![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
estiroseSo, writing the notes for "The Wish of Not Being Lonely" started taking up far more space than the notes for the rest of my gifts, thus this post.
I wanted to write something far grander than the story that came out, but ran into the fact that a) I didn't really have a solid plot, and b) I didn't have time to write the six branching storylines I wanted to write due to RL stuff. I finally sat down and hashed out a plot that went something like follows:
"You're visiting a relative through a virtual reality connection. (This relative may be dead.) While you're waiting, you have a cat run by and you have the choice of following it or not. The cat transformed into a person who says they're a technician working on the system. There's a random chance that you'll realize that this person is not who they say they are. If you realize this and point it out, this will be a bad but interesting end. Following that, you will encounter a doctor of yours who says you have cancer of the heart. The reality is that this is not actually the doctor in question, this is the system trying to say there's something wrong but the message got a bit messed up. Once you either belive the doctor or not, you then meet your relative and talk to them (and they may give you hints that all is not as it seems). You think you've had a odd but nice day and finally sign out in a good mood. The end."
I already had written interactive fic in Twine/Harlowe for a previous main recipient in Yuletide. (Let the Struggles Fall Away", fandom was "Epistory: Typing Chronicles" for those curious.) This meant that as long as I kept things relatively simple or at least far less complex than that story that I had a chance of coding this properly before the collection closed.
That being said, there's a lot going on behind the scenes that readers will never see. The gender and relationship of the relative you see, whether they're dead or alive, what gender the technician is, the color of the cat that you can chase, whether you realize something's weird about the tech, and whether you see kittens are all set in the beginning. They're all global variables (variables that are there for the entire thing and not just the passage you're in) because I need to be able to refer to them in more than one passage. On the other hand, there are a few flavor text bits that are local variables (the passage you're in), such as the tech's excuse as to why they look like a cat, what your "visiting room" looks like (for example, some players will find themselves in a cafe and others at a fishing spot), the drink you have, the lyrics your coworker belts out, and the breed of your dog. (This is why "you" will not remember the technician's excuse, because the game cannot remember it!)
In addition, I had variables for pronouns (so the game would use the correct version of she/her/her and he/him/his and capitalize pronouns correctly when needed), ones that kept track of whether you ignored the cat or chased it, whether you saw the tech and/or the kittens, and whether you believed the doctor.
(There were only two beings with set pronouns: the doctor and your dog are always male.)
The page numbers were just a fun throwback to the old CYOA books and don't mean anything. They are set and don't change.
Randomly, you have a 1 in 4 chance to notice the technician is a bit off. If you get the message and then say that you don't think they're a tech, you'll get a bad ending that also reveals that the separatists are trying to "fix" things and the technician is one of them. I chose to make this random to simulate someone just having that chance of saying "hmmm, something's wrong here" when they might not otherwise.
For the section where you can talk about up to four things with your relative, I debated on how to handle that. I at first thought of narrowing down the possible choices, but it proved too much of a time waster to set up, so unlike every other section of the book, you can flip around all four sections as long as you want to. Instead, if you do not go to all four sections, on the last passage you'll get a mention that you didn't discuss everything, and that's okay.
Trivia-wise, if you have seen the technician (and possibly the kittens), talk to your relative about the cat and then the doctor, you'll get an extra bit of dialogue that you wouldn't get if you didn't visit the cat passage first. Since you can cycle through those passages as you want, it's very possible to go 1,2,3,4,1 an get the extra dialogue. For the passage where you catch your relative up on what you're doing, at first everything was very generic and I didn't like that, so I added in four bits, three of which are somewhat random. Your coworker will sing one of three songs (titles drawn all from the same song, "Melody", which I also used lyrics from for another fic this Yuletide), you will mention Hayfork (which is not random), you will talk about your dog (one of four small but easy-maintenance dogs), and you'll visit with two relatives (these will depend on where each relative ended up in the original shuffle).
One of the things I look back and see that I should have done slightly differently was how I handled the array that had the relatives in it. Every new game, the list of relatives was shuffled and the first one on the list was the one the reader was going to see. In order to mention the correct relative during the game, I had to refer to the first one on the list constantly. Looking back, even if it was a tiny bit of extra memory used, I could have saved myself some typing throughout the game if I'd just copied that to a new global variable.
The other is how I handled the believing/not believing the doctor, and the ignoring/chasing after the cat variables. I used a 0/1 true/false indicator for these four possibilities. With Twine/Harlowe's default undo/redo arrows, it was quite possible for the player to tell the game that the reader had both chased and ignored the cat, and both agreed with and argued with the doctor. Not to mention that the storyline with the tech would have gotten a bit confusing! As I see it, there were two ways I could handle it: either set conditionals to switch the opposite option off (so a person who went back to the beginning and ignored the cat would not later talk about chasing the cat, encountering the technician, or possibly seeing the kittens, and a person whose most recent encounter with the doctor would not get a message about them agreeing with him), or have set the variables differently (0 for no choice on the cat, 1 for ignored the cat, 2 for chased the cat then returned, 3 for chased the cat until the cat became the tech; for the doctor, 0 for not seen, 1 for believing, and 2 for not believing).
(My choice to take out the undo/redo buttons allowed the story to work with the time I had but I regret the player/reader not being able to go back and explore the various storylines without restarting.)
I wanted to write something far grander than the story that came out, but ran into the fact that a) I didn't really have a solid plot, and b) I didn't have time to write the six branching storylines I wanted to write due to RL stuff. I finally sat down and hashed out a plot that went something like follows:
"You're visiting a relative through a virtual reality connection. (This relative may be dead.) While you're waiting, you have a cat run by and you have the choice of following it or not. The cat transformed into a person who says they're a technician working on the system. There's a random chance that you'll realize that this person is not who they say they are. If you realize this and point it out, this will be a bad but interesting end. Following that, you will encounter a doctor of yours who says you have cancer of the heart. The reality is that this is not actually the doctor in question, this is the system trying to say there's something wrong but the message got a bit messed up. Once you either belive the doctor or not, you then meet your relative and talk to them (and they may give you hints that all is not as it seems). You think you've had a odd but nice day and finally sign out in a good mood. The end."
I already had written interactive fic in Twine/Harlowe for a previous main recipient in Yuletide. (Let the Struggles Fall Away", fandom was "Epistory: Typing Chronicles" for those curious.) This meant that as long as I kept things relatively simple or at least far less complex than that story that I had a chance of coding this properly before the collection closed.
That being said, there's a lot going on behind the scenes that readers will never see. The gender and relationship of the relative you see, whether they're dead or alive, what gender the technician is, the color of the cat that you can chase, whether you realize something's weird about the tech, and whether you see kittens are all set in the beginning. They're all global variables (variables that are there for the entire thing and not just the passage you're in) because I need to be able to refer to them in more than one passage. On the other hand, there are a few flavor text bits that are local variables (the passage you're in), such as the tech's excuse as to why they look like a cat, what your "visiting room" looks like (for example, some players will find themselves in a cafe and others at a fishing spot), the drink you have, the lyrics your coworker belts out, and the breed of your dog. (This is why "you" will not remember the technician's excuse, because the game cannot remember it!)
In addition, I had variables for pronouns (so the game would use the correct version of she/her/her and he/him/his and capitalize pronouns correctly when needed), ones that kept track of whether you ignored the cat or chased it, whether you saw the tech and/or the kittens, and whether you believed the doctor.
(There were only two beings with set pronouns: the doctor and your dog are always male.)
The page numbers were just a fun throwback to the old CYOA books and don't mean anything. They are set and don't change.
Randomly, you have a 1 in 4 chance to notice the technician is a bit off. If you get the message and then say that you don't think they're a tech, you'll get a bad ending that also reveals that the separatists are trying to "fix" things and the technician is one of them. I chose to make this random to simulate someone just having that chance of saying "hmmm, something's wrong here" when they might not otherwise.
For the section where you can talk about up to four things with your relative, I debated on how to handle that. I at first thought of narrowing down the possible choices, but it proved too much of a time waster to set up, so unlike every other section of the book, you can flip around all four sections as long as you want to. Instead, if you do not go to all four sections, on the last passage you'll get a mention that you didn't discuss everything, and that's okay.
Trivia-wise, if you have seen the technician (and possibly the kittens), talk to your relative about the cat and then the doctor, you'll get an extra bit of dialogue that you wouldn't get if you didn't visit the cat passage first. Since you can cycle through those passages as you want, it's very possible to go 1,2,3,4,1 an get the extra dialogue. For the passage where you catch your relative up on what you're doing, at first everything was very generic and I didn't like that, so I added in four bits, three of which are somewhat random. Your coworker will sing one of three songs (titles drawn all from the same song, "Melody", which I also used lyrics from for another fic this Yuletide), you will mention Hayfork (which is not random), you will talk about your dog (one of four small but easy-maintenance dogs), and you'll visit with two relatives (these will depend on where each relative ended up in the original shuffle).
One of the things I look back and see that I should have done slightly differently was how I handled the array that had the relatives in it. Every new game, the list of relatives was shuffled and the first one on the list was the one the reader was going to see. In order to mention the correct relative during the game, I had to refer to the first one on the list constantly. Looking back, even if it was a tiny bit of extra memory used, I could have saved myself some typing throughout the game if I'd just copied that to a new global variable.
The other is how I handled the believing/not believing the doctor, and the ignoring/chasing after the cat variables. I used a 0/1 true/false indicator for these four possibilities. With Twine/Harlowe's default undo/redo arrows, it was quite possible for the player to tell the game that the reader had both chased and ignored the cat, and both agreed with and argued with the doctor. Not to mention that the storyline with the tech would have gotten a bit confusing! As I see it, there were two ways I could handle it: either set conditionals to switch the opposite option off (so a person who went back to the beginning and ignored the cat would not later talk about chasing the cat, encountering the technician, or possibly seeing the kittens, and a person whose most recent encounter with the doctor would not get a message about them agreeing with him), or have set the variables differently (0 for no choice on the cat, 1 for ignored the cat, 2 for chased the cat then returned, 3 for chased the cat until the cat became the tech; for the doctor, 0 for not seen, 1 for believing, and 2 for not believing).
(My choice to take out the undo/redo buttons allowed the story to work with the time I had but I regret the player/reader not being able to go back and explore the various storylines without restarting.)
