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Still going. I'm probably at about the midpoint now, but we'll see. There are always either more or less words than I anticipate between each natural stopping point. I could just stop mid sentence, but that doesn't seem very reader friendly. So probably 2 more posts, maybe 3 before the conclusion?
The line shuffled forward a few steps and Kaitlin shuffled with them. She was fairly sure that she had forgotten how her knees worked. Was she being awkward? Maybe? Oh god, she was. She absolutely was being the most awkward. All she had to do was walk a few steps and not act like a doofus. Hundreds of times, many hundreds of times, she had stood in this same line in front of this same counter in this same coffee shop waiting for the same low V-neck wearing barista taking his slow ass time. Sometimes she felt tired or irritable, sometimes she felt rushed and overextended, but never awkward. Now she was feeling judgemental and guilty for feeling judgemental. Or maybe she just felt anxious. Did it show? Could Malcolm tell? He totally could. How could he not? Anxious was leaking out of her pores. She pressed her arms a little tighter to her sides so the smell of anxious couldn’t escape from her armpits. “Busy this morning.” Malcolm's voice sounded so calm and easy. How could he be so comfortable when she couldn’t remember how to stand like a person. And he smelled so good. Just a simple clean soap smell with maybe a touch of wood, like sawdust. His smell this close to her made her tongue feel dry. How was that fair. Kaitlin felt the words “Yeah, right?” croak from her throat as she looked up at his face. Malcolm's bright half smile, the deep brown of his cheeks, and those gorgeous almost black almond eyes. Not. Fair. At. All. The line shuffled forward again. “I’m glad you- we- could, you know, finally make it out- get together.” Malcolm sounded a little less smooth just then. Kaitlin could feel her heart slow to a manageable rhythm. At least some part of him might be close to her level. Stumbling over a few words didn’t stop him from being so damned pretty though. He added “I mean Medicine is demanding, right? Like timewise and workwise.” “I’m only first year, but yeah I guess so. Engineering can’t be so super easy either.” Kaitlin could feel her cheeks warming. She just hoped against hope that she didn’t look like a frickin tomato. This was the longest she had ever talked to Malcolm without the buffer of a group of mutual friends. Maggie had told her that she heard from Lane “that if Kaitlin asked Malcolm to go for coffee, that he would for sure say yes”. It was all very junior high, but it still sent Kaitlin’s stomach into backflips. Then she had gone up and asked him at Janice and Dean’s house party, well her and two beers had gone up and asked him. She felt floaty and hadn’t been sure that it was real, but here they were, saturday morning, standing in line for coffee. Together. “We only have to memorize a few equations. Mostly we just play a lot of basketball” He said, laughing it off and looking up to the menu board. “Same. Well, except it’s anatomy and tennis for me.” “Tennis? I tried badminton, but I never played tennis before.” “We should!” Kaitlin felt her voice jump in volume and she wrestled it back down. “I mean, if you wanted to try it out sometime, I could- I would be happy to teach you” Kaitlin fought off images of long brown legs and short white shorts long enough to close with a weak grin. “Maybe for a second, or third date?” Malcolm had replaced that half smile with a sly sideways glance. If she didn’t look like a tomato before, there was no way she didn’t now. That heat had spread from her cheeks to the tips of her ears. The line shuffled forward and they found themselves in front of the counter. Together. Captain V-neck barely focused on them, wiped his hands across his ‘Burks’ apron, and tossed off a bored “So what’ll you have?” Kaitlin was devoting an unreasonable amount of attention to the warm latte in her hands. She studied the tiny puckered pinholes in the lid. The the wisps of steam that drifted up and away into the crisp october air. None of it was interesting in the slightest, but she made a real effort to keep her eyes locked on that lid. People don’t die of nervous embarrassment do they? They started talking about school, since that was easy neutral territory. They both asked the same simple, customary questions, and gave the same, simple, rote answers. It felt to Kaitlin like they were participating in a conversational ritual with no clear goal, but it was better than the alternative. She was mostly thinking about just sinking into the cracks of the concrete and disappearing entirely. She kept her mouth moving so by the time they had walked the two blocks from the coffee shop to the river path, Kaitlin could feel herself relaxing a bit. She started to realize how fast she had been walking and slowed enough to take in the orange and yellow crested trees. Malcolm slowed with her. “It’s pretty down here.” He said, stopping to regard a group of vibrant poplars. “It’s a nice place to run. Lots of people, but it’s not usually crowded.” It had been weeks since Kaitlin had gone on a proper run, but she wasn’t going to say that out loud. Besides, it wasn’t a lie. She really did like this stretch of the river path. She looked up at Malcolm while he closed his eyes and took a deep breath of cool air. Maybe this was going okay. She hadn’t felt like a complete disaster in at least four minutes. He had laughed at her jokes. That had to be a good sign. “You live close, right? Maggie said you live on this side of town.” Kaitlin was startled and felt her eyes involuntarily snap skyward. Had she been staring? Maybe. Did Malcolm catch her staring? Maybe. “Uh” Kaitlin uttered. Seemed an easy enough question, but it took a second for her brain to change gears and process it. “Um. Yeah. Yeah. We live just over there. Like three blocks from Burks.” “That’s convenient, for running I mean. I live way east. Past the university. It’s all just copies of the same couple of houses. Nicest place over there is the parks between the ‘burbs.” He smiled as Kaitlin walked her eyes back over to his. She could feel herself smiling back and only a little warm in the cheeks this time. “I don’t really know much of the city. I just moved here for school.” Kaitlin trailed off. She felt like there was nothing interesting she could add after that, and her smile faded. The last thing she wanted to do was bore Malcolm with small town stories. Of course, he went and asked anyway, because that was the ritual, right? “Oh yeah? Where are you from?” They quickly drifted back into that same question/answer pattern, but more relaxed, maybe a bit more sincere. They strolled past dozens of mid morning joggers and cyclists trying to shake off a week of sitting on their butts. The air was warming as the sun slowly rose in the sky. When they came to a small bend in the river path Kaitlin stopped short to take in the view. Shafts of sunlight were streaming through the trees and tiny spikes of gold formed on the ripples in the river. “That deserves a picture.” Kaitlin breathed, and slid her phone from her pocket. “I’ll hold your coffee” Malcolm offered. She handed him the cup and took a couple quick shots. It seemed like maybe she was missing an opportunity here. “Want one with us in it? I can send it to you.” She asked “Yeah. That’s a good idea.” Kaitlin stepped back off the path and felt the warmth of Malcolm sliding in behind her as he moved into frame. She was starting to hold it together. Only a tiny bit of her felt like sinking into the soil and blending in with the tree roots. He brought his face up beside hers and she tried to get both of them and the trees behind into one balanced photo. Click. She really didn’t feel like moving though. This was nice, just like this. “Here you go.” Malcolm brought her cup up into view and she reached for it with her free hand. Her fingers wrapped over his and she looked up at her phone screen just in time to see Malcolm’s beautiful eyes, now fully wide with surprise, slide out of view over her shoulder. She gripped hard as she felt his hand slipping away, both of them crushing the remnants of the latte into warm spray. She felt herself being pulled down by the hand, then the shoulder, then the ground dropped from underneath her. She was being yanked down, butt first, still clinging to Malcolm’s hand. She opened her mouth in panic, but her voice was absent. Kaitlin’s phone, still locked in selfie position, lit up in her hand. Her ringtone “Yakety Sax” barked out at her. She snapped up to sitting, her spine rigid. She had to detangle her other hand from something to mash at the face of the phone. Instinctively, she answered the call and slapped the phone to speaker mode. “Hel-wha-Who? What is- Who is this?” “Please don’t move.” A calm, businesslike voice. Female maybe? The voice echoed like whoever it was, they were speaking to Kaitlin through a culvert. “What? Why? What?” She felt immobilized from the tongue down. Kaitlin wasn’t sure she could move even if she hadn’t felt scared out of her mind. “Sorry to interrupt. I was wondering if you might need some help.” “What?” Kaitlin screamed into the phone. “Who is that? What-” Malcolm screamed up at her. Or maybe he was screaming at the phone, it was hard to tell. Either way, she flinched when she noticed his face lying right beside her hip. For a second there, she had forgotten that he existed. No, that can’t be right. Some hollow static from the phone cut her off mid thought. “I’m sorry that I interrupted. I just wanted to know if you might need some assistance. Kaitlin Doyle and Malcolm Aldridge, is it?” The voice on the phone pattered back at her. The sound of Kaitlin’s name caught her attentions. That was something real she could latch onto. “ I just want you to stay put for a second while I access your accounts.” “What accounts?” Malcolm spluttered. “What accounts?” Kaitlin parroted. “If you could just hold on for one second, and again, please try not to move.” There didn’t seem to be anything Kaitlin could do at the moment. The voice on the phone was saying to stay put. Her legs were in total agreement, so they stayed frozen to the ground. Looking. She could probably look around? That didn’t count as moving right? So she looked around. Aside from her phone screen there seemed to be a dim red orange light filling the cavern. Okay, cavern! That was a thing! This definitely looked like a cavern. A big one. What else, what else? Stone floor. Smooth stone floor. Tile? Nope. Bigger. Huge stone blocks, mostly smooth with cracks and imperfections. So stone that has worn smooth, not stone that has been machined smooth. Okay. Good, good. Malcolm! There he is. He doesn’t look very calm. Rapid breathing, dilated pupils. Maybe a panic attack? He’s not looking back at Kaitlin. He’s looking straight ahead at something right behind her. What? She turns her head and glances over her shoulder. Nope. Not ready for that yet. What else, what else? Some dirt on the stone floor. Hmm, dirt? So probably not water. What wears stone smooth? Water. But if it were water the stone would be wet and there shouldn’t be dirt. Okay, that’s sorted. She should probably check again. She didn’t really see what she saw, right? A nice slow turn of the head. Nothing flashy. Just a nice slow glance. Really take it all in. Yeah. Still there. “What?” Malcolm whispers the question, but Kaitlin understands every nuance of that one syllable. It’s not just “what am I looking at?” - it is that, but not only that. It’s what to everything. What is this place? What are we doing? What happened? What is happening? Kaitlin reached out to Malcolm’s hand again. There is no infatuated fumbling. There is no heart stopping, electric moment of contact. She needs an anchor. She can tell by his “What?” that he needs one too. Her fingers mesh with his and she whispers back an answer. “Yeah. It’s a giant skeleton.”
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we're hitting the twist now. it might have started as a cute, first date story, but it's gonna get weirder from here on out.
The line shuffled forward a few steps and Kaitlin shuffled with them. She was fairly sure that she had forgotten how her knees worked. Was she being awkward? Maybe? Oh god, she was. She absolutely was being the most awkward. All she had to do was walk a few steps and not act like a doofus. Hundreds of times, many hundreds of times, she had stood in this same line in front of this same counter in this same coffee shop waiting for the same low V-neck wearing barista taking his slow ass time. Sometimes she felt tired or irritable, sometimes she felt rushed and overextended, but never awkward. Now she was feeling judgemental and guilty for feeling judgemental. Or maybe she just felt anxious. Did it show? Could Malcolm tell? He totally could. How could he not? Anxious was leaking out of her pores. She pressed her arms a little tighter to her sides so the smell of anxious couldn’t escape from her armpits. “Busy this morning.” Malcolm's voice sounded so calm and easy. How could he be so comfortable when she couldn’t remember how to stand like a person. And he smelled so good. Just a simple clean soap smell with maybe a touch of wood, like sawdust. His smell this close to her made her tongue feel dry. How was that fair. Kaitlin felt the words “Yeah, right?” croak from her throat as she looked up at his face. Malcolm's bright half smile, the deep brown of his cheeks, and those gorgeous almost black almond eyes. Not. Fair. At. All. The line shuffled forward again. “I’m glad you- we- could, you know, finally make it out- get together.” Malcolm sounded a little less smooth just then. Kaitlin could feel her heart slow to a manageable rhythm. At least some part of him might be close to her level. Stumbling over a few words didn’t stop him from being so damned pretty though. He added “I mean Medicine is pretty demanding, right? Like timewise and workwise.” “I’m only first year, but yeah I guess so. Engineering can’t be so super easy either.” Kaitlin could feel her cheeks warming. She just hoped against hope that she didn’t look like a frickin tomato. This was the longest she had ever talked to Malcolm without the buffer of a group of mutual friends. Maggie had told her that she heard from Lane “that if Kaitlin asked Malcolm to go for coffee, that he would for sure say yes”. It was all very junior high, but it still sent Kaitlin’s stomach into backflips. Then she had gone up and asked him at Janice and Dean’s house party, well her and two beers had gone up and asked him. She felt floaty and hadn’t been sure that it was real, but here they were, saturday morning, standing in line for coffee. Together. “We only have to memorize a few equations. Mostly we just play a lot of basketball” He said, laughing it off and looking up to the menu board. “Same. Well, except it’s anatomy and tennis for me.” “Tennis? I tried badminton, but I never played tennis before.” “We should!” Kaitlin felt her voice jump in volume and she wrestled it back down. “I mean, if you wanted to try it out sometime, I could- I would be happy to teach you” Kaitlin fought off images of long brown legs and short white shorts long enough to close with a weak grin. “Maybe for a second, or third date?” Malcolm had replaced that half smile with a sly sideways glance. If she didn’t look like a tomato before, there was no way she didn’t now. That heat had spread from her cheeks to the tips of her ears. The line shuffled forward and they found themselves in front of the counter. Together. Captain V-neck barely focused on them, wiped his hands across his ‘Burks’ apron, and tossed off a bored “So what’ll you have?” Kaitlin spent all of her attention on the warm latte in her hands. She studied the tiny puckered pinholes in the lid. The the wisps of steam that drifted up and away into the crisp october air. None of it was interesting in the slightest, but she made a real effort to keep her eyes locked on that lid. People don’t die of nervous embarrassment do they? They started talking about school, since that was easy neutral territory. They both asked the same simple, customary questions, and gave the same, simple, rote answers. It felt to Kaitlin like they were participating in a conversational ritual with no clear goal, but it was better than the alternative of sinking into the cracks of the concrete and disappearing entirely. Had she not kept her mouth moving, she was certain that is what the rest of her body had planned for her. By the time they had walked the two blocks from the coffee shop to the river path, Kaitlin could feel herself relaxing a bit. She started to realize how fast she had been walking and slowed enough to take in the orange and yellow crested trees. Malcolm slowed with her. “It’s pretty down here.” He said, stopping to regard a group of vibrant poplars. “It’s a nice place to run. Lots of people, but it’s not usually crowded.” It had been weeks since Kaitlin had gone on a proper run, but she wasn’t going to say that out loud. Besides, it wasn’t really a lie. She really did like this stretch of the river path. She looked up at Malcolm while he closed his eyes and took a deep breath of cool air. Maybe this was going okay. She hadn’t felt like a complete disaster in at least four minutes. That had to be a good sign. “You live close, right? Maggie said you live on this side of town.” Kaitlin was startled and felt her eyes involuntarily snap skyward. Had she been staring? Maybe. Did Malcolm catch her staring? Maybe. “Uh” Kaitlin uttered. Seemed an easy enough question, but it took a second for her brain to change gears and process it. “Um. Yeah. Yeah. We live just over there. Like three blocks from Burks.” “That’s convenient, for running I mean. I live way east. Past the university. Nicest place over there is just parks in the ‘burbs.” He smiled as Kaitlin walked her eyes back over to his. She could feel herself smiling back and only a little warm in the cheeks this time. “I don’t really know much of the city. I just moved here for school.” Kaitlin trailed off. She felt like there was nothing interesting she could add after that, and her smile faded. The last thing she wanted to do was bore Malcolm with small town stories. Of course, he went and asked anyway, because that was the ritual, right? “Oh yeah? Where are you from?” They quickly drifted back into that same question/answer pattern, but more relaxed, maybe a bit more sincere. They strolled past dozens of mid morning joggers and cyclists trying to shake off a weeks worth of sitting on their butts. The air was warming as the sun slowly rose in the sky. When they came to a small bend in the river path Kaitlin stopped short to take in the view. Shafts of sun were streaming through the trees and tiny golden pyramids formed on the ripples in the river. “That deserves a picture.” Kaitlin breathed, and slid her phone from her pocket. “I’ll hold your coffee” Malcolm offered. She handed him the cup and took a couple quick shots. It seemed like maybe she was missing an opportunity here. “Want one with us in it?” She asked “Yeah, we could do that.” Kaitlin stepped back off the path and felt the warmth of Malcolm stepping in behind her to get into frame. She was starting to hold it together in a bit more of a dignified fashion. She only half felt like sinking into the soil around her and blending in with the tree roots. He brought his face up beside hers and she tried to get both of them and the trees behind into one balanced photo. Click. She really didn’t feel like moving though. This was nice, just like this. “Here you go.” Malcolm brought her cup up into view and she reached for it with her free hand. Her fingers wrapped over his and she looked up at her phone screen just in time to see Malcolm’s beautiful eyes, now fully wide with surprise, slide out of view over her shoulder. She gripped hard as she felt his hand slipping away, both of them crushing the remnants of the latte into warm spray. She felt herself being pulled down by the hand, then the shoulder, then her entire body flipped backwards. She was being yanked down, butt first, into a hole far deeper than the riverbank had any right to be. Here's the start of a new story. Same drill. I'll write and edit it a bit more each week until it's done, but I went and did something different this time. I actually wrote the ending first, so I know where it's going to end up. Or at least I do if I don't change it. If you have any comments or feedback, let me know and I'll try to edit accordingly.
The line shuffled forward a few steps and Kaitlin shuffled with them. She felt like she might have forgotten how her knees worked. Was she being awkward? Maybe? Oh god, she was. She absolutely was being the most awkward. All she had to do was walk a few steps and not act like a doofus. Hundreds of times, many hundreds of times, she had stood in this same line in front of this same counter in this same coffee shop waiting for the same low V-neck wearing barista taking his slow ass time. Sometimes she felt tired, or irritable, but never awkward. Now she was feeling judgmental and anxious. Did it show? Could Malcolm tell? He totally could. How could he not? Anxious was leaking out of her pores. She pressed her arms a little tighter to her sides so the smell of anxious couldn’t escape from her armpits. “Busy this morning.” Malcolm's voice sounded so calm and easy. How could he be so comfortable when she couldn’t remember how to stand like a person. And he smelled so good. Just a simple clean soap smell with maybe a touch of wood, like sawdust. His smell this close to her made her tongue feel dry. How was that fair. Kaitlin felt the words “Yeah, right?” croak from her throat as she looked up at his face. Malcolm's bright half smile, the deep brown of his cheeks, and those gorgeous almost black almond eyes. Not. Fair. At. All. The line shuffled forward again. “I’m glad you- we- could, you know, finally make it out- get together.” Malcolm sounded a little less smooth just then. Kaitlin could feel her heart slow to a manageable rhythm. At least some part of him might be close to her level. Stumbling over a few words didn’t stop him from being so damned pretty though. He added “I mean Medicine is pretty demanding, right? Like timewise and workwise.” “I’m only first year, but yeah I guess so. Engineering can’t be so super easy either.” Kaitlin could feel her cheeks warming. She just hoped against hope that she didn’t look like a frickin tomato. This was the longest she had ever talked to Malcolm without any of their friends around. When Maggie had told her that if she asked him to go for coffee, that he would “for sure say yes”, and then she had gone up and asked him, well her and two beers had gone up and asked him at Janice and Dean’s house party, Kaitlin hadn’t been sure that it was real. But here they were, saturday morning, standing in line for coffee. Together. “We just play a lot of basketball and memorize a few equations.” He said, laughing it off and looking up to the menu board. “Same. Well, except it’s tennis and anatomy for me.” “Tennis? I tried badminton, but I never played tennis before.” “We should!” Kaitlin felt her voice jump in volume and she wrestled it back down. “I mean, if you wanted to try it out sometime, I could- I would be happy to teach you” Kaitlin fought back images of long brown legs and short white shorts long enough to close with a weak smile. “Maybe for a second, or third date?” Malcolm had replaced that half smile with a sly sideways look. Maybe this wasn’t going as badly as Kaitlin had thought. Of course, if she didn’t look like a tomato before, she sure did now. The line shuffled forward and they found themselves in front of the counter. Together. Captain V-neck barely focused on them and tossed off a bored “So what’ll you have?” My past post was the game that I made for the Ludum Dare game jam. It was a text based game using the interactive fiction engine Twine. Twine started out as a modification of the HTML and JavaScript modifiable web page thingy tiddlywiki http://tiddlywiki.com .
Mostly, what you can make with it are really specialized web pages. It's all click this link to go here and click here to go back. This leads most people, rightly, to use it for creating choose your own adventure style stories and games. Ever since I learned about Twine, I wondered if maybe it could be used in a slightly different way. Choose your own adventure books can be done on paper and they aren't significantly improved by being on a computer. The fighting fantasy series of gamebooks Incorporated information tracking and random events, but both of those can be handles with a pencil and paper, and a couple of dice. If I was going to use Twine on a computer to make a game meant to be played on a computer, I wanted to make that meaningful. Using a computer gives you a couple of things. You can process a lot of information very quickly, and you can hide the it all from the player. That lets you create the sort of interactions you get in your pac-mans and your galagas. Fast, reactive experiences also known as video games. Using a game creation tool like Twine that is tailored toward slower, text based, or narrative games meant that fast was probably off the table. What I could do though was use the computer's ability to process information in a way that is mostly invisible to the player. The theme for the game jam was “running out of power” and I fairly quickly settled on the idea of a never ending chase where the only possible outcomes would be to die from exhaustion, or be caught and devoured. Fun stuff, but that is also the basic plot of Pac-Man and look at how well that turned out. Ever since zork, I had wanted to create a text adventure, but one that changed every time you played it. For that I went the easy route and just had the computer randomly select from lists of possible descriptions, this was something that was easy to implement, but not really a great solution since that adds more writing work, and it doesn't provide any meaningful difference to the choices you have to make. Game jams aren't really about great solutions, they are about making the thing go as best as you can as quickly as you can. To that end, the random approach did it's job. The other thing I wanted to add to the text adventure genre, was an ever changing environment. Each time you play it, it should be different. I didn't have time to come up with a better solution so I went for the random approach again. Only this time the game would select one of four maps and place you somewhere in the middle of it. The effect is disorienting and sort of annoying. That was by design and I was glad that it worked. For the maps, I started out planning them on a grid system. I was going to build all of the possible movement directions semi manually, but quickly realized that would take way too long. Then I started to build the maps in a sort of branching series of Twine nodes (passages) but that would require a lot of custom writing to say things like “you can move left or right from here”. Then I thought that maybe I could store the map in a series of arrays, since I had read that Twine could deal with arrays. After a few searches, I found that not only did Twine support arrays, it supported 2 dimensional arrays, which I did not expect, and someone else had already made a tutorial using them to create a navigation system very, very, much like the one I had thought up. So I partook of a time honoured programing tradition. I copied the code and modified it to work in my project. Now I could make maps on an x,y grid where certain cells would have custom descriptions while others would use the random descriptions for that particular map. The whole time you play, the game is keeping track of your exhaustion and how far away the devouring hoards from you. And that's it, you move up, navigating an unknowable maze and totally fail to avoid death. That's the whole game. It's not much but coming from knowing almost nothing about Twine to making something that will run perfectly over and over in 48hours is no small task. I'm happy with how it turned out. |
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