DL4: Spooky Season

My writing goals and the calendar aligned for this month’s update, so I spent a lot of time thinking about “Spook Hill”, a story about a gravity hill in Maryland. I’ve always liked this story, but was never really sure what it was trying to say, and within its current context in the Twine game, another story focusing on Granbunny felt redundant. So I laid out some goals for the revision of the story:

• Shift from 1st person narrator to a more distant 3rd: There’s a lot of first person narration happening, and multiple speakers between the trunk story and branch stories. Since “Spook Hill” is in Bill’s perspective, he would be the 3rd first person narrator in Plenum, but I don’t think the story lends itself to first person narration to begin with since it focuses on the trip itself and the fantastic stuff happening outside of the car.
• Bill’s perspective needs a purpose: The player should learn about Bill in “Spook Hill” in ways that just aren’t possible from Thomas’s perspective. Since Thomas is ultimately trying to understand Bill / himself / their family through these memories, the authenticity of Bill’s perspective is in question. Thomas’s interjections / returns to the trunk story, should focus on the frustration of not being able to understand someone else.
• Adding a grounded beginning: I wanted the story to be grounded in the boys’ current life situation, to show what Granbunny’s gesture meant within a context instead of being isolated

I got a dash camera to create visuals for Plenum, and finally set it up and tested it out on a road trip to Tennessee early this year. For this month’s update, I edited a few .GIFs and added them to Part One. They’ll likely just be placeholders, since the ultimate goal is to drive the same route the brothers are driving and use snippets of that video to accent the story. The jarring repetition of an imperfectly looping .GIF is beautiful, and I really like the one I added to the title node. It feels like I’m always just about to turn a corner.

Also this month, I finally figured out how to code (probably extremely inelegantly) the removal of a random object from the player’s inventory, and added code to prevent players from skipping the side stories and still helping the stranger with his VCR at the end of Part One. I had put this off for a while now, just because I knew it would take me a couple hours of research to figure out how to implement and would probably make my brain hurt (it did). I want the player to accumulate points in the five attributes by exploring the story and delving into the side stories about the family’s history. The emotional weight of confronting difficult moments adds up, but can be relieved by helping and making connections with others. So when Thomas and Bill help the man watch a video tape of his daughter, their burden is reduced, but they also lose the physical object tied to a piece of their past, as well as the ability to “remember” it by interacting with it in the inventory. I limited the first encounter with this mechanic to just the boxes of cat ash.

I also did some writing around the introduction of the character Cigarette and expanded the initial dialogue between Thomas and her. A lot of the trunk story is the newest (and roughest) writing I’ve done, so I’m continuing to work through and expand on the characters and their interactions. Cigarette will play a larger role in Part Two, but her introduction here is the first chance players have to see Thomas interacting with another person (outside of his family).

This update went more smoothly than the last, so hopefully I can continue pushing through this first year of concentrated effort on Plenum. For next month, I’ll focus on re-thinking “Home Video,” which finishes Part 1 and is completely new, so I’m interested in seeing how it develops as I sit down to move it beyond a first draft. I’ll be pausing work on Part 1 in the New Year to start drafting Part 2, but will be spending the last month of the year trying to tie up loose ends and polish what I’ve accomplished this year. I wanted to focus my work on a “vertical slice” that showed how this textual world would function and demonstrate that I could take some old ideas and new ideas together within the context of a Twine game. The links should all work to carry the player from one grouping of sentences to the next, if nothing else!