Dev Log 1

In all my years, I’ve struggled with starting or finishing projects, a fact which most people are probably at least a little bit aware of. In writing devlogs, I hope to hold myself more accountable, as well as document my creative process and thereby figure out what “works”. Most of my avoidance has been due to pathological demand avoidance, ADHD, and physical illness preventing my working consistently, and at least two of those things are things I can work on. I’ve released shitty little things here and there and generally removed them as quickly as I uploaded them due to my dissatisfaction and perfectionist streak. I’m trying to get better at releasing things and having them exist, warts and all.

I guess a devlog is a first step.

I’ve been wondering for ages how on earth to write a devlog about a piece of interactive fiction. There are no pictures. There are no health bars or puzzles in the traditional sense. There are no enemies, but there are characters, and there’s dialogue and a measure of interactivity. I toyed with the idea of making this a piece of interactive fiction, an explorable mindmap, or something of a smaller interactive piece, but I think I would like to finish this project rather than get bogged down on many, many shiny, glittery, distracting things. Writing this scratches that itch somewhat, whilst giving structure to my thoughts.

Where else to begin but the beginning?

So, what am I working on? It’s called These Corridors Are Endless (TCAE), and it is an interactive fiction piece about the liminal spaces of holidays, hospitals, and hotels. I’m aiming for it to be surreal, dream-like, and a little scary by the end.

I’ve been writing TCAE for about 18 months. It started, almost fifteen years ago, as a comment my Dad made when we were walking between hospital units for my then-yearly blood test (which has since been shifted up to every 3 months, alongside general tests of pretty much all my bodily fluids). He stood in the middle of the hallway, looked to either side, and said:

“These corridors are fucking endless, aren’t they?”

Last year, sat in a waiting room for a new clinic I found myself thinking about the walls and hallways of medical buildings. How much of my life was spent in such environments? And I found myself thinking back to my Dad, stood in that corridor, his voice in my head, perfectly encapsulating the stagnation of chronic illness. I’d just been diagnosed with Ulcerative Crohn’s. Doctors have helpfully termed my case as moderate to severe chronic acute flare, and I still have no idea what that really means, and neither do the doctors, in all probability.

This was but one of several serendipities to occur during its writing, the last of which is perhaps the most darkly ironic – I am currently pretty damn unwell, on a pretty-much liquid diet, and need constant access to the toilet for reasons I am sure I don’t need to spell out. With the physical, my mental health takes a toll, too. In other words, I am almost too unwell – currently – to work on a project that is ostensibly about the strains of being unwell.

One of several serendipities, I said. Let’s talk about the others!

I was in the early stages of planning it out – I knew I wanted it to be about chronic illness, and I knew I wanted it to be a sort of gradual descent into a nightmare logic, potentially with some themes of liminality, but I was asking myself how I wanted to approach it.

Indeed, one of the first hurdles I considered was that to many, interactive fiction has A Reputation. Regardless of how (un)justified that reputation was, it was more or less that people use it to streamline putting someone in your shoes, not those of a character, and therefore into your traumas and experiences on a very personal level. Personally, I think that’s an unfair, somewhat blasé summary.

The second hurdle was… Well. How on the nose is too on the nose? I wanted the hotel in the story to be adorned with all sorts of slight in-jokes – DVDs and books and paintings that had something to do with chronic illness in some way that was subtle but noticeable if you had an eye for that sort of thing. I don’t think I’m alone in associating, of course, Frida Kahlo with chronic illness and pain, but I had thought that putting her paintings in a hotel might be a little odd.

And then I went on holiday, only to London for a short break, but I found a little gem of a B&B there, done up in a kind of amalgamation of Portuguese, Spanish, and Mexican all smashed together in a building that was probably once several houses. As I made my way up the rickety, steep stairs (slowly but surely), chaperoned by a very anxious man who felt the need to tell me not to fall down every five to ten seconds, I spied Kahlo’s The Broken Column, a painting about her relationship to chronic pain. It was but one of several paintings of hers in the hotel.

It was strange, to come across such a visceral portrait in a hotel, yet a strange comfort as any fears I’d had about writing something a little too on-the-nose melted away. There was, in addition to a liberal smattering of Catholic guilt (failure to be honest at the bar would result in your going to capital h Hell), a DVD shelf that included an entire Twin Peaks boxset, in one of the strangest assortments of films outside of my own DVD shelf.

I made a note and enjoyed my holiday, struck by the thought of just how similar hotel corridors all looked, and how odd it was to sleep in a bed that isn’t your own, both in hospitals and hotels, and at the ubiquity of design choices.

Now, regarding These Corridors Are Endless, most of it had been completed already, but I’d had some issues describing later scenes and, in my attempts to make them not-so-obvious, had come up against an invisible wall.

The week after that holiday, I finished my first draft.

I guess the big question is, why interactive fiction rather than a full, proper game? I have long known that writing is my strong suit. I’ve been back in the habit of writing non-fiction for a while now, partially in service to my university degree and partially to just get myself out there.

I’m now at the stage of stringing it all together, and from there it’ll be a hop, skip, and a jump [so to speak] to its being finished. Accidentally, it has ended up looking like an arrow, which was completely unintentional but fits in with some of the themes I’m exploring. Another happy synchronicity.

I’ve talked about what it’s about, but not so much the how. I think the why might be fairly self-explanatory. I’m really interested in postmodern literature, structure, and how to convey scenes through text in an interactive medium in an interesting way, visually, not just linguistically. After stringing it all together, it’ll be on to the more complicated little coding things, and that’s part of the reason why posting an excerpt is so difficult: the finished thing will be more than just the words on the page.

***

The sky fluffs up in anticipation of rain, a billow of cloud and grey and white, and you walk towards it, towards the sea, each acting as a mirror to the other, a churning ever-present flecked wetness at the edges of everything.

You stand at the sea wall now and listen to the gale as it blows inland. You move to sit perched on the edge of the sea wall, all bitty gravel and dirt that gets under your nails and sticks to the back of your knees and the palms of your hands. The bits that don’t stick leave shadowy, gritty dimples in your skin. The sky drizzles grey. The sea rises up and spray-splats across your face. After a dry train journey, you can’t help but shiver and laugh. The noise is snatched away and carried along the coast, tumbling and stretching with the wind that pulls it out into long, wide howl.

In the distance, the hush of traffic stretches over the moors like a long sigh. Gulls echo the sentiment, their wings stiff in a wind that knots in your hair. The sea slaps wet against cement wall and a flag clatters and batters against a pole in clings and clangs; a tree, all but pulled out to sea, continues to shudder against salt spray, its roots half-uncovered; the sticky warm-cold drizzle of August rain beats a rhythm into the air, and sand hisses and unfurls across the pavement, shifting, serpentine, in coils of grit upon grit upon grit. You stand and let it all wash over you for a minute. Nothing is still here.

A bottle clattering across the cobbles brings you out of the moment as the clouds overhead begin to bubble over with rain. At first a few gentle spats and then all at once in a lukewarm deluge that cools the longer it goes on until you are not quite soaked and yet still wet, and colder than is sensible.

You roll your shoulders and step down from the wall, your knees giving a little as the pavement reaches up to meet you with a judder that spikes up your legs. You stretch and then get moving.

Your gait is uneven as your shoes tap against the tarmac. Your cane scuffs every few steps. Last time you were here it felt like an age between the sea and the B&B. You turn right down Slater Street. If you close your eyes, you remember Slater Street as dusty and faded, with decades old ice cream selection charts tacked and pinned against the wind and buckets and spades and beach towels and rubber rings and beach balls and frilly swimming leotards, picnic blankets and cheap plastic tat that had nowhere better to be. As you open them –

Your memory for such detail is sharp. You can retrace your steps. It’s a left then a right, then straight on and after that the second exit on the left. From there you can see your destination. The spirit of nostalgia had fully taken you when you booked that hotel -and to call it such was a kindness bordering on pity-, a place you once crossed days off of a calendar towards.

Sea Breeze Bee and Bee. Outside, it’s namesake painted in striations of blue and green, and beaten by coastal winds. No vacancies hangs off the bottom by a single pin, rust melting in great orange bursts down the wooden lacquer. The chipped blue front door is open. A bell jingles as you push the door in with your shoulder and pull your case up the step in one fluid motion.

***

I think posting a sneak preview of a third draft is okay because I’m not spoiling anything in doing so. I’ve also removed most of the interactive bits, so this is but one of several paths or passages you might encounter. I’m hoping, in sharing this, to kind of give a behind-the-scenes of the entire process as well as showcasing some words I’m especially proud of.