulf without mentioning the digressions? Can the poem’s many episodes be split into tiny pieces and sown back together in a different manner than what is presented to us in the first place? And more importantly, to get to the core of my research question:

How can the polyvocality of Beowulf be depicted through the use of IF game design while problematizing notions of the poem’s assumed narrative linearity?

(I have to change the RQ’s wording, notably “be depicted” being really basic and inaccurate at this point. I think CHURL does more than just depict polyvocality, it highlights it and, in many ways, prioritizes it over the narrative control BEED attempts throughout the game.)

One of the things Tolkien argues for in “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” is a new perspective on Beowulf’s structure at the time: “the structural role of Beowulf’s homecoming, because it is not a heroic event in Beowulf’s life, tends to be forgotten. Yet the transition is structurally essential.”

I brought this quote up while talking about the different ways scholars would characterize the ‘plot progression’ of Beowulf – it seemed to me, as I looked around, that the main events are always: three fights, death, boom. Or some variations of that cycle – Beowulf as a young hero, fights, death, boom. It just often revolves around this idea that the most important bits are the big fight pieces. Beowulf dying is also then not really important enough to be point n.4, it just gets jumbled into point n.3 (fight with dragon). Tolkien’s argument about the homecoming, the return to the Geatlands and the historical run through the speaker gives about the noble lineages of several Viking peoples, being crucial yet tossed aside, struck me as becoming more and more of a North Star for how CHURL progresses from Month 1 to 2 to the remains of 3.

The homecoming as not being a “heroic event” – that in particular – is also wildly in line with how I perceive Beowulf as a character...and that characterization is hopefully going to be fleshed out and more eloquently worded in the final thesis draft than what I have been rocking with so far, which is just repeating in all caps: WHAT IF BEOWULF WAS JUST A GUY? WHAT IF BEOWULF WAS JUST A GUY? WHAT IF BEOWULF WAS JUST A GUY? WHAT IF BEOWULF WAS JUST A GUY? WHAT IF BEOWULF WAS JUST A GUY? – the gravedigging in the first half of Month 2 is indicative of this chant slowly getting louder and louder in BEED’s head and her refusing to admit it to herself.

And if Beowulf is just a guy, if BEED’s perception of Beowulf is distorted and constantly leads to her cycling through mythologizing to disillusion, if WORLD and RIM are meant to discover a 50-year-long history but keep running into side-quests (digressions), how many times can this transition between HIGHS/LOWS keep going before it unravels the project completely?

I talked to Yeager about how I want to incorporate the fights into CHURL in some way, and that would include Grendel as a potential character coming back to the narrative. He mentioned that I already addressed the dragon, and if I am going to bring up Grendel, his mother should probably be next. My interest in Grendel, the dragon, and Grendel’s mother is really rooted in how much I believe monstrosity in Beowulf always returns and despite the heroic efforts made by humans, monsters will always survive. Humans won’t. So, there is something there that speaks to me – Grendel takes over the blog and kidnaps the TYPEWRITER – what is that Month 2 storyline transitioning to in Month 3?

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radsunny · 4 months ago

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CHURL - VERS 1.5

The most important part of this new version was supposed to be building the bare bones structure of Month 2. It did not happen! Why?

I looked back on Month 1 and the rounds of feedback on it. It needed an extra boost of something, and I wasn’t sure what it was. On top of that, there was a glaring hole in the section of the game dedicated to the “monthly reports” – this is supposed to be a big part of what the gameplay cycle leads to, and I still hadn’t figured out what that looks like.

After some discussion, I went with an open-ended version of what player input can be, in line with the overarching argument my thesis tries to make, which is that close reading can be gamified and that process leads to understanding a text in a deeper, more meaningful way.

Once a player completes a month of content on BEED’s site, the end report splits up the notes + analysis into 4 weeks. I am still not too sure about the categorization being centered on the basis of chronological order, but I want to take a step back, consciously, from inputting my own assumptions of how research or reading notes should be organized. I originally thought about the prompts for the report being like, themes or ‘main character beats.’ But that feels like I am trying to push too much on the “THIS IS LIKE AN ENGLISH LIT COURSE!!!” button too hard.

Adding to that, on the design side, Twine is notoriously iffy on player text input, if I put in a text box and assign a variable to it in code, I can have the player text exist in multiple passages, but there is no real way for me to have the game respond to it. I mean, I could if I begged my brother to help me with JavaScript coding for a full day, but that is counterproductive at this point in time.

So, the limitations are a box but I choose to fill the box with sand and make lil shitty castles in it. The hope for the “end-of-month report” is to elicit a response in the player: it is motivating them to think about what they saw, read, clicked on + formulate more sophisticated thoughts that make connections between all aspects of the text. And it is up to the player to choose what matters and what doesn’t, what clicks and what doesn’t, etc. Hopefully, that kind of engagement is fruitful enough by the end of Month 1 to distract the folks that hope the game is responsive to their input away from getting mad that it’s not doing that lol?

I think, also, that there might be an interesting opportunity to ask players to send me screenshots of their responses after they complete them (this might be a popup at the end of the report phase, where I’m like, hey send me a screenshot – Dimana). I would love to look through all of that stuff. Thinking about this for next prototype when it’s sent out to playtesters.

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radsunny · 7 months ago

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list of things i need to stop doing now

While I’m here, a list of ongoing Dumbass Decisions I’ve made since the beginning that I need to stop doing for the sake of my sanity as this project gets bigger and bigger:

Still using the CSS margin tags with “px” values instead of percentages, making my game look weird on any screen size that isn’t….my PC.

Using a wix.com empty site just for hosting the images that I use

I’m approaching the 500 MB limit for the free account soon, also literally most of this project is big image files…,,,,

Twine does, allegedly, have an ability to let me use local files (but it doesn’t work)

Having no real Passage Naming system except for “oh this works for now I guess everything is Dayx_1, Dayx_2”

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radsunny · 7 months ago

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vers 1.2 update

The timeline bar based on the Wayback Machine graph:

There is nothing like spending 2 days straight trying to re-create a bar graph without any of the JavasScript functionalities (because I don’t need them) and realizing that it looks awful and I should have done my own thing from the jump.

It all started with attempting to use generalized example code of a bar graph from a quick Google search + StackOverflow perusal, where I thought I could fill in the x + y values in a way where it looks like a simplified version of the WM graph. Problem n1 – Harlowe is very bad at reading JavaScript code and implementing it in one isolated passage. It lets you input some JS globally over the entire story, but it’s not going to be useful in this case, where I need it to do one specific thing for one <div> in the entire passage.

Then, I thought – how do I just copy the aesthetics of the bar graph without all the backend stuff that Twine won’t fuck with? Re-creating a bunch of small rectangles shouldn’t be that hard, but I don’t want to make a bunch of empty <div> blocks – that’s gonna get messy fast. I went to the SVG tag – essentially, this tag allows you to ‘draw’ graphics with code, and they will scale alongside the height/width of the <div> they are inside of.

It became a nightmare to deal with pretty fast. The SVG tags for 30 days, in variable sizes to try and re-create the vibe of WM’s tracker, were impossible to control WHILE having clickable “day x y z” links within them. Moving them around broke a lot of the page margins, I was tearing my hair out trying to make it look semi-presentable. And I almost just gave up and settled on keeping the SVG graph...

I can’t overstate how much these 2-3 days of BAR GRAPH BULLSHIT made me feel like my game design sessions were a waste of time. My hands started hurting, my right-hand wrist felt bruised from moving the mouse & clicking around for hours at a time. And the result of feeling like I have Cryptkeeper Hands was something I genuinely hated looking at and had no idea how to fix without starting over.

So I did it. I started over. I had to take some time off and go to the gym, using the elliptical genuinely sicko mode style, but I came back to the game and started over.

The timeline problem came at the same time as I was also trying to figure out how to tutorialize the beginning stages of the game – I was worried about sticking a big header on the main page of each blog day that would not belong aesthetically to what BEED’s site looks like, and wrestling with the issue of making it look more sleek & modern, as if part of the current day frame narrative (you are an archivist working for a modern day web archival project).

I ended up going back to the warm embrace of the early Windows aesthetics and looked at a bunch of icons on https://win98icons.alexmeub.com/. There is something about the squareness of everything that always brings me back to the design of the big bulky pop-up window with an icon attached to it. It is just such an efficient way to present information. And it’s so satisfying to go absolutely crazy making the colors look wildly contrasted or inverted.

Once I decided on the design of the “day 1” image, it was very easy to see how the entire month would look like lined up on top of BEED’s blog. It feels strange trying to explain how I got to the decision to make the timeline look like the way it does. It just feels right to look at it on the page alongside everything else. It fits. It makes sense for it to exist on top of everything else?

There is an innate embarrassment to most of my documentation of “design progress” here because I feel like I have a weak grasp on how thoughtful I am about the decisions I’m making.

STORYLETS, HISTORY, SAVE-GAME MACROS:

I tried a lot of options – the storylet stuff is not going to work because of how it relies on randomization.

The save-game macro is where I thought I was going to be able to utilize the variables in Twine to my favor. I followed a tutorial on the basics of setting up the load game/save game macros and made a variable for the “ABOUT ME” page.

One of the issues mentioned in the last post about the 1st version of the game was that more static pages like “ABOUT ME” were constantly being copy-pasted into new sections because I couldn’t figure out how to make new landing pages link back to one “ABOUT ME” page that I set up in the beginning. For example, clicking “about” on the Day 8 main blog post sidebar should be able to lead you to the same “about” link from Day 4, and then allow you to return to whatever day you were at in the first place.

So, I used the “save/load game” macro to a data-map of the “about me” versions where Twine would save the player’s progress when they got to a new landing page and clicked “about.” The issue persists – I want to link back to a specific page, and I can’t make Twine open a different passage with one line of code, I can only really have it open a random page from a series of tagged pages within the single line of code. Or, maybe you can make that happen, but it requires more knowledge on how to write in Harlowe.

The problem in trying all of this out is that at the end of the day, I hate math. I hate variables. I am not good at figuring out what in the world anyone is talking about when they make a “dataset” and I am only capable of understanding the tutorials on this shit when they explain the binary versions of it:

set x thing as A

if A is true: run this string of words

else: run this other string of words

This is the extent of my ability to absorb variables and how they could work in Harlowe. God knows I tried so hard not to be in this position, but here we are! I can’t work out how to make this solve my problem with page duplication, so we’re just going to duplicate pages. I do not hate the player in this situation, I despise the game.

Finally, I managed to spread out the narrative over a month rather than shove all the content into the first few days! Much of that was possible through the implementation of a tutorial section.

I have a contentious relationship with tutorials in general – it is hard to know how much information the player needs before starting CHURL. It is relatively intuitive to see a “blog” pop up on the screen, with clickable links and images, and knowing that you should click a link and see where it goes. Exploring BEED’s blog is not hard to convey, but explaining why it exists, and how the content relates back to Beowulf, is where I focused my attention in designing the tutorial section.

Narratively, it felt right to then think of the player as someone who needs to be “onboarded” for the task of archiving BEED’s blog. THE ARCHIVE is a very vague, but otherwise useful, name for the entity that hires the player to do the job of analysing this rare and strange GeoCities site. In trying to incorporate some of the media theory stuff about GeoCities more directly, I added some descriptive text about the impact/history of GC so that players could be acquainted with some of the ideas I am addressing aesthetically/visually throughout the game. I think it is a placeholder that will end up being edited down or removed in favor for something less ‘academic voice’-y later on, though.

I have gotten some positive feedback on the tutorial section, but I do agree with the folks who pointed out that it is a bit too long – there was a distinct feeling of surprise and disorientation I loved about just throwing players into BEED’s site without any preamble preparing them for the aesthetic. I am still thinking about how to weigh the tutorial length against that.

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radsunny · 7 months ago

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vers 1.1 update

This is going to be the first big update about the project. Mostly because I finally got around to re-tooling the project into an actual narrative – think of this first jump from CONCEPT to DRAFT.

Many issues to consider after doing so, and the main points are:

This thing is way too goddamn big!!!!!!!

There are issues with how the player accesses pages in a chronological or nonlinear order (basically, the calendar page “index” is not very responsive)

I need to telegraph more clearly when players have made a choice that changes the narrative structure or adds new content

Some screenshots of what CHURL looks like right now:

Graphically, it looks great. It’s exactly what I want it to look like. It makes me happy to see how insanely garish and overwhelming it is to see the content for the first time.

The main point of this prototype was to see if the content I already had could be fit into the new framework of treating BEED’s narrative like a blog you can browse through a centralized WayBack Machine-like index calendar page.

The gameplay cycle is as such:

Look at the index and pick a date (does not have to be day 1, but that does help contextualize the story more easily.) to visit a version of BEED’s site at that moment in time.

Browse the main page (BEED’s posts), the chat (side window) and other links (ABOUT, TYPEWRITER, PROJECT ARCHIVE, etc.) that look clickable. Read the content, analyze what is happening on that day for all the characters.

Repeat for all the available days on the calendar.

(not implemented yet) according to the textual clues collected during the month cycle, provide a summary statement on what BEED’s research ‘yielded’ or not throughout the month.

The most difficult part of transferring the project from a straightforward linear set of Twine passages to this new format is figuring out how to repeat content structurally while changing the content narratively on a fairly frequent basis.

Also, just in terms of my own lack of restraint when it comes to filling out the game, I ended up with six days of content in the new prototype totaling 58 passages. The original prototype outlining three weeks has a total of 55 passages. big time uh-oh moment.

A part of why CHURL ballooned so hard is that I am limited in my understanding of Twine’s ability to automate sections of the narrative, so I was basically copy-pasting static pages time and time again when a new “MAIN’ page was created.

Coupled with this is the fact that I wanted to include bonus content for players who visited certain pages or clicked ‘secret’ links. I had only become comfortable with using the (else), (either), (if x is true/false) macros that I limited myself to a binary variable structure. Again, this led me to just start multiplying passages to avoid the confusion that comes with players clicking the “RETURN TO MAIN.HTML” button and it working only on day 4 + 5, when they are on day 6…etc.

The solutions to these problems are basically: pull out the Harlowe Cookbook and read it properly without taking the simplest macros and trying to push them past their limits.

There is also the issue of how I started using Twine: as soon as I booted it up three years ago, I realized that I could use HTML and CSS to deal with a lot of the game’s links, pages, and graphic elements. I largely discarded the idea of using Harlowe as a language for this kind of stuff, so I am now atoning for my sins by trying to understand it better.

Turns out telling yourself “oh wouldn’t it be cool if also this happened” every time you thought it makes it impossible to maintain a workable structure for a project that you want to have an ENDING by April. So, I am also pulling the reins hard on outlining a developing/designing pipeline that does not kill me (metaphorically, psychologically, metaphysically).

After having the folks from the Behaviour Research Chair group play the prototype, I was given feedback which I summarize here:

Figure out the saving of player options, constant hotlink that takes the players to what they’ve found – journal updates for players – collects for them, shunting off a path – an inventory of sorts

How to get back to the progress, locking content and saved

History and Storylet tags in Harlowe/Twine – need to look into

The peripheral chatter is great – helps flesh out the world nicely – read on BEED through them

But, it isn’t clear who “I” is, who is it coming from sometimes – who is speaking at this moment?

The handholding of the first week of content – tutorializing the site!!!!

(not familiar with Beowulf) Felt overwhelmed – what is Beowulf? you have to tutorialize a bit

Every month could be a self-contained chapter, drip-feeding the initial bits

Real-time events – look into how to add this, maybe

The sound of the old mouse clicking, ads, broken gifs, etc

Notification sound or graphic on the DM window to draw attention to it

Interacting with the game’s text confirms the excitement for it, the text is great – it is a rewarding chunk of text every time, my time is worth it

The trajectory is hard to understand – need framing for why you are doing, you would accumulate, this is developing live to some extent – how do you take this? needs to be framed – needs a progression scheme

Rather than a test, this site is a quest – directing the attention of the player to something

For ex: We unearthed a snapshot of the website, click on it – to move forwards the next website page

Telegraph a few things, and they should be part of the experience – it is worth overdoing it and backtracking.

“this will be remembered” something like that

On the issues with the Calendar Index page: The story might be better served without the overarching top-down view – leaning more into the interactive idea

Idea to replace the index: The split screen of the graphs (the top section of the WayBack Machine) always present on top of the screen, letting players interact with them at any point

Waypoints for the next prototype are pretty clear after documenting what I’ve done and listened to feedback on what could work better or differently:

WORKING LIST OF NEEDED TASKS (EMPHASIS ON NEEDED, NOT WANTED):

Investigate the storylet and history macros in Harlowe

Talked to another designer who has used storylet extensively – this might be an option for more ‘randomized’ content rather than structurally aligning things to happen one after another in a specific list.

Re-tool the narrative to be spread out across a much larger span of in-game time

A “week” of tutorializing sounds good to me, and it will allow me to fix a couple of issues at a time:

orienting players, setting up the “quest,” telegraph how player choice impacts the narrative.

Turn the landing page into the graph of years the WayBack machine has “crawled” a site and paste it on top of the MAIN.HTML page of content, allowing players to go back and forth between days more easily.

Maybe keep the calendar index for the overarching narrative which is supposed to last a whole year (with gaps!!!!!!!!!! I will not write a whole year of content that’s crazy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

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