Source Code Amnesty Day 2023!

Happy Source Code Amnesty Day (It's still April 1st somewhere....I think. I hope. A vain, vestigial hope from when I initially started writing this.)!

In the spirit of sharing all the coding struggles and victories that go into making a Work of Interactive Fiction, I've uploaded the source code for Leda and the Swan. And of course, I'm going to indulge my speech-making little starlet self who never was. (You wish I would say "April Fools'!")

Leda was written in roughly 24 hours and coded in 48. I published it on itch at 4:04am, with zero pre-marketing and nothing queued up. It was my second-ever project in Sugarcube and the first that I dabbled in CSS for beyond just changing the colour of things. There was no jam deadline, no editor tapping an impatient red pen, and no real reason that I wound up in total darkness on my stomach in bed, feverishly narrating passages into my phone's voice notes app because I was too tired to type properly; I was just very profoundly possessed by a need to externalise everything comprising my internal maelstrom at the time, kicked off by seeing Gail Potocki's painting "Leda" after a lot of scattered, coincidental (prophetic?) thought on similar themes. Maybe that's what a Muse is.

This code isn't quite the shiny gold star text I'd like to think it is - there are barely comments, some bizarre workarounds regarding image sizing, and some keyframe animations that I scratched from the final build but left the skeleton of inside the stylesheet. But I'm proud of it that way; one of the very first things I said publicly about Leda was that it's a story about pretty things with ugly insides. It feels very fitting that should carry into the meta of it as well.