#the game already has a variable to tell which world you're in so it can switch the time and sunne/moone locations

[katzdxd]

one of the dumbest things that USUM didn't do is make it so you can find the opposite version exclusive pokemon and evolve cosmoem to the opposite version legendary in the reverse world. like CMON that could've been so cool and useful-

[chrysanthemumgames]

Hi! I just finished my first play through of FoA and I’m just… flabbergasted by the scope of choices and branching and OPTIONS that the PC has. I LOVED my first play through and I’m so excited to do more and see how many more possibilities there are in this amazing world you’ve let us be a part of!

So my question is: how do you keep track of everything? What choices branch where, how they overlap, stuff like that. I’m sure there’s more that I can’t even comprehend to think of to ask but I think you get the gist haha. And how long did planning and writing take you - I saw on hosted games FoA was released in September! And I don’t mean that as an unsubtle “when is the next book coming out” way, but from someone who also loves writing and interactive fiction. I’m just very impressed as both a reader and a writer, and the writer part of me is mind boggled and impressed and curious and… yeah! Everything felt so smooth and seamless and I’m just very impressed in how it came to be, and interested in your process! If you’re comfortable sharing :)

Well, FoA started, in a very messy and disorganized way, around the 10th of August, 2020. So... it was four years from "yeah, actually, I'm going to do that greek myth adaptation if" to its publication. That said, it was very much my first time getting a solo project from start to finish, and I was very inefficient about it in a lot of places, and it took a lot of time to build up my 'system,' so the same project would definitely take me much less time now.

(I'm hoping BotL, which will probably be slightly smaller, will take me around two/two and a half years, for example.)

That's one thing I would definitely prepare for—a learning curve. Unless you're already a published author, getting from an idea to release is going to be very surprising in a lot of ways, and even more work than you think. If you are a published author, there will likely still be a lot of things to get used to with the format.

One of those things is definitely tracking variables. I personally have a large spreadsheet in which I do this as I go, where I sort them by category (e.g. "here are all the variables related to the PC's relationship with Charon"), and then list all of them, the possible values they can have, and a really rough summary of what each one means.

I also outline before writing, which, even if it's just "here's the second main plot beat for Hermes's route, where X happens" helps keep me organized. There's definitely still a lot of things to work out about how X happens, and that's where a lot of the significant details emerge, and where they do I try to find ways to refer back to them later.

If you're telling the kind of story that has a structure where the player's actions actually cause things, that part's usually not too difficult to do. That doesn't mean the story has to be action and high drama, of course—FoA is certainly not that. But the way the PC approaches their relationships with people, the problems in front of them, does tend to have effects on the future, be it of those relationships or related to that little subplot.

But really, it was a lot of learning as I went. :)

[vineee2000]

A computer parsing a program cannot observe a missing parentheses and compensate like a human could do in their sleep - it simply fails to parse, because the mathematics don't work out.

I have an interesting fact about that actually. While yes, computers are way dumber than humans, this is partially offset by how structured programming language are. If there is only one way to make a statement correctly, it doesn't take a lot of smarts to find the one missing bracket and put it back in. As a result, modern computers working with modern languages actually can correct for mistakes like that - it's just that often their designers choose not to for reasons I'm about to explain. If you already use a programming parallel for your lacrima/magic stuff, I imagine you might even be able to extend that parallel to the issues that real life programming encounters when computers "compensate" - although I do remember you saying that you're very careful with using fan ideas to avoid any potential copyright issues, so I'll hold back my creative juices on account of directly replying to your blog, and will confine myself to purely educational perspective about real-world computer issues.

The short version is that compensating for missing context or incorrect syntax or other such things is that you might compensate incorrectly.

The long version is this:

When something is wrong or missing from the program, and the right words aren't in right places, the computer has 2 choices: it can either stop the program, and point out where there is stuff missing, or it can just try and figure out what you meant, and put it back together. Your typical programming error reading in red "NullPointerException" isn't actually the computer failing to math the maths and giving up - it is rather your computer telling you "I can see you made a mistake on line 392, go fix it". (A computer failing to math the math completely would look more like a game freezing up or an app crashing). That is annoying to deal with when you're making the program, and it takes more time - but it lacks the downsides of the alternative.

Which brings us to the alternative and the whole point of this growing increasingly out of control wall of text. Guessing what was intended and running with that. It works great for simple syntax errors, and can save a lot of time for quick-and-dirty straightforward projects. Problems can start when doing complicated things though. Because trying to figure out the original intent can result in figuring incorrectly. Like maybe that missing parenthesis wasn't meant to go at the end of the last line, but actually in the middle. Maybe there is a missing bracket because the programmer forgot to add a keyword that would completely recontextualise this block of code. And if you pick wrong, and keep going, you might end up with a situation where the resulting code is completely valid, but not what was intended. On the less catastrophic end of this, you might have something like a website that instead of having 4 columns of buttons just squishes them all into 1 column, and now it's ugly (but how would the computer know if you made a programming mistake, or you just make ugly websites?). On the more painful end, you might have something like an image that ended up being saved as a text file ("The programmer is giving me an image, but gave me a text variable to write into... should I save the image as text, or set the variable to image? Uuuuuh, let's convert to text!"), and you have a programmer tearing out their hair about why is a jumbled string of random characters is showing up in their shopping list app instead of, well, a shopping list - and have no idea where to start fixing it - because at no point did the program fail, it just found a way to make sense of what it's been told and kept running. Whereas a language that throws errors at you for every missing bracket would just throw out "Incorrect variable type at line 15", and the programmer would very quickly realise they are thelling the app to use its own logo file instead of the shopping list text file, meaning the program never even knew the shopping list existed.

So, - to quote you, - yeah?

In your asks and other outside-of-comic statements, you seem to draw on parallels to programming a lot when talking about lacrimas.

And this makes me think as a programmer: the primordial rules that are used in Auroras to do magic and lacrimas are part of the primordial language. You are literally telling the primordial's dead bodies what to do, and they obey.

Yet, the difference that comes to my mind is that Primordial was at one point a language actually spoken. Used to communicate in day-to-day life by normal sentient beings. That's quite different from programming languages, which aren't meant to be talked in at all, and are built from the ground up purely to convey a series of precise instructions. They're very formalised and structured. There are no synonyms, no double meanings, no altering of word order, no redundant information etc. It's extremely rigid, much unlike languages people actually talk in, for which a degree of fluidity and ambiguity is essential.

And in Aurora it would seem the latter is being used as the former.

Have you ever thought about this tension/contradiction/conflict? How it affects the world, how it affects your writing, etc?

Or has this distinction never crossed your mind?

Or was this something you have noticed, but never really had the right knowledge to engage with much?

Or any other thoughts on the subject, really

So! This is an interesting thing I have actually thought about.

When the Elder Races were first created, they were born knowing and speaking a language innovatively called the First Language. Every new Young Race is also initially created speaking this language. The language then drifts over the generations, developing into regional dialects and then into separate linguistic descendants if given enough time.

The Ancients spoke a close descendent of the First Language for most of their time in existence, and made a writing system of their own very early on, which has no innate power. But in the early days of the world, the generally accepted story is that a god granted the three elder races knowledge of the written Runic language, which could command the elements. The Ancients acquired it late and used it very sparingly, only for the programming of lacrimas, but for the Elves and Humans living in the depths of the Caves, this was their first and primary writing system. It's even possible that a rare cave-dweller brave enough to venture to the surface was the one who taught the Ancients these runes in the first place.

It's posed an obvious question, of course. Why does this one specific form of writing manifest as a language of magic? Why can it command the dead Primordials? Why is it so well-suited to the phonemes of the First Language that every child of this world is created speaking?

The predominant theory - and, with two living primordials to check with, one which is potentially on the cusp of being proven - is that the First Language and its runic writing system are the language that the Primordials spoke. Its words, written or spoken, can be understood by the remnants of thought that still linger in the sleeping, dead-but-not-entirely-gone primordials that make up the world.

Primordial magic is different from programming in one key way: real computers are entirely unthinking entities. They are not in any way smart - not even smart enough to be stupid. A computer parsing a program cannot observe a missing parentheses and compensate like a human could do in their sleep - it simply fails to parse, because the mathematics don't work out.

Magic in this world is like what every programmer wishes programming could be. Tell the computer what to do, and it might be a little confused, but it'll get the gist. Tell Fire to burn in this direction - Fire, even if it's just running on an echo of a seven-thousand-year-old memory, knows what that means. Tell the wind to printf this statement to this recipient, it'll try to find them and send the message. Tell Life to make this body do what it's doing faster, it can do that. It's simple executions of simple commands, almost reflexive - things that require no complex higher thought from a being that is no longer alive enough to have them. They're not as unthinking as computers, and that means the nuances of language can actually have an effect on them. Some mages think more poetic and emotionally-charged spell invocations can lead to better, more efficient results - an appeal to a long-dead emotion might be easier for the Primordial to execute than an appeal to a half-forgotten complex thought.

When a mage takes direct control of a magical energy and funnels it into an elemental effect, their own higher thought allows the element to do more complicated things - Fire can't transmute on its own like it could when it was alive, but it can when bent to a mortal will. No need to translate a spell into the language of magic when the mage can simply use their own mind to shape the effect. This is the primary advantage mages have over lacrima-users - flexibility, complexity, and speed.

Another interesting factor. Alinua's dynamic with Life demonstrates what a living Primordial's living thought can do when in the hands of a mortal. A normal, simple healing spell cast by anybody but her just accelerates a body's own healing, but with Alinua's guidance steadying Life's hand, they can do much more complicated things of her own free will - things Life knows how to do that no mage knows how to command her to do.

[venteamocha]

Thanks so much for the IF recs! I'd absolutely take a second post of recommendations for Twine games too if you're willing to share! <3

Of course!!

I... actually like twine games better than cog based ones, in some ways, just because they tend to be fancier and prettier, and I am secretly a ferret in the body of a human and I love shinies. ADHD, baby!

I only actually know of like 12 twine games, so if there are any that anyone who sees this knows of that I didn’t list, feel free to let me know about them! There’s a chance I do know about them and just didn’t put them here, but I would rather hear one I already know of on the off chance that I’ll get a new one dropped in.

That said! Another list of games I really like that is again in no particular order!

They’re all on itch.io by the way! They tend to work better if you download them but most can be run in your browser and most are also mobile friendly so you can play them on your phone! I’ll note which ones are.

Scout: An Apocalypse Story: I love dystopia stories, I dearly wish we had more IF based in this kind of setting. Set in a wasteland that is trying to pull itself together with people trying to find out if other settlements are out there while also trying to, well, stay alive. I gotta say, I played only E’s route for a long, long time, but once I tried the other ones I haven’t really gone back. I still love E, you can pry the childhood friend trope out of my cold dead hands, but wow. Oliver. Wow. That dude has serious UST. And Sabine!! I’ve been forced out of my little “play it the same way every time” rut and I’m not sorry. I very much like that you can choose the intimacy level, as someone who’s ace. Sometimes I like reading the smut, sometimes I don’t. Options! (mobile friendly!)

Bad Ritual: I got it baaaaaaaaaad~ I do though, I love Siruud. I have terrible, terrible taste in men. I mentioned Dracula in the other list, and here there’s an actual demon. This is a game with *sass* and I always love a chance to be sassy. I think part of the reason I resonate so much with this one is because of how jaded retail has made me tbh but that’s another story.  Honestly, if you like dark settings, I recommend you play this one first of all my recommendations. It’s just such a good game and there are so many choices and even the pronoun choices are pretty varied.  It’s just good! (mobile friendly!)

Wayfarer: Another for the fantasy list! I love the worldbuilding in this one, and the character creator is just amazing. There are maps, there’s a codex, seriously if you love reading lore, this is definitely a game for you. This is like if Tolkien made an IF. It’s amazing. I’ve said that a few times but it’s true. In all honesty it might count as one that’s not so romance focused, since it does focus more on plot. If I could just sit down and make an IF, I’d want it to be like this tbh. With a beautiful framework, a well organized space of information for the players to just look at and see stuff about the world, a way to develop and build their own character in a clear cut way, and the game immediately tells you what stats are effected by what choices. I really enjoy it when games try to work in character creation in creative ways, but sometimes I just want to sit down and go, “Okay, my character has red hair, blue eyes, is short, and has a crippling phobia of lizards” and this game lets me do that. Well, except for the lizard part. (Not as mobile friendly as the others but I make it work!)

Love and Friendship: It’s a regency game and I love Pride and Prejudice. What can I say? Something about the massive amount of rules of society just gets me. Propriety! This is a game that has a set gender protagonist, female, and it actually is a bit different from the norm in that it has two female love interests and one male, when most of the time it’s the other way around. So that’s something. You can even have a platonic route with a fourth love interest, who is also male. There really aren’t enough platonic routes, but I understand why that is, since a lot of IF players are looking for romance. (mobile friendly!)

Exiled From Court: Also a bit of the same vibe simply because of how constrained everyone is by rules. Nobility, after all. There are a lot of love interests, and one is the MC’s sister’s husband, which is definitely gonna be scandalous. Will I do it? Will I? Eventually. I do like how you can act like an absolute hellion, well, as far as that goes considering. You can try to be a better person but that’s less fun, lol. (mobile friendly!)

A Tale of Crowns: This is literally one of the very first twine games I ever played. Really! It’s got a lot of wonderful intrigue and the setting is very fun. There aren’t a ton of fantasy middle eastern games, and this game is definitely one reason why we should have more. There’s a great deal of customization, and the love interests’ gender will changed based on your MC’s gender and sexuality combination. I like R & D best, and no that’s not a pun. I think. (mobile friendly!)

For the Crown: This is a different game, I swear, they just both happen to have crown in the title, lol. You get to play as an assassin, which is a great deal of fun. The lore in the game is very nice too. I tend to play with they/them pronouns though, and there were a few pronoun hiccups in the game. Seems to be an issue across all of the games made by this author, but I know how much of a pain variables can be so hopefully those will get squashed soon. There’s an explicit content choice in this one as well, and if you turn it on there is an “equipment” choice, so this is definitely gonna be spicy later on! (mobile friendly, but after each chapter the browser shifts as it auto saves. you just have to tap restore game to keep playing.)

-These games aren’t exactly twine games, but I’m putting them here because they’re visual novels that fit the IF format for the most part and are also on itch.io and I love them and for this post at least I will bend my own rules! They all have gender choice MCs and are nonbinary friendly.-

Perfumare: This game is actually being made into an IF, with the visual novel as a sort of preview of what we’re gonna get there. I literally cannot wait for that to happen, this game is so good as it is, and from what we’ve been told it’s only gonna get better. This game has an excellent world, the characters are all messy in the best ways, and ugh it has hurt me quite a bit, again in the best way.  It’s another one on the dark side of things. The powers in this game are just so fun, I dearly want a game set in this world where we can choose what powers we have! Maybe that will be in the IF, but I have a feeling the answer is no. We’ve been teased that there will be a second game with a different MC who will get to romance the characters we can’t in this one, and that alone is enough to get me to jump as soon as it drops. The love interests aren’t gender variable but there are two male ones and one female. I, a known mess, recommend Laurent for lots of repression and pain. (not mobile friendly, you gotta play on desktop/laptop)

Andromeda Six: I’ve recommended this one to pretty much everyone I know, it is such an excellent game. The cast is a mashup of misfits and makes me miss my Mass Effect crews. I specifically set my pronouns to she/her just so they’d all call me Princess. What can I say, I like it. There’s lots of pain, lots of drama, lots of world building, lots of interesting lore, and there is much breaking of cuties. Much. Can’t wait till we get to the next planet. The author has gone out of their way to say that each love interest is gonna get their own arc and will definitely get their own share of attention, so no matter who you pick you’ll have plenty of time to be with them and watch them shine. (not mobile friendly, gotta play on desktop/laptop)

When the Night Comes: Not only do you get to play a badass hunter but it has multiple poly routes! Multiple! It’s rare when you get one poly in a game, this one has three! You can also choose to romance any of them individually if you so choose. It’s dark fantasy gothic, and I really really like that. (not mobile friendly, gotta play on desktop/laptop)

Errant Kingdom: Made from the same dev as WTNC, this one is set in a more fantasy middle eastern setting. Very pretty, lots of intrigue. You can choose between three set protagonists, who can have three different storylines depending on your choices, which is very nice for replayability. It’s got two poly routes this time, and it works the same as their other game in that you can romance them individually if you’d rather be monogamous. (not mobile friendly, gotta play on desktop/laptop)

[lunamanar]

Ask for you to get your mind off unpleasant things: I'm sorry if you've done it before, if you're repeating yourself or just sick of this, but could you please tell us in detail how you think the first father-son exchange would happen between Laguna and Squall. Would Laguna be telling Squall? Would someone else have already told Squall? Would Squall have figured it out on his own? Would they both already know and know each other already knows? How does "The Conversation" go down?

Oh geez, haha. Well…again, this is another thing that could go a lot of different ways, depending on a hundred variables. I can tell you my personal headcanon but it’s not necessarily that I think that’s the only way it could go–I don’t think it is–but it’s the one I ended up liking best when I was exploring all those possibilities. 

First, my Squall…doesn’t really like Laguna that much. Not even that he thinks he’s a bad person, or anything. But he’s embarrassing. And, in Squall’s head, a screwup, of massive proportions, who failed his way to the presidency and now lives in comfort and gets to be reunited with Ellone while Raine is six feet under and a bunch of other people have had to go out of their way to save his sorry ass times and again for him to enjoy the life he now lives. 

But for all that, it really wouldn’t be so bad, just so long as Squall never has to have anything to do with him, personally. 

My Squall, perhaps unfortunately for himself, was smart enough to figure it out on his own, although he did so post-game. He was in the middle of finalizing his report about the entire experience of what we think of as game time, when he realized he was missing a detail he’d be asked about if he didn’t include it: Raine’s last name. So he does his research and manages to find it (he didn’t know if she’d taken Laguna’s name or not, and he wasn’t about to ask). What he found, however, was dated; not her married name, but her maiden name. I personally like the idea that Leonhart was originally hers. 

All the pieces fall in place. Everything about everything suddenly makes sense, and Squall hates what he now knows must be true. Laguna’s lucky he was nowhere nearby at the time. 

To reiterate, it’s not that Squall thinks Laguna is a bad person. He just thinks he’s a bad everything else. Bad soldier. Bad friend. Bad romantic interest. Bad climber. Bad boyfriend. Bad uncle…and non-existent father. 

He’s a screwup from start to finish. He’s a fool who exists on charisma and everyone else’s charity. A klutz. A moron. He’s literally everything Squall aspires never to be. And now he’s related to him. It’s a living nightmare. In Squall’s head. 

And the expectations. Now he knows what it was that Laguna had said he wanted to tell him about, back on the Ragnarok. And he doesn’t ever want to hear it. He doesn’t want anyone to ever link the two of them, in any way. And he sure as hell doesn’t want Laguna claiming any sort of credit for Squall’s accomplishments. He’s afraid that people will start looking for similarities between them just because they’re blood related, and the very thought makes him feel ill. 

Because, he’s not a screwup. He didn’t leave anyone to go gallivanting around the world pretending to be a journalist. He didn’t shrug off his family to be president. He hasn’t abandoned anyone. And in his mind, Laguna has. Over, and over. 

He doesn’t want to make amends, or give Laguna some sort of second chance (there was never a first) with him. He doesn’t want to find out what he was missing, because as far as he’s concerned, he wasn’t missing anything at all. He had Ellone, and Matron. That’s all he knew, and that’s fine. He couldn’t miss Laguna or Raine because he never had them to begin with. And he’s sure as hell not planning on starting, now. 

So, he sits on the knowledge, and stews in it. Tells no one (though Rinoa does pry it out of him in private, which leads to a an interesting discussion on how she empathizes with not wanting to be anything like your dad, but, well, that’s another story). Hopes no one else says anything, no one else figures it out. And meanwhile, wonders why–why didn’t Ellone tell me?

The first meetup he does have with Laguna afterward is pretty cold. Everything to the point. Get in, say what you wanna say, get out. But…eventually, they have to discuss it, and when they do, it’s not too pretty. A lot of I’m-Not-Mad-I-Just-Don’t-Care sentiments from Squall. And oh, by the way–don’t you dare tell anyone, ever, about it. You don’t get to fix this, because I’m not broken. Thank you and goodnight. 

He leaves Laguna all but cowering in a corner. But for what it’s worth, Laguna does what he’s asked, and never breathes a word of it in any public sense. Even the friends who followed him in that Great Ultimecia Adventure don’t learn of it for months. 

And it’s best, anyway, if Squall and Laguna’s names are never confused; after all, it would be a PR nightmare if the world learned that one of the most influential SeeDs in Garden is…the President of Esthar’s son. Talk about corruption accusations. No, thanks. 

It takes time–somewhere around a decade–of uncomfortable visits with Laguna and other interactions, before Squall finally calms enough to acknowledge Laguna as his progenitor, if not his father. Part of that was just growing up some, and part of it was the fact that Ellone genuinely, truly loves Laguna, and wants more than anything for the three of them to be a family. It’s a hard discussion to have with her…that he can’t share her dream. It’s hers…not his. And that’s a painful thing to realize, when you’re talking about the long-lost sister who was your Everything. Shouldn’t he want what she wants, shouldn’t he be willing to suffer in her name? It takes a lot of soul-searching to arrive at his final answer: Suffering in her name wouldn’t actually give Ellone the reunion she wanted. If it wasn’t genuine, she’d be able to tell. So, he had to let her down, and it was one of the hardest things he’d ever done: This is your dream and I don’t want it. It’s your past, and I don’t belong there. 

He belongs in the present, her grown brother who still, after all this time separated, remembers her and cares about her. There’s an entire lifetime ahead of them, and that’s where he wants to be, as her family. Not in the past, pretending to live out things that never happened. It’s a sort of turning point, for the both of them, and allows them to reclaim a lot more of the familial closeness they’d thought they’d lost to time. His opinion of Laguna has warmed somewhat by this point…he still thinks the guy’s a screwup, but at least he’s a well-meaning one, rather than someone who just doesn’t care. He’s still not fond of being associated with Laguna or compared to him, but he’s able to talk to him, at least, without leaving the room in a huff. 

So that was maybe a bit more than you asked for, but it was fun to type up while I was damn near falling asleep. And yes, this helps…all of it does. Thank you.