A Facebook post from 2011

Just thought I should put this somewhere more accessible.

Came across something interesting my my research…

It appears that famous murderer Lizzie Borden actually killed many more people than popular wisdom suggests. In fact, after “giving her father forty-one whacks,” she went on to murder her sister, Emma Borden—the deed evidently requiring forty-two blows from the very same axe. Then, in the same evening (really the early hours of the next morning), Lizzie accosted the family maid, Bridget Sullivan, hacking her forty-three times before jumping into her four-poster bed and falling asleep, her clothes still covered in blood.

Lizzie, now the sole inheritor of the Borden estate, was arrested and jailed on August 11, 1892. Before she could be tried for the quadruple homicide, however, her case was taken up by Thomas Embling, a psychiatrist who had gained fame for his involvement in a Parliamentary inquiry at the Yarra Bend Asylum. Embling managed to have Lizzie released under his supervision.

Just as Embling had predicted, Lizzie’s first act after her “escape” was to murder another maid, striking her with an axe forty-four times. Embling continued to observe this depraved behavior for several months before he was “whacked” himself, fifty-six times, by the object of his unseemly research. Embling’s experiment thus concluded, Lizzie was finally apprehended and returned to the custody of the Crown.

Embling was, thankfully, the last to fall to Lizzie’s axe, but it is interesting to note that if the waif were allowed to continue her string of murders, by today (July 8, 2011), she would have slain her 552,898,543rd victim, striking him or her 552,898,582 times.

You can read more about Thomas Embling in the Wikipedia article about him: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Embling

Development Diary: “The Little Match Girl”

It looks like I was writing this for an audience, so I’ll let it introduce itself.

HEY: Don’t read this if you haven’t played the game yet. Come on.

Friday, December 27, 2019

I saw this YouTube video where this guy had made a mechanical retelling of The Little Match Girl. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzrFVUBpNkY He described it as “Women selling matches on Christmas Eve” because he doesn’t really speak English and he possibly was misremembering the story. But I didn’t know the story at all, so I thought maybe it was a traditional Japanese story. Trying to figure out the inspiration for this Lego narrative automaton, I actually looked at The Little Match Girl for the first time, and noticed what a bizarre story it is. A synopsis if you need it:

A little girl is forced to sell matches in the street on a freezing New Year’s Eve. She burns the matches to keep warm, and in their light she sees visions of Christmas happiness (including a roast goose that climbs off a table and starts walking toward her). Then she has a vision of her grandmother, who carries her up to Heaven. In the morning, people find the girl’s corpse and lament her death, but the narrator indicates that their grief is misplaced don’t know what beautiful visions she saw and how happy she is in Heaven.

I guess Hans Christian Andersen was thinking “Man, it’s not such a bad thing when children freeze to death in the street… but what’s the best way to convince my readers that this is true???”

The derangedness of the story made me want to do my own deranged version, and its structure suggested to me a game structure where burning matches allows the player character to visit different fantasy worlds. This tied into a puzzle I had been playing through in Luigi’s Mansion 3, where Luigi has to carry objects between film sets to solve a chain of puzzles (a torch from a medieval movie burns down a spiderweb in an unrelated basement set). So, a trading sequence hopping between different near-death experiences.

(Wikipedia mentioned that some version of A Christmas Carol has Scrooge be mean and then nice to a Little Match Girl, so I decided to steal that.)

I thought, what are the stupidest places the little match girl could go? Definitely Atlantis. I don’t know why I thought of the tunnels beneath Paris, but I ended up doing way too much research on where these sewers used to be and what this street’s name used to be and from where on the Seine you should be able to see the Eiffel Tower. I never got a firm idea of what year it is in the Paris part of the game though.

A quiet cabin in Japan seemed like a nice contrast to these two more bombastic ideas. Then I wanted a fourth location that would contrast with those three, and I realized it should be dangerously hot (to match the deadly cold of the “real world”). So, the American southwest.

I wanted the four locations to be completely incongruous to each other, and I think conceptually they are, but as I started coming up with the trading sequence, I realized that the connective tissue of this long puzzle would force the four worlds to feel much more cohesive than I intended. Well, what can you do?

Anyway, Friday night I had the basic locations and their inhabitants and some of the trading sequence figured out. I decided that if I could get the design outline finished on Saturday, I’d have a game scoped for writing in three days.

Saturday, December 28, 2019

I got the rest of the trading sequence figured out. I started designing the rooms in my notebook: Sketchy little maps of each region, and then a few lines for each room saying what is in that room.

When those were all done, I opened up Inform, I wrote the rooms in, and then I started outfitting them with objects and descriptions. I did the Cuervo rooms first, because I knew the walk through the desert would be easy. Then I did Atlantis. I started in on Paris before I went to bed.

I added all the people, but none of their behavior. I guess I did write the scene where you get the pirate statue from Nash, because it’s part of the basic looking around part of the player experience. The idea of a trashy nude pirate statue came from a Twitter post of a Reddit post about somebody’s house that amounted to “hey, isn’t it messed up that this guy has a trashy nude pirate statue?”

The vampire character was initially conceived as a man, but became a woman when I was trying to come up with a suitably weird French name and remembered the precieuses from Cyrano de Bergerac. This ends up making femininity and womanhood a bigger focus of the game than I ever intended: The little match girl confronts various women and their various needs (and men whose needs focus on the women in their lives), but she’s a little girl who shouldn’t really have to think about any of this stuff. It would be cruel if we could somehow take any of this seriously.

I like how the final four transactions in the game—Nash’s milk, Kazue’s headache relief, Poseidon’s quest for beauty, and Urimedonte’s death—form a kind of hierarchy of needs, from nourishment to comfort to philosophy to oblivion.

At the end of Saturday, the game was just over 5,000 words long.

Sunday, December 29, 2019

I implemented the basics of Paris and Ogureyama. I started in on the critical path of the trading sequence. I got up to where you get the poem from Yasushi, and then I stopped: I didn’t know how to write the scene where you give the poem to Poseidon.

I added some basic verb response stuff, I added structure for giving items to the wrong people. I did a little bit of the structure for the transition from the “real world” to the “visions,” but I’m a bit intimidated by that right now. I have basically nothing for the “real world” section.

At the end of Sunday, the game is just over 10,000 words long.

Tomorrow I need to finish the trading sequence. Do the mechanics for burning matches to enter visions and waking up to exit them. Write the conversation stuff for all the NPCs. Add the patreoneer names to the busts in Atlantis.

Monday, December 30, 2019

In the morning I did the stuff for the “frame story,” including the text quoted from the original story, the mechanics for burning matches and waking up to enter/exit visions, and some small default response adjustments. I also did all the “give X to NPC” responses. good grief.

The game is 14072 words at noon. I wonder if it can break 20k by tonight! Probably not!

[Editor’s note: The final version of the game comes out to about 18,000 words.]

What I need to do with the rest of the day:

X put the Patreoneers in the busts in the statue gallery.
X write trading Poseidon the poem for the trident.
X write killing Urimedonte with the trident to get violin and cat.
X text for TALK TO each of the NPCs.
X a CRY action
– the text of the poem when Nash translates it.
X The ending of the game (waking up with the violin, playing the violin)

That should be everything!

OH ALSO: It is critical that the game hints you to wake up! You have to know that you can wake up!

5:45 PM: I wrote the ending and it made me laugh so hard. I am so pleased with myself.

All that’s left is to write the poem as Nash translates it and then I can try to get someone to beta test it!

WELL, I copied a Neruda poem and I compiled the dang game. I sent it to Zach, who played through it pretty fast, and I sent it to Yerrik, who took two hours to get through it. I fixed the issues they reported and I ran a new version and I sent it to Emily.

Tuesday, December 31, 2019

Emily only had a few notes so I fixed that and then I got the game ready to send out.

I wanted the “PARIS, FRANCE” text to be really big. It didn’t work in Lectrote for some reason so I had to compile separately for the Quixe version and the bare gblorb.

I am frustrated because none of the testers seemed to find the drastic changes to the original story particularly funny. BUT I wrote the game in three days so it doesn’t have to be extra super good. And I think it’s hilarious.

BONUS: “PREWRITING”

Along with the development diary, my files include “prewriting.txt,” which is just a little brainstorming document, and I guess I’ll just paste it here:

The Little Match Girl
by Hans Christian Andersen

  • you have four matches
  • you are supposed to sell the matches
  • but if you don’t burn them you’ll die
  • burning a match makes you go to a vision
  • take items between visions to solve puzzle
  • the end

ATLANTIS
meet the little mermaid
JAPANESE VILLAGE
buddhist bells, 108
CATACOMBS
beneath paris? vampire?
dark
GAS STATION

bring source of fire, because matches don’t travel with you

little doll
shells
torch
book in foreign language
kitten
mask
blanket
dagger
flint
jewel glitters, light source
bean
cow
pitchfork/trident
beaded necklace
bottle of glue
bottle of milk

light source for cave
hook for reaching something
knife for cutting something

finally get ukulele and play on street, get adopted by Ebenezer Scrooge

see paris -> see atlantis -> see ogureyama -> see cuervo ->

get bottle -> fill bottle with milk from cow -> give milk to gas station attendant
Neptune’s trident -> slay vampire

A through J: A Diachronic Survey of Other Places in Barovia

I have analyzed Location K84, the infamous Catacombs of Castle Ravenloft, in its several incarnations. It occurred to me that I would like to do a similar reading of the other parts of the castle. (Here that is.) But, as I started doing that, I started doing a similar reading of the whole adventure leading up to the castle. Which is probably not as exciting as the castle itself.

WHOOPS!

Some Etymologies in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

A sentence on Zelda Wiki posits that “Sahasrahla may be named after the seventh chakra of Hinduism, Sahasrara.” Sahasrahla, it goes without saying, is the wise old man who guides your quest in the early sections of A Link to the Past. His name, it goes without saying, is weird.

When we see sentences like these, it is wise to be skeptical. There’s no obvious reason for Sahasrahla to be named after a chakra, and the author of the sentence offers no support for the supposition. But it is not wise to conclude on this basis that the theory is incorrect. It is not wise to dismiss an idea out of hand just because at face value it seems goofy. Wise people are aware that the objective world, the world of facts, is extremely goofy.

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K84: A Diachronic Survey of Ravenloft’s Catacombs

In this post we will look at the crypts in Castle Ravenloft and see how they changed from edition to edition.

Here’s a different post about locations in Barovia outside the castle. Here’s a third post about the castle itself.

Unnecessary Abstract Introduction (JUST SKIP THIS SECTION PLEASE)

Perhaps you have heard somewhere the idea that all stories—sitcoms, epic poems, video games, This American Life vignettes—are fundamentally retellings of older stories. Perhaps you have even heard the idea itself multiple times. In some contexts, the proposition refers to deep underlying structures to which storytellers inevitably return. This is a rich subject for analysis—but the big money is in abandoning all but the merest pretense of originality and casting the same characters in the same conflicts in the same settings that the audience remembers from 30 or 10 years ago. And this might be a good subject for analysis too. I hope.

This practice of story-rehashing is especially salient in the stories of Dungeons & Dragons, many of which are embodied in physical locations with detailed maps. The most successful D&D settings and stories are reprinted decade after decade, edition after edition, so that new players can enjoy the same adventures so beloved by their forebears, and old players can whine about the things that got changed.

I believe the paradigm example of this is Castle Ravenloft, depicted in the modules I6 Ravenloft (1983), RM4 House of Strahd (1993), Expedition to Castle Ravenloft (2006), and Curse of Strahd (2016). All four of these books tell basically the same story: “Go to this spooky castle and kill this evil vampire.” The vampire is always menacing the same young women; the aged fortune-teller always helps you find the same artifacts that will help you slay him. And in all four books, the floor plan of Castle Ravenloft is presented in basically the same form. This is fascinating, but not surprising: Nerds, who are humans, naturally hate change. Also, the original dungeon is very good. Why would you change it? Why indeed.

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Uncovered! CROCODRACULA: THE BEGINNING

You can play this game right now! But you should probably find out where it came from first:

A few months ago, I came into the possession of a copy of a very old, very rare text adventure game. I happened to be poking around in—Well, maybe I should start from further back.

THE STORY SO FAR

A few years ago, I came into the possession of a copy of a very old, very rare text adventure game titled Crocodracula: What Happened to Calvin. Feeling an obligation toward the preservation of an oft-overlooked art form, I—

—Actually, I should go back even further.

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The Imitable Process of Ryan Veeder: Additional Autosaving Techniques for Inform 7

There are a few more things I should say about implementing autosaving in Inform 7. In the previous posts I neglected to address how these techniques interact with the default verbs UNDO, SAVE, and RESTORE, which was a bit of an oversight. I’ll get around to that now, and then I’ll show you a couple of other neat things you can do with autosaving.

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The Imitable Process of Ryan Veeder: Advanced Autosaving in Inform 7

In a previous post I explicated the basic principles of how to automatically track and restore the player’s progress in an Inform 7 game. What it really comes down to is this:

  • Represent the parameters of your game’s progression in a table.
  • Whenever the player does something worth autosaving, record it in that table, and then write that table to an external file.
  • When play begins, read that external file and use those data to reconstruct the player’s progress.

I said we’d get into some ways of representing progress in a nonlinear game. The first thing that comes to mind is my game The Lurking Horror II: The Lurkening, in which the player character learns various spells that let you manipulate the environment and solve puzzles. Learning certain spells requires you to learn certain other spells first, but the “tech tree” has enough branches that we can’t predict in what order the player will discover everything.

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