NOTE: This entry includes spoilers for Shattered Reminiscence.
It started with a conversation. After interviewing FMV actor Rupert Booth for my podcast, we became friends and chatted daily about all manner of topics. We’d wandered into the realm of the golden age of cinema, discussing Metropolis as a reference point for a pole dance choreography I was working on at the time, and I mentioned my love of The Phantom of the Opera. I’d shared a podcast episode about the original novel and Phantom by Susan Kay, which led me to tune back in as inevitably when you record hours and hours of conversation you forget details. During the episode I’d pointed out that in Kay’s book, Erik is a scientist well ahead of his time in addition to his litany of other skills, but although his instruments and creations are mentioned they are never directly addressed or expounded upon. I then wondered why we never got a popularized time traveling Phantom.
Rupe thought this was an interesting idea as he is a sci-fi guy, and he’d been flirting with the notion of the two of us working on a project together at some juncture given my background as an artist, dancer, writer and number of other things. He looked it up and lo and behold, Phantom is in the Public Domain and would be useable should we opt to create something based on that concept. We spent some time brainstorming, bouncing ideas back and forth across the pond like it were table tennis. We whittled the concept down to a single primary location for the sake of FMV game budget, and Rupe added in copious humor where I was working from a darker, more horror-themed base.
I wrote a vignette around this time, which I released for free as the first episode of A Glass Darkly, a “taster” of a short form bonus show for Ko-fi subscribers where Dave and I read our creative writing aloud. We were also discussing how we were going to pass the branching narrative work back and forth. As I’d used Articy Draft 2 SE awhile back when I’d considered making a visual novel game based on my old unfinished comic C’est La Mort (for which I also wrote and directed a short audio play), I started a barebones file and shared screenshots with him. But right about then, the funding came through for a project he’d been dreaming of developing basically since he first started out as a writer and actor, and so he vanished into the mines of creative endeavor.
At the start of 2024, Dave and I kicked off patron tiers on our Ko-fi. As mentioned, one of the bonus shows launched that January was A Glass Darkly. Each month, Dave and I take turns reading a chapter of one of our works aloud. For my part, I have been slowly chipping away at reading Aplasia, a Resident Evil-flavored horror story/character sketch of a sociopath that tied in with C’est La Mort. Aplasia _and C’est La Mort_ were both left unfinished as I went through some extremely trying times and had a total recreation of self amid working on them. I’d hoped that perhaps in reading Aplasia aloud it would inspire me to return to complete it.
Instead, what happened is that I recalled the conversation with Rupe and the vignette I’d released as the first episode of the bonus show. And then I thought,_ why not work on that as a solo project, rather than waiting around for Rupe to surface? _And rather selfishly I also felt that in making it my own project, it would best reflect my intention uncolored by Rupe’s drastically different tone. Now, don’t get me wrong, I feel he and I could come up with some rather fun stuff together — but I decided I wanted my first game project to be 100% my own. What I have developed now is extremely different from the idea Rupe and I were toying with.
Because among other things I am also an artist, I initially thought about making Shattered Reminiscence a visual novel. This is a genre I play regularly, and I already owned both Articy Draft for planning and TyranoBuilder for generating the UI and spitting out a working title. But the more I thought about it, the more I shifted toward a textventure. A textventure would be much easier for one person to do themselves. Art assets, not to mention sound design and overall UI would be limited in scale, so I could generate a working version before the details were added in and the programming behind it could be as simple or complex as I could learn and apply.
The writing, furthermore, would be drastically different in visual novel format: more limited in scope and relying on the artwork to tell much of the story. I began my creative life with writing, and have consistently been told that my narrative voice is incredibly strong. So why would I generate a first game project hamstringing myself and hiding that light under a bushel as it were?
When I’d decided this, my first thought was of course TWINE. I reflected on works like Abigail Corfman’s Open Sorcery and felt this would be fairly simple for me to apply as well. As an option, my friend Simón recommended Inklewriter, a free plug-and-play interactive web app by inkle Studios, makers of games such as Sorcery! _and 80 Days_. I looked into it and was delighted, so I started my project there. I found myself swiftly dissatisfied however, wanting to control more aspects than the plug-n-play version allowed for. So I bought the Ink manual, downloaded Inky, and joined inkle’s Discord server which is full of extremely helpful folks. I haven’t looked back. I have found my scripting home.
I also decided that my illustration work will largely begin after I have the entire game written and coded in Ink. I set myself up to begin sketching at any time, and have as a way to warm up that part of my brain again started playing Chaotic Draw Along with Dave, which gives you a series of extremely silly prompts which you then must illustrate in a short time limit. I also used an app called Magicplan to create a floorplan for the mansion which is the primary setting of Shattered Reminiscence. This reads as a blueprint for a house because the app is for architects and builders, but given that my father owned his own business building and remodeling homes this form is extremely comfortable to me. The app also offers 3D views of the floorplans, meaning that I also have a basic drawing reference for the setting.
The final component to consider for the time being is sound design and music. I am not a musician, but have some apps downloaded to learn basic music theory. I possess a basic sense of composition, but want to further educate myself as I have time and when I need a break from podcasting, writing, drawing and coding. I have already created a title theme for the game and have a couple more fragments in the works, taking inspiration from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom here and there with a few notes used as callbacks to some of the songs. The themes so far are simple, but this is intentional as I do not want the music to distract the player as they move through the narrative. The music should be an accent, not the focal point.
Ink is a script which is a form of middleware. It is not a finished product but it ports to software such as Godot, Unreal and Unity. At this time I am considering Godot, but the folks in the inkle server also recommended nw-builder and Neutralino, so when I get to that step I will look into each of those more thoroughly. These are my picks over Unreal or Unity for two reasons: 1) both Unreal and Unity are paid software and I have limited income; 2) they both also have a very steep learning curve by all accounts from the Ink users I interact with. The exact software I use for finishing is unimportant at the present moment, however, and so I will circle back to that when it is more pertinent.
The original idea for my game was a fairly simple branching path narrative, but as I continue to work on it, it grows in scope. The planned length is Prologue + 6 Acts + Epilogue, of which the Prologue and Act One are completed and Act Two is nearly so. At this juncture I have begun incorporating randomized encounters, conditional text depending on what was seen prior, and as of last night I am tracking the affection levels between characters as well as each character’s madness level, both of which will of course generate different situations as the game progresses.
The genre of _Shattered Reminiscence _falls between suspense and character study, with touches of sci-fi and horror (Lovecraftian and psychological). More on this in a future post.
Next post will focus on my creative process.