#ectocomp23

Forever and Ever is a short, interactive horror story written in Ink. Halloween night comes to a close and you're just settling in to get a good night's sleep when your son Lucas lets you know there are monsters in his room. Again. A father's work is never done.

Play the Game | Ko-fi

Happy Friday the 13th and hold on to your butts, folks! My second-ever interactive fiction game is here!!

Forever and Ever is an entrant into the La Petite Mort English division of ECTOCOMP 2023--meaning the game was written and coded in under 4 hours; as well as the Bare-Bones Game Jam--meaning it's published without any alteration or customization of the default UI.

This short, horror story clocks in at about 3,800 words with three possible endings. Hopefully, it's a seasonally appropriate, unsettling tale that leaves you feeling awful and uncomfortable.

Not a bad week of progress! Not as much as I would've liked, but when is it ever? As far as I can tell, a defining trait of being a writer is not getting as much done as you hoped to.

But! I'm finished with the first draft of my game for ECTOCOMP (La Petite Mort division) and the Bare-Bones jam. It's out with a couple friends right now for feedback and I have 50 minutes left on the timer to edit. I'd love to give it a thorough tonal edit to ramp up the creepiness but I edit even slower than I write, so I probably won't have time. Shock.

I've never spent so much time thinking and meditating on sentence-level text before. It was a bit overwhelming. And I had such a hard time getting started! Knowing I only had 4 hours made me afraid to misuse a single second. Which was a great exercise, but not one I think I'll regularly do.

I enjoyed working with Ink (Inkle? Inky? I'm still not sure which one to call it...). It works well for shorter stories but I think my brain can parse longer stories better in Twine. I like seeing all the "sticky notes" to track story progression.

Forever and Ever is a short, interactive horror story written in Ink. Halloween night comes to a close and you're just settling in to get a good night's sleep when your son Lucas lets you know there are monsters in his room. Again. A father's work is never done.

Word count came to about 3,800 and the game has three endings. I'm planning on publishing on Friday the 13th because....of obvious reasons. Hopefully, with the 50 minutes left on the timer, I'll be able to inject a bit more creepiness into the tone of the story.

I've started on the second game for ECTOCOMP and I'll have to hustle but I think I'll get it done. I'm really bad at gauging how many words I need to tell a story, so who knows. I might switch that one to Twine and drop it out of Bare-Bones (because, I'm sorry Twine, your default UI is not for me). Maybe I'll try another short game in Ink. Writing horror is really fun.

Final devlog!! Late night, brain-empty thoughts comin' atcha.

This has been a wild month, but I'm glad to say I have finished 2 games within it. I haven't really parsed how I feel about it--probably because I've spent about 25hrs in the last two days starting and finishing game #2. Proud? Probably proud.

But Laurie, no one asks, what about that game you talked about ages ago? You had cover art for it and everything. You invented (and purchased) merch for it because the idea cracked you up so much. Well, dear player, what happened was I fell really in love with a story that kept growing. I realized if I was going to get it done before the end of October, I'd have to cut a lot of things out of it. I decided it was worth it to do it right. Never fear! The project has been moved to Nano and will (fingers crossed) be published by the end of November. I got about a third of it written, I love the characters so so much and I didn't want to rush them.

I decided that with about two weeks left before the end of the jams. Plenty of time to do another small game and I thought it'd be really neat to get 2 games finished. And I had a ton of ideas--teens break into a Spirit Halloween to do a seance and shenanigans happen; you've been set up on a first date for Halloween and the order in which you, well, order your food determines the ending you get; it's the far-flung future and your a teen on a space ship feeling disconnected from the life you know and a friend found some old Halloween party guides from earth and is throwing a Halloween party--and as much as I liked them, I never found the spark that makes a story catch fire for me. I was ready to be content with the game I had made.

Until 3 days ago. When the opening line "Honey! I've got some hair wrapped around my toes." popped into my head out of nowhere. Suddenly, this horror story develops whole cloth in my mind. And it's...a kind of horror I don't usually engage with. It's uncomfortable to write. I feel a little conflicted about publishing it. It's not about Halloween and I really wanted to make a game about Halloween! But it's done so I am. There are enough narrative things I find interesting that it seems worthwhile to share. And it's pretty good horror.

I still have to finish some backend stuff--write copy for the game page, finish some placeholder text in the game itself. I ended up going with Twine (Harlowe), even though the UI makes me want to cry. I knew I wouldn't be able to figure out pathing and variables well enough to make Ink work (not without something even more clunky than what I've got). And I really needed italics and base Ink doesn't do italics

Forever and Ever is available to play!

I completed a game in under 4 hours! Which ended up being an incredibly stressful experience. I'm glad I did it, but I don't think I'll revisit that particular restriction 😂 There was _so_ much pressure to make sure I was using my time as best as I possibly could and to make every sentence as great as it could possibly be on the first go. My editing process usually involves a lot of staring and thinking and I wasn't sure if that time counted so I counted it and then all I could think about was ohmugawdi'mwastingtimestaringwritesomewords.

Yeah.

But I did it! Hekkin proud of myself for that. Work is trucking along to What Has Sacred You, I've got it about a third of the way drafted (I think) and switched it over to Twine since I've dropped it from Bare-Bones. I have an itch still to make another game for Bare-Bones because I had fun with Ink and making 2 games for a jam would be another feather in my cap. But, I also want the story I'm working on to be as good as I can make it. It'll be the first IF I've completed that has true narrative branches and I wrote a scene that's so funny I've got to share it with the world. Guess I've got to finish it!

Two jams at once! Never thought I'd be here and yet...here I am. ECTOCOMP was a given to join--Halloween is the greatest and I find horror to be a versatile and interesting genre and I'm excited to be writing horror IF. Bare-Bones Jam I was more on the fence about--I don't care for default Twine UI and it's all I know coding-wise. I was hesitant to try out a new IF tool as I often get carried away with details and fall down learning holes. But Ink is straightforward enough that I can learn the basics and make a good story out of it and the default UI is quite nice.

Now! Here's the kicker part: ECTOCOMP has two sections to it. La Petite Mort for games made in 4hrs or less and Le Grand Guignol for games made in over 4hrs.

Here's how my brain managed this: --pfft, no. Impossible. There's no way I could make a game in that short a timeframe. Get out of here. Long version for me, thank you very much --how would I even....no. Stop thinking about it. There's no way --well, I guess if I didn't have to worry about the UI that would leave more time for writing...nope, focus on your other story idea. We're not going to bother with this one --!!IDEA!! --oh...dang. That's a cool idea... --it's short. You could write it in 4hrs....probably... --it'd be pretty funny if your first IF is a big, chonky boy at 25k words and your second is a smol bean under 2k words

And that was the nail in the coffin. I will always commit for the LOLs. I had a similar Rejection of the Call experience with the Single Choice jam and that one turned about pretty good. There won't be any neat mechanics or anything--I'm a storyteller before I'm a coder, after all--but there'll be a pretty good story (I have a lot of Big Thoughts about interactive fiction as games and I still haven't nailed down how I feel about the idea but I strive for my stories to be benefitted by the medium of IF--to have something crucial to their telling that's enhanced by the act of playing. There's something powerful in the nature of choice-making)

I still love my original idea and will be doing that as well:

Haven't decided yet if it'll be Bare-Bones, too, or just for the longer portion of ECTOCOMP. It'll depend on if I can get the first idea done within the time limit, I suppose.