Not Stopping Believing

I’ve been working on creating a game. It’s a piece of interactive fiction (or “IF,” a game genre I wrote about a few posts back), based on my career as a creative professional in the insane world of advertising. Working in Adland has given me the opportunity to make a ton of interactive game-like things, but never a piece of IF, and never just for fun.

Right now I’m in the process of writing the game outline, a loose summary of everything I want to happen in the story. I’m also trying to hash out the major puzzles the player has to solve to get through the game. At this point I’m just pouring stuff onto the page, without much editing, to see where things go. I’ll go back later and work out the kinks. You can view the current working manuscript here (WARNING: this document contains spoilers), though I can’t guarantee it will make any sense. It’s kind of all over the place right now. This doc will continue to update as I play around.

Here’s the rough intro.

It’s Sunday at midnight, three days before your big client presentation. It’s a full-court press on this one. Seven of Daaci & Daaci’s top creative teams have been working three weeks straight on TV and online campaign concepts. The result? A colossal pile of blood, sweat and clichés. By sunrise, it will all be boiled down to three creative directions to be shown to the client on Wednesday.

You and your writing partner are desperate to stay in the running. Everything you’ve come up with has either been killed or is on life support, and your creative director is giving you looks like he’s wondering why he keeps you around. It’s time for the Hail Mary. Time for some fresh ideas to keep you in the mix for the presentation, and to keep you employed.

The caffeine is pumping. Your synapses are firing. You live for weekends like this. It’s another chance for greatness in the

Shark Tank

So far I’m doing most of the writing and brainstorming during my commute. I use WriteRoom, a streamlined text editor for iPhone, for capturing my thoughts. Here’s a shot of the app in action. Very minimalist. There a very cool desktop version of this app as well, which is worth checking out.

WriteRoom lets me share my documents via WiFi, and syncs all my documents with SimpleText, a free (and simple) online text editor which also stores my files. So when I make changes on the file in SimpleText, it automatically changes on my phone, and vice versa. Nice features for getting the big-screen perspective on my work. Plus I can access my writing whenever and wherever I have browser access, which is good for jotting down ideas and plugging them in when they hit me. Here’s the SimpleText interface, all retro.

After some research into game creation languages and apps for my Mac, I’ve settled on Inform, a builder made for storytellers who aren’t super-crazy programmers. Which fits me perfectly. As far as free software goes, it’s remarkably well-documented, well-supported, and intuitive.

I’ll be continuing to document the creation process in posts and in the Laboratory.