Sympathy for the Devil

This month I am creating a game for NaGaDeMon 2016. You can follow along from the beginning.

I've played a few more pieces of Texture to see how people have been using it. There's not a lot out there yet, especially with regard to the investigation mechanics I'm thinking about using. I guess I'll have to be the one to make them?

That's not to say I haven't stumbled upon a few interesting tidbits. Em Short's Endure involves translating and contextualising a piece of greek text from The Odyssey, and I think a similar mechanic would work for my (provisionally titled) graveyard game.

As a first step towards the design, I'm imagining that the "main screen" of the game will be interacting with a newspaper. You'd be able to [read], for example, the {front page}, {funnies}, and {obituaries}. You'd be able to [think about] certain highlighted people's names, locations, etc. The resulting text would reflect the POV character's perspective on the topics. You could also [note] certain topics, perhaps adding new verbs to your list.

There are several pieces in the Texture library one could essentially consider spam. Like there's one that is just an ad for someone who'll write essays for you. Another that's a little more interesting is a simulation of encountering a consultant at a trade show. I'm not sure it was intentional, but at one point the consultant asks for your contact details and you have the options to [give card], [give fake number], or [leave]--and if you hold [leave], no words are highlighted so you can't actually do it. Aside from being really funny in the context of playing an advertisement presumably written by the consultant you meet in the simulation, the idea of having an action that you can't do is a useful tool (which of course has been used to great effect in other interactive fictions like Rameses and Depression Quest. We'll see if there's an opportunity to use it in the graveyard game.

I've been thinking about the POV character, and the difficulty of encouraging the player to identify with the person they will inhabit despite the whole digging up corpses for a blood ritual thing. I don't want the PC to be like Dexter or Walter White where you root for them almost just because they're the protagonist, in spite of all the horrible things they do. I want the player to understand or at least empathise with the PC when they feel they have no choice and need to do this horrible thing. This can happen when the blood ritual is being done to stop something even -worse- from happening, something that the PC genuinely believes will absolutely happen if the ritual isn't completed.  I want to stay away from the Mythos as well, as a) it's been done and b) I'm not that into it. I'm put in mind of Mr Tuttle in Punchdrunk's immersive theatre production The Drowned Man. My interpretation of his story and his one-to-one scene is that he is aware that some horrible things are happening in town and he wants to stop them, but in order to do so he's gotten into some weird bad blood magic and has cracked under the pressure.

I don't think I'm a good enough writer to adequately give these experiences to players of the graveyard game, but uuuuh aim high I guess!

Next: either more theoretical procrastination by formalizing some of this design, or actually trying a prototype in Texture!