Week 7, paused

This is an edi­tion of Robin Sloan’s video game devel­op­ment diary.

Welcome: to returning readers as well as everyone newly subscribed. If you missed it, week 1 sets up the moti­va­tion behind this project. All the pre­vious edi­tions are avail­able over on my blog.

The k in the hea­dine at the top of the page is gath­ering its forces for a fresh assault.

Orpheu, Odilon Redon, ca. 1903-10

As I warned you in last week’s edi­tion, all my efforts this week — really very close to all my waking hours — were com­mitted to a sub­stan­tial new writing project. I am halfway done, which is good, because I have two weeks to write it, and one of them has elapsed.

But then I made coffee this morning and thought, am I really not gonna send any­thing? So I decided I would com­pose this very brief edi­tion in which, rather than share my own progress, I rec­om­mend a couple of other works that are rel­e­vant to the inter­ests and goals of this newsletter.

Wot I got

Exactly the same game I had last week!

The diary

Jordan Mechner’s The Making of Prince of Persia is his con­tem­po­ra­neous devel­op­ment diary for that video game, which is con­sid­ered an all-time classic. Confession: I have never actu­ally played it (although I did watch over my friend Steve’s shoulder while he played it on his Apple II, many years ago)—but I still found the diary totally engrossing.

I first read this book years ago as a PDF; it’s now avail­able in a jaw-droppingly beau­tiful edi­tion from Stripe Press:

Inside, it’s a rich and absorbing production, with many of Mechner’s orig­inal diary pages on display, along with lots of mate­rial like this, the orig­inal frames he roto­scoped to pro­duce the game’s fluid motion:

In December 1988, Mechner writes:

Russ and I “fixed” the dig­i­tizer (it was in the wrong slot) and changed my life. In the past week, sword fighting has gone from a vague notion of some­thing I’d have to put in the game someday to reality. The little guy now thrusts and lunges. Everyone who’s seen it is thrilled. The amount of painstaking work still ahead of me is too huge to contemplate, but it’s paying off more dra­mat­i­cally than any­thing I’ve done in months. This is going to be a good game.

Wonder weeks :)

Disclosure: I think the volume preceding this one, chron­i­cling The Making of Karateka, might be even better, because Mechner is even younger, and he knows even less. His breath­less­ness and uncer­tainty are over­whelming and, honestly, inspiring.

The guile­less­ness of Mechner’s diaries is what sets them apart. There are very, very few records like this, notes taken day-by-day in the weird fur­nace of cre­ation, and then — importantly — not edited to strip out that breath­less­ness, that uncer­tainty. (This devel­op­ment diary of mine is a dif­ferent animal entirely, because, even though it’s chron­i­cling a process, it’s written with an audi­ence in mind. In fact, it’s a stretch to call it a “diary” at all, but/and I am okay with that.)

If you and/or someone you know (a young person, perhaps … ) are inter­ested in video game devel­op­ment and/or the process of cre­ation in general, I pre­dict you and/or they will get a lot out of these books.

The game

80 Days is a nar­ra­tive adven­ture that was released in 2014 and remains, in my opinion, the best-written video game. Others might have it beat on epic scope, or campy weird­ness … but in terms of actual prose quality, 80 Days is almost without peer. Which is really just a way of saying Meg Jayanth, the game’s lead writer, is almost without peer.

My first playthrough was revelatory. I can still remember my rising sense of excitement, tap­ping through the first few cities: “You can MAKE games like this??”

80 Days was pro­duced by the studio called Inkle, and its story was written in Ink, the language/format of their devising that I’m using for Perils of the Overworld. So, my project owes a huge debt to this studio and this game.

It’s avail­able on basi­cally all plat­forms at this point — iOS, Android, Mac, PC — and I can’t rec­om­mend it more highly. It is fun to play, fun to read. Its world is sur­prising and energizing. More than any other game I’ve ever played, it shows the path for­ward for this hybrid book/game genre that inter­ests me so much.

The hodgepodge

I wrote a short story, or, a short … fictional … artifact … that takes the form of remarks, circa 2041, from the director of the Smith­sonian Museum of Amer­ican Conspiracy. I’m very happy with how it turned out and proud to have it in the pages of the Atlantic. (Please accept this pub­li­ca­tion as evi­dence of my ongoing com­mit­ment to the President Dwayne The Rock Johnson Cin­e­matic Universe.)

You might remember my dis­cus­sion of sac­cades in a pre­vious edi­tion of this newsletter. Here’s a long and fas­ci­nating thread about the utter weird­ness of our vision.

The Kindle edition of my novel Sourdough is on sale for $3.99 this month ✌️

Beatrice, Odilon Redon, 1897

Okay, now I want to write more, of course, but the point was to do this quickly, so I’ll push myself away from the keyboard.

I have felt absolutely on fire this week, thanks to the com­bi­na­tion of an urgent assignment, a story idea that panned out (they don’t always!), and the knowl­edge that people will get to read it soon, not an inde­ter­mi­nate number of months in the future. Again, I have no desire to be cryptic; I’ll detail this project as soon as I’m permitted.

It is not lost on me that, in this edi­tion, I have referred you to (1) a video game devel­op­ment diary better than this one, and (2) a video game better than the one I’m making. Well. Hmm.

From Oakland,

Robin

This has been an edi­tion of my video game devel­op­ment diary, sent by email every few weeks. You can subscribe: