Haters across the nation are reeling–I’ve gone and done it again. I made a game. Since everyone around me is extremely tired of hearing about this thing, and I am extremely tired of being alive, I think it’s time to wrap this whole thing up, dump all my thoughts on the whole journey, then finally embrace death’s tender kiss.
Since this blog is my internet toilet where I excrete all my dumb thoughts, this is probably gonna get long, so feel free to not read this and continue living your life.
I already documented the experience of making the original game here, so if you’re into bullshit, feel free to read that to hear the story of the game’s initial reception. Let’s pick up the story from there. Note: I’m back after finishing this thing and I can confirm it’s extremely long, so click at your own peril.
January – March, 2018
After I finished the first Werewolf House I experienced an explosion of creativity that I’m still trying to understand, mainly because I’m afraid of sliding back to how I used to create. Like most people who do creative things for fun as a hobby, my output was extremely sporadic my entire life.
I always wanted to be like those motherfuckers who were constantly working, constantly finding the energy to make new things, complete projects, juggle multiple creative endeavors at once on top of life’s many responsibilities. But I always figured that just wasn’t me–life was too draining. If a normal day of coworker smalltalk, “hopping” on “quick calls”, and a Southern California commute was already exhausting, what hope did I have of coming home and mustering up more energy for creativity? I gave myself a break and let myself relax most nights, trying to put available energy into something productive, even if that just meant putting time into staying healthy or spending time with friends when I could. I figured that finding a job that satisfied my urge to create was the solution, then at least I’d be putting all that daytime energy into making things.
Visual proof that I did in fact do a thing. And even got friends together to read and talk about making that thing. (Not pictured: friends)
But then I did Werewolf House, and after god knows how many years of reinforcing these not-so-great habits, I fuckin changed. Just like that. With still 2 months to go, just this year I: wrote and recorded demos for 2 musicals (and rewrote a third whose first draft previously took me a whole year to write), wrote and am working on the production of a short film with friends, produced a podcast, did a Arbor Day version of Werewolf House, and now did a game version as well. Plus I started getting more into upgrading and modifying instruments if you wanna count that as creativity (hey it’s better than sitting on my duff and watching youtube all night at the very least, you gotta admit. you gotta).
So I don’t know exactly how Werewolf House really changed me that drastically but I have a few tactics that I think have made a difference. And if it’s helpful I will put them here. If it’s not then it’s not my fault OK?? No court could convict me for trying to be helpful online.
I challenge myself to do stuff as quickly as possible. I think this is the main reason things have changed so drastically. As a musician and an appreciator of story and music, it was always my dream to write a musical, so a few years ago I tried. That first musical took me a full year. I’d get stuck on a song and get discouraged and I wouldn’t go back and take another shot for months. But I did Werewolf House with an explicit deadline. I had to get a full website done packed with writing and music before Halloween, I had no choice. What was I gonna release it November 2nd?? Get the fuck outta here.
Anyway, after Werewolf House I wrote a draft of a Crypt Keeper musical in 12 days (I counted). I was giddy, it was like I had acquired a superpower. I could write dozens of musicals in a year now if I wanted. And one or 2 of those might even be good. I was just walking around with that secret knowledge I had just gained. No, creating something like that wasn’t some insurmountable year-long undertaking. At even a fairly leisurely pace of a couple hours a night I could end with something I was proud of in what seemed like no time at all. My whole perspective changed. Now it feels like there’s nothing I can’t accomplish by working at it over the course of a month. A prime example being this damn game that this fucking article is supposed to be about. I never would have even considered doing something like this before, but I knew that if I could just keep my head down and work on it a bit every night I’d be shocked at what I had by the end of the month. And almost exactly a month later I was right, I had a game beyond what I ever thought I could make.
And it’s exciting to watch that progress unfold right in front of you. If I focused, I could go from absolutely nothing to like a quarter of my musical done in a single night. Going to bed with 2 new songs and a scene done was infinitely more exciting than my eyes glazing over as I watched dozens of drum covers on youtube until it was time to go to bed.
Plus, when you don’t allow yourself to agonize over every tiny detail and get stopped up on everything, it only allows you to be more creative and the ideas flow more freely. Every creative person has a million ideas and dozens of projects they’ve started up, only to reach a spot where they get blocked or frustrated and then they decide the project isn’t worth it anyway, so they move on to the next idea that sounds more exciting. And so on. Meticulous outlining and a constant forward momentum has prevented me from encountering that issue again (so far). When a problem arises or I hit a roadblock, I blast through it with the dumbest idea possible, and give myself permission to come back and change it if I want. But often those dumb ideas or quick patches turn out to be creative solutions you never would have come up with had you not forced yourself to move forward. And of course, the hard truth is that a completed script with a terrible deus ex machina ending that you added because you got stuck is infinitely more valuable than a perfectly composed script that’s only halfway done. I’ve tried to remember that. Finishing is all that matters.
And this will probably sound stupid but I think that quick semi-stream-of-consciousness writing is sort of becoming my style. Don’t get me wrong it’s extremely sloppy and extremely dumb, but I think there’s a sort of fun in watching someone struggle with language in real time. At least I think it’s cool and some people have even mentioned my “signature” style so hey yeah this is what I do awesome look at me type ha ha yep whatever.
I allow myself to do extremely dumb niche shit that probably only interests me. Beginning a project used to feel like a huge undertaking because I was banking on that thing being the big thing. I’d make something because I thought it could potentially be popular, because it reminded me of some other successful thing, or maybe it was a thing that I thought a writing agent would like or something. Or maybe it’d go viral and I could be the next Moon Pie twitter account. Whatever I was working on was gonna be the thing that broke me into stardom. It had to be, especially because I was working so infrequently, I was really banking on the few things I was making to be worth the time.
Werewolf House was different though, it was based entirely on a Halloween Haunted House blog post I wrote a long time ago at work in only a few minutes. But I remember it being a lot of fun to make, and I liked the final product a lot. So why not expand it a little more? The idea was extremely exciting to me, I wasn’t sure if anyone else would care but that was a concern far in the back of my mind, behind much more dumb concerns like whether e-cig has a hyphen in it or not. The answer obviously is that it does, “ecig” looks weird.
Of course I still have those delusions of grandeur all creative types get (I assume). When something is really cranking along and you’re feeling good about where it’s going, you become convinced this is the big thing that M. Night Shyamalan will see and he will M. Knight you into Hollywood royalty and you’ll get millions of dollars to turn your Crypt Keeper musical into a trilogy of movies. But now every project doesn’t feel like life or death, like this thing has to work or else I’m sunk.
I always try and keep in mind that it’s impossible to predict what will catch on, what people will like and gravitate towards and what they won’t. Sometimes the dumbest stuff that I’ve done that I don’t even personally like has somehow turned into the most successful. So I figure, might as well do something that excites me that I won’t be too precious about. I have a feeling I’ll eventually give more important things a shot as I gain more confidence in what I do. But it’ll be nice to know that I have a bunch of bad shit under my belt before I begin taking on bigger ideas.
I only begin projects that I know I can turn into a final product. One of the hardest things about putting a lot of energy into writing meant that I didn’t have many other skills. I could write dumbass blog posts, I could sort of write a script, but I can’t act or draw or take pictures or anything much beyond that. So if I did put a few months into writing a script, like… I don’t know let’s come up with a really dumb example and say, a movie-length Rush Hour 4 script where they go back in time and defeat racism and win the Civil War, that was as far as I could take it. I wouldn’t even know where to begin actually turning that into something an average person could consume. I had no connections in Hollywood that might read it. I knew no one that would ever dream of filming it. I knew when I finished the script could never be anything beyond a funny script. Or even if I wrote a sketch or an article or whatever, all I really could do was post it on this blog, which as we’ve established, is an internet dumping ground that has less visitors than your average toilet.
With Werewolf House, I had a very clear vision of what it could be. I could use Squarespace’s design to create the interaction, then commission some art, steal a bunch of bad gifs from the internet, write some words and music, and when I put it all together, it would be a full website I could share and show my friends. Just go to Werewolf House dot com. No other steps needed, no one else I had to rely on, no gatekeepers deciding whether or not it got made. It was right there online, a fully complete final product you could check it out if you wanted, or if not you could go to hell.
I chased that same idea on the next thing. My friends started a sketch troupe that I was sort of part of even though I’m not much of a performer, and they were very organized and met really frequently. So I figured I could harness some of that organization and cast. I wrote them a musical. And what a beautiful thing it is to be able to take a couple weeks and then send all your friends a script for a musical you wrote for them. I couldn’t wait to finish it and show it to them. I was sick, in the middle of a move, AND I had to travel for a whole week for work, and I still found the time to work on it and complete it in a handful of days. I never would have dreamed of doing something like that before. But because I could see a direct path from me writing this thing to it becoming a final product performed on stage or filmed as a rough video, I couldn’t wait to get the process going.
I probably picked up some good habits. One time at the dentist the hygienist told me that after 21 days of doing something consistently, it becomes a habit. I still have not picked up flossing and my mouth probably hates me for it, BUT I certainly worked on Werewolf House every day for at least 30 days last October. It was a lot easier to keep that momentum going after I had been working so fervently the whole month. After that long it felt weird to come home after work and just not do anything. Like before I had no problem wasting my entire night on watching stuff, but come November sitting for more than a couple hours at home after work felt weird. I’d get antsy–not just out of guilt that I wasn’t being productive, but because of excitement. Given all I learned above, the prospect of creating turned from a struggle into something I enjoyed and looked forward to.
I’m all for the power of thought, but I think that can only take you so far. I say as I negate the thousands of words I just typed above. The truth is we all are gross smelly animals who thrive on routine and muscle memory. So if you can establish that pattern, it will no longer be a concerted effort to keep it going.
For all those reasons and probably lots more I don’t have the self awareness to understand, this year I became one of those motherfuckers that doesn’t stop. I’ve always got some dumb thing I’m working on consistently. And I am here to tell you that at least in my case, it’s certainly not because of any kind of discipline or any kind of innate ability to buckle down. I work on this shit because I’m excited. It’s fun for me now. It reminds me of when I was a teenager. I used to come home from school–exhausted from football practice (I was extremely bad at it) and trying to pretend like puberty hormones weren’t making me insane–and practice playing bass and guitar for 4 or 5 hours all night until it was time for bed. All my friends either quit their instruments after a few months, or only played every once in a while when they felt like it. How did I do it? On top of all the bullshit of being a teenager? It was easy because it was never “practice”. Playing music was enjoyable. It was a release and a break from all that stuff, not another thing on top of it. It took me way too fucking long, but it feels like I’ve finally figured out a way to do that with other forms of creativity, and let me tell ya, it’s a real damn treat. It’s exciting to look forward to what I can create now that I’ve learned all this simple stuff that should have been obvious long before.
It’s true what you’ve heard: Spring has actually sprung.
April 3, 2018
I had spent a decent amount of money for the WerewolfHouse.com domain and Squarespace tools, but since Halloween the site had just been sitting there. In the back of my mind I knew it would be cool to get more use out of it, since it was completely free to add as much content as I wanted. The sky was the limit, was another thing I was thinking to myself.
I figured it might be fun to do another Werewolf House thing for a holiday like I did for Halloween the prior year, but what holiday? I looked up a list. Hmm already missed Valentine’s Day… then I saw Arbor Day. April 26. Shit. I only had 20-something days but I knew Arbor Day was so dumb I had to do it. It’s the day of trees. The second scariest holiday. C’mon.
And of course like an even bigger dumbass (my first dumbass move was doing the thing in the first place) I assumed it wouldn’t take very long. Nope. I can’t believe I was so stupid back then but am so smart now, I’ve come so darn far.
It took me right up until the night before to put the finishing touches on part of the site and drop in the commissioned artwork. It’ become sort of a tradition (if you want to call 3 times a tradition) for me to commission some actually good artwork to put on the front page of the site to act as sort of a splash page before you get into the meat of the Werewolf House fun, which is populated by the worst gifs the internet has on tap. If I wanted to sound smart I’d say that the commissioned art acted as an introduction to my work or whatever, but really it was to trick people into clicking on the site on social media. Because the art looked so good they couldn’t help but be enticed to visit the site and then they were trapped in the house of werewolves forever.
Anyway the music could have probably used another pass if we’re being honest with ourselves here, but it was done and it went out into the world and that’s cool.
April 10, 2018
In the midst of all the Arbor Day stuff, I sent myself an email titled “Werewolf House Game?” and the world was never the same (it got lots worse). It was only a couple links to potential visual novel/interactive fiction engines, but just a quick search made me realize that it was possible to do something even bigger next time. That’s one of the benefits of having a consistent creative output, working on one thing inspires you to do more. I had just gotten started on one Werewolf House undertaking and I was already thinking about the next one.
April 26, 2018
I’ll spare you all the details but I put the Werewolf House Arbor Day experience out and then it was time to move on to other bullshit. I wrote musicals, recorded demos, and arranged a table read with some friends. Plus lots of other unfathomably dumb shit.
April 27 – August 27, 2018
Wow I didn’t even plan it that way, but these 2 Werewolf House projects were exactly 4 months apart? Isn’t that fascinating how things work out like that? No.
The truth is during all of these months I didn’t think I’d do another goddamn Werewolf House. The same pattern has happened each time I’ve done one of these god-forsaken things: I have fun making it right up until the last few days of leading up to the deadline. At that point I’m exhausted and sick of Werewolf House but I can’t just give up now. Gotta finish the remaining work, try and fix what isn’t good, or decide “fuck it” and leave the fuckups and odd parts and decide it’s good enough. That’s beyond where I am now. I’ve long since passed the “fuck it” stage. Honestly Werewolf House can go suck an egg, why am I even writing this thing.
But as you’d imagine, once I’ve moved on to some other thing, I start to miss the freewheeling style of Werewolf House. It gets to be all the things I love, all at once. I can and do put whatever dumbass thought crosses my mind into it, and it’s definitely been the most well-received of any creative thing I’ve done.
The exhaustion fades and all the positive thoughts start creeping back into my head. I look at the calendar on August 27 and see that Halloween is 2 months away, and on that night LA happens gets slightly below 70 degrees so in my mind I’m like “YEP, it’s fall, baby!!” and before I know it I’m replying to that April 10 email on August 27 with more links to possible game creation tools.
August 28, 2018
I took a day to look around and test out a number of different platforms until I eventually landed on Twine. I noticed that a number of acclaimed indie games like Firewatch and Depression Quest were made with the platform, and it seemed like it could do anything I wanted to do and more without being too technical to overwhelm me right at the start.
Plus, a big bonus was that in theory, any game I made would work on mobile since a Twine game is basically just a web page. I knew from obsessively refreshing Werewolf House analytics that about half the visitors to the site were people on their phones, so it’d be cool to get everyone on board.
I think I summed up the project well when I sent myself the note: “Might be cool if we could pull off something like this but I’m sure it’s a shitload fuck ton of work you dumbass.” I was right! It was a shitload of fuck tons of work. But actually I’m smart.
I found a couple very basic tutorials and after a couple 20 minute videos I was elated. I could do this. After a lifetime of having the mindset of “I’m a writer, I don’t do technical stuff, I’m no good at that”, all the great teachers online and the powerful tools people put out there for free meant that even someone like myself with absolutely no coding experience felt like he could actually create a game.
With that, we were off and running. 2 days before I wasn’t even sure if I was going to do a Werewolf House for Halloween, then that night I was ready to undertake an entire game, and learning an entirely new skill to bring it to life.
August 29, 2018
Alright so I’m making a fucking game now. But a game has to have gameplay obviously… some sort of interaction. The only problem was, pretty much any game I could think of had a mechanic based on visual things, whether it be shooting, or having your anime guy punch another anime guy, most games were based on the player interacting and manipulating the images they see on the screen. But I knew that I wasn’t going to instantly learn how to make interesting or even coherent art, so I had to think of something else
At one point the idea was that the whole game was a really crude version of VR, like a text-based, 8-bit VR. The joke mainly being that VR is about trying to replicate “reality” with freedom of movement and vision, while my game would be extremely restrictive. Like in a funny way. I used that idea sort of in the final product, but honestly that’s not a bad idea for a full game now that I think about it, don’t steal that. Thanks. But it seemed restrictive for what I was trying to do with this iteration of Werewolf House.
Later, I was making my way through Twine tutorials when I hit one that was all about adding music to a game. The previous Werewolf Houses definitely had a musical element, with both 10 minutes of backing music and a full song with lyrics as a reward for surviving. Twine being able to incorporate sound effects and background music was a big selling point. So I knew audio would be a big part of the game, but then I started exploring what kinds of audio options the platform supports.
All pretty basic stuff: Play, pause, stop, sound controls–but also loop. You could set a backing track to loop indefinitely. I wish I could remember exactly how it happened, whether it was a sudden idea that hit me or if I slowly figured out the solution, but either way, by my second day I had an idea for a mechanic: As you beat certain sections of the game, new parts of the soundtrack fade in, building a track as you go. By the end all of them would come together to become a full song.
So then, the conceit of the game quickly followed after that. If the goal is to build a soundtrack, why would the player need to do that? The answer is obvious: You’re an EDM DJ who needs to build a beat for your Werewolf House rave. Of course.
As I wrote to myself in a note: “That’s a damn game.”
August 30, 2018
Now that I had the mechanics of the game, the story pretty easily fell into place. And yes I’m aware that calling this a “story” is a bit of a stretch, and I’m aware writing thousands and thousands of words about this as if it’s some sort of artistic achievement is even more of a stretch but as I said, this is my online dumping ground.
Anyway, once I knew the game was going to have a musical progression system, then all I had to do was figure out what layers of a song I wanted, and what story beats could go with it.
It ended up being a matter of mixing and matching musical things to horror things–a Frankenstein’s monster could make a growly EDM bassline, sure. I could use the 8-bit VR idea for a section, and the VR could create some sort of synthy line on top. And so on, you played the game, I hope. If you’ve read this far and you HAVEN’T played it and are still reading this? Well please email me I’d like to give you 150 dollars and will happily email you thousands of more bullshit thoughts. I got a million of these.
The musical ideas also really easily turned into story ideas. How could the player earn a melodious wolf howl? Maybe make a wolf fall in love with them? Sure. I instantly knew I wanted the drum beat to be a skeleton. Originally the idea was that the skeleton would help you make a beat, but it morphed into him kicking your ass to create the beat. That’s a staple of the project: Everything in Werewolf House hates you, especially the narrator.
3 days in and I already had a pretty solid plan of attack for the core gameplay, the music, and structure. Now it was just a matter of making all of this. Shit.
August 31, 2018
The kind of cover art I wanted to emulate. Here it is here above these words.
I knew I wanted my game to have pixel art. I’ve never considered myself much of an artist, and I knew I would need to make a lot of art quickly, so I figured it would only add to the humor if my terrible attempts at art went along with my attempts at writing, horror, humor, etc.
I also thought it would be a funny effect to commission some realistic, genuinely atmospheric and creepy art, only to have it quickly transition into my bad pixel art. It’d be like the classic text-based adventures I was emulating. I loved how the box art and prose promised an epic adventure, only to greet players with boxy houses and stick figures upon install. Not knocking those games though, I think the simple art and abstraction helped a lot with letting the player create their own world. Did my game work that way? Probably not.
Things were really cruising along until I hit my first roadblock. I knew that the program GIMP was a free, open-source version of PhotoShop. And I knew PhotoShop was a powerful tool that I knew very little about. But it had to be capable of drawing the shitty animated gifs I was looking for, right?
Oh yeah I should mention, I also wanted the art to be animated to match the clip art gif style of the previous entries. Even more image skills I had to learn in not a lot of time.
I booted up GIMP and yep it’s like PhotoShop alright. It’s identical in that I am completely inept at both and completely bewildered by all the options.
No matter, I was quickly beginning to learn that the internet was absolutely littered with tutorials for stuff like this. I could watch a quick video or read a blog, follow along, and suddenly I’d be doing exactly what I was hoping to do.
I followed along with a couple GIMP pixel art tutorials and… not only were my pictures looking even more incoherent than I wanted them to look, I couldn’t even get it to work. Trying to animate even 3 frames was a huge pain, it looked bad, and I couldn’t get the .gif functionality to work right. It would go too fast, or wouldn’t animate at all, or it would come out tiny. What was I gonna do!! I gotta have my gifs. But honestly it was a little disheartening, I was getting afraid I wasn’t going to be able to fill the game with the amount of horrible horrifying art I was envisioning.
I kept reading tutorials until I came across one post that mentioned that pixel art is possible on GIMP, but it’s nowhere near the best program to make it on. Oh?? Yes?? Implying there are multiple programs?
And then blammo one google search in and the first thing I clicked on was a program called Piskel. Within seconds I was doing everything I was too dumb to do on GIMP with ease. Animating gifs, creating a moody color pallet, drawing lightning and shit. It was fast and easy and free. I got another jolt of excitement. I was only a few days in, and sure, I was already locked in to making some sort of interactive game by the time Halloween rolled around, but with Piskel downloaded and working full force, it became clear that I had the tools and time to actually make this thing sort of good.
September 1, 2018
So as I smashed through that one roadblock I immediately was face-to-face with another one and isn’t that what life is like, just a road that is full of blocks for some reason? Yeah sorta, sure.
I knew that I was going to use the moon as sort of a status bar, and have it fill in as you progressed in the game. So that seemed like a decent place to start. I drew a little moon and animated some clouds on it and wow, it was really working! I could export as a gif and within minutes the moon was in the damn game.
Baby’s first moon attempt. It does look like a pumpkin.
I was so jazzed on my jazzy little moon that I went and showed my girlfriend. “Cool, nice pumpkin” she said and then the poor long-suffering young lady had to deal with my sudden scary realization: “Oh shit. I’m gonna have to figure out how to draw.”
It’s one thing to have comedically bad drawings, but at the very least I was hoping to create something people could at least understand. I’m not looking to blow anyone’s mind with some Picasso shit but I felt like clarity was a legitimate concern. When a moon looks like a pumpkin, there’s a problem.
So I started experimenting a bit more, and I quickly realized Piskel had even more functionality that I hadn’t considered, but could help me make my art actually coherent. I used the program to create a specific Werewolf House color pallet: Mainly shades of purple and green to match the game’s color scheme. Plus splashes of red and yellow for emphasis, and sure why not some greys for shading. Couldn’t hurt. I knew I had to limit myself or else I’d be tinkering with colors for far too long.
Plus I figured out you could use different layers to create depth and animation so much easier than trying to draw it in like I had been doing in my earlier explorations. If I wanted some atmospheric background clouds I could just draw them on their own and put them behind whatever piece of shit house or tree I was drawing. So much easier. God bless whatever saint created Piskel and put out it out for free.
September 2, 2018
So OK, I had locked in a plan of attack for the story, gameplay, and art. And I had a platform for my game, but Twine was only the jumping off point. From reading tutorials and looking at other games, it became super clear that Twine was a powerful program. Using CSS and Javascript, you could alter the game’s code as much as your heart desired. Pretty much anything possible on a website is possible in a Twine game, I read.
Which is all well and good. Fantastic. But I’ve never made a website in my life. The most advanced thing I had ever done was construct the Werewolf House website last year, but that was with Squarespace, which is especially designed for dipshits like me that don’t know how the first thing about coding. I even thought I was Mr. Fuckin Neo Matrix Hacker Boy because I figured out the right way to format links to make the site jump from one portion of the page to another, instead of loading the page all over again and messing up my carefully crafted background music. But obviously baby stuff compare to real coding.
Now I had to figure out how to do everything. From square one. Fonts, colors, buttons, background colors, effects, you name it. Not to mention all of the coding logic required to make the actual mechanics of the game work.
My pie-in-the-sky lofty goal was to try and emulate something like this.
I dove in. I knew I wanted to emulate classic text-based adventure games, so I thought it might be cool to add a monitor flicker effect. Like before, I quickly learned that this kind of thing has infinite internet resources, just a quick search away. Search any kind of CSS effect, and someone has spent a lot of time meticulously crafting it, and then they will happily put the code online for free for anyone to use. So instead of learning how to do everything completely by scratch, I just had to learn enough to implement what I could find online.
I found an effect that causes the screen and the words to flicker like an old monitor. Hell yeah. The blog I found even explained how all of it works, and I had amassed juuuust enough knowledge to know it’s complicated and creative and awesome that someone make this and then allow some random online doofus like me to use it.
So I copy the code and place it into the code zone for the game where the Twine tutorials told me to put it. I hit the button to test it out and… nothing. Yep, another low point. I couldn’t even directly copy this one background effect, how the heck am I going to figure out how to make this look like anything but the boring standard Twine layout?
“It me” is a thing I like to say that I made up.
I played around with it for hours until I finally figured out that I wasn’t using CSS tags to target the specific pages I wanted the effect to appear on. When I hit the test button and the screen effect finally appeared, I truly did that famous Brendan Fraser awards show clap in real life. Another huge burst of creative excitement. I was downright Bedazzled. I finally get where Brendan was coming from. Sorry we made fun of you Brendan, you were right all along.
September 3, 2018
Alright so, pretty much every preliminary thing is in place. I’m still basically at the starting line, but I know everything I’m hoping to do is possible. Now it’s a matter of making all of this shit.
September 3rd was Labor Day so I had a full day to waste on this thing, and you better believe I did. I took a few hours to do a full writing pass on the game. I knew I was going to fix a lot of it down the line, but I went through as quickly as I could, writing whatever I thought should happen in each section. Of course, as it always goes, tons of that stuff ended up making it into the final game in one way or another. Because of both fatigue/laziness as well as the stream-of-consciousness writing creating some surprising moments throughout the story.
Recently as I’ve been learning how to efficiently do my bullshit, I’ve found myself making a ton of lists and spreadsheets and a whole load of extremely square stuff I should be ashamed of but whatever. So I made a spreadsheet of every single thing I needed to do to complete the game. I don’t think it was absolutely necessary to remember everything, but it feels less overwhelming to have it all laid out in one place, even when you’re staring down the barrel of about 60 screens to complete, lots of which require special coding and music cues, and ALL of which require custom animated gifs.
Imagining doing it all again right now genuinely makes me wanna puke, but back then I was ecstatic. I couldn’t wait to get going.
September 4, 2018
I knew some folks that had good luck finding an artist via a “comedy jobs” Facebook group I’m a part of, so I took to that group to try and find someone to try and create a sort of “splash” front screen for the game, as well as box art to mimic the old PC games of yesteryear.
My friend Rose had done the art beautifully the past 2 times I did Werewolf House, but I was hoping for someone with a more gritty, scary style to better contrast the crudeness of the game. I already explained that, whatever.
The artist I found through the group had a great oil painting style and she delivered exactly what I was hoping for despite my troubles explaining to her what I wanted.
Don’t tell anyone but I took care of all the art commissioning while I was at work. When I got home I had time to start working on creating more CSS effects. It took me damn near all night to get it to look like the screen was flashing like lightning but I did it OK?? It broke later and I didn’t really get the full effect, but that’s not the point OK??
September 6, 2018
The next day I continued working on the coding. After searching through some Twine Q&A forums (more absolutely free, but invaluable info online, thank you internet), I figured out how to stow the sidebar of my game at the beginning so it could reveal itself as you first got your beat-making mission in a very exciting fashion.
I worked on that plus figuring out how to format the sidebar, like adding extra links and my moon picture was a challenge on its own. But by the end of the day I got the coding logic working right, so when you beat a different section of the game, a new portion of the moon appeared. So that was at least something.
September 7, 2018
Starting on the 7th, I began a marathon of creating art. In college I was always envious of my friends who were studying for an art degree. They’d sometimes get together and work all night on their art projects or paintings, stopping to chat every once in a while or play movies in the background. I was studying for an English degree (which probably was dumb but now I write for a living so I guess I’m being dumb all the way to the damn bank) and I’d get distracted even if I put on instrumental music while trying to read or write. I still can’t write with music–I can barely even write on a computer without getting distracted. Movies are out of the question.
But I finally got my wish, and making art was exactly the process I hoped it’d be. There is something extremely satisfying about putting on a podcast and zoning out as your drawing takes shape. I’d come home and work roughly 5 hours cranking out pictures, eating, sleeping, working, then doing it all again. The routine was meditative and fun in a way, but you better believe I was over it after a few days.
Before, then after.
Of course it’s not like it was easy. I went through 4 different versions of the moon that I was going to use for my game’s main status bar. After a lot of experimentation, by the end of the first night I had something I was really happy with. I think it adds a lot to the atmosphere and definitely does not look like a pumpkin anymore (I don’t think).
September 8, 2018
The next day, I finished a few images that appear at the beginning of the game, right until you get struck by lightning. These are probably the crudest of the bunch, but they’re fine, and hey maybe that adds to the joke I keep talking about, where the commissioned art looks good, but mine looks bad.
I was starting to get into the swing of things, so my output only picked up as the days went on.
September 9, 2018
OK for all my bragging about my great work ethic and how hard I worked on all of this I can’t figure out what the fuck I was doing on Sunday, September 9. I can’t find any files or notes from that day. It’s possible I was doing something dumb like spending time with other people. Or maybe I was working on the script to a short film some friends and I were working on simultaneously.
Now I can’t let it go. What the fuck was I doing? My Letterboxd account says I watched the movie Blow Out so I figure I was home… who knows. Maybe I did get shit done that day after all and I’m forgetting.
This sucks and is bad writing but I figured it out. I went to the park with friends. So I probably worked a little bit on code and then called it a day. Also I watched Blow Out which is great. So a lot accomplished actually if you think about it. Who cares.
September 10, 2018
It looks better in the context of the game OK?
Back into the swing of things with a regular work week and I was flying. On the 10th I made the final touches to my moon sidebar images (added spooky clouds using Piskel’s invaluable layer tool), finished the rest of the images for the intro of the game, and finished all 8 different versions of the image in the main room, which checks off whichever section of the house you’ve completed. Since there are 3 different rooms I had to create a new version with a checkmark for all the permutations.
September 11, 2018
Give us a kiss
Really starting to fly now. The next day I finished the images for both the skeleton room and the room where you fall in love with the wolf.
The wolf images especially were ones where I was surprised at how they were turning out. Some of the werewolf room images were looking downright passable.
I discovered a benefit of pixel art I wasn’t even aware of when I first started. Since I was really only working with a few dozen pixels per image (the dimensions were only 40×20), slight adjustments made all the difference. I’d put down some eyes on my werewolf for example, and if they looked a little weird, it was extremely easy to just move them a pixel over and suddenly they were looking fine. Small, quick tweaks could turn an image from fucked up into that high high bar of passable we were talking about before.
September 12, 2018
The flames take a long time.
Finished the VR section. Took a little extra time since I was playing with a first-person perspective, and because I needed to draw lots of stuff being engulfed in flame, which turns out is harder to animate than you’d think.
Also, I realized that my spreadsheet didn’t account for the actual writing of the damn game, so I made a simpler checklist that covered the 4 facets of the game: Art, Music, Writing, Code. And then the 8 sections: Sidebar, Intro, Skeleton Room, Werewolf Room, Computer Room, Frankenstein Room, VR Room, and the Ending. Then I got to have that sweet sweet rush of endorphins as I checked off even more bullshit in my spreadsheet.
September 13, 2018
This is how all the kids dance now this is called Flossing.
Decided to jump ahead a bit and finish the 6 ending images on the 13th. These also took some time because I had to animate the werewolves transforming and then dancing their little hearts out to the rave music I was planning on putting down.
September 14, 2018
Though I had the overall narrative more or less figured out, the Frankenstein Room and the Computer Room were still a little lacking. I wasn’t feeling super confident about what would be going on in each of them. They didn’t have the same immediate comedy premise as “a skeleton is kicking your ass” or “you are playing shitty 8-bit VR”.
I wrote a new breakdown what would happen in each screen for those 2 rooms and was feeling a bit better about my concept: having to escape being haunted by FearDotCom the haunted website in the computer room, and Frankenstein’s Monster turning out to be a gentle giant, only for you to destroy him with weapons anyway in the Frankenstein’s Room.
I also finally got going on the music. I gave myself a little slack on this one because compared to the last 2 games, music was gonna be relatively simple. For both Arbor Day and Halloween 2k17 I did a full 10 minutes of background music that constantly shifted tone and intensity. AND I did a 3+ minute song complete with singing and lyrics which I am bad at but I did anyway.
I had already planned out what I wanted the music to be for the game before I began. I was really happy with how the music for the first Werewolf House turned out, and I think that had a big part to do with the music’s time signature. The music was in 9/8, though I treated that as 3 bars of 3 beats. So it was basically something more akin to a 3/4 kind of waltz time we’re all familiar with. A song with a 3/4 or 6/8 time has a great rolling sort of feel to it that works especially well for horror music. It reliably adds tension and forward momentum to music no matter how slow and creeping you make it. There’s a secret for all you songwriters out there. Wanna write something slow? A ballad or something? Put it in 6/8 and no matter how low the BPM it is, it’ll never feel stagnant. Songwriters in the 60s figured that out–almost every doo-wop or soul ballad is in 6/8 and it worked great, but it seems like that trick has been lost to time.
I didn’t want to do anything quite as proggy and complicated as a 9/8 time signature for this werewolf house beat, it was supposed to be dance music after all. But I knew that I could use a little trick to keep that momentum but still have a 4-on-the-floor 4/4 time signature dance music was famous for. Simple: triplets! Triplets over a 4/4 beat suddenly gave it that classic rolling 6/8 feel while still keeping a danceable beat under it all. Rappers do it all the time now, it’s the big fad. It’s the new “Dabbing”.
Anyway, all I had to do was lay down a simple 4/4 drum beat. It was easy to pick which drum samples I wanted to use, just had to pick the drum machine that sounded most like someone getting his ass kicked to fit with the skeleton backstory. Then I put some triplet marimbas on top of that to represent the skeleton’s bones of course, and we were in business, buster.
September 15, 2018
Spent another day creating sounds for the other rooms. The story dictating the beat sections made things move a lot quicker. Normally when creating music electronically, you can become a bit paralyzed with the amount of options. You can truly create any sound you want, emulate any instrument you could ever think of. You could tweak a single note for years if you really wanted.
But now I had a clear goal. This section is supposed to sound like a modem. Cool. This one has to sound like a wolf howling, but also singing. Got it. Actually that one was tricky to try and get it to sound melodic, like a real wolf howl, and synthesized all at once. But again, I didn’t have to tweak it forever. Once it was sounding like a wolf howl but also fit alongside the other synthesized sounds, I was done.
Now I say this like it all came together perfectly. And while I did have a version of the beat done this day that checked the story boxes, the more I revisited it, the less happy I was with each section as its own separate musical piece. But we’ll get to that later.
September 16, 2018
I had delayed things enough with music and other stuff–it was time to figure out the computer room section of the game. I knew that I wanted to use that room to make fun of annoying computer things like pop-ups, CAPTCHA, “I’m Not a Robot” checkboxes and such.
Unfortunately, that meant a lot of code.
It was starting to become a pattern, though. There was something I was sure was way beyond my grasp and I was probably going to have to compromise a bit on making the game behave exactly how I wanted it to. And then after a quick search suddenly I have a whole handful of completely free resources that allow me to actually make the game better than I thought.
Not only could I add a “I’m Not a Robot” button, I could make it so that clicking on it was the only way to proceed, you know, like real gameplay? And in the final section, I would be fun to have some kind of hacking thing you had to do to win. What could that be? I had no fucking clue. Then I found a genius macro made specifically for Twine that converted any kind of typing into whatever I wanted it to say. Did I say I was a writer? That didn’t make sense. Someone could mash on their keyboard and my dumb words would come out instead. Got it? Great. I was able to make my game do that.
Would like to pause here and thank the internet. You made me extremely powerful and now I can’t be stopped.
All the horrible parts of the internet aside, this aspect of it did give me a bit more appreciation of its function. This completely free exchange of ideas that allowed a complete beginner like me to quickly start doing some pretty fancy computer stuff seems like the sort of thing we all hoped the internet could be as it just started out. Now it’s full of racism and sexism and should be exploded, but still, it was cool of the web to let me do some of this stuff.
September 17, 2018
With the computer section squared away I was able to spend another full night of creating art. After another trance-like session, it was done. I had a big fat row of X’s down the “Art” column of my spreadsheet. That was extremely satisfying–especially because only days before I was still flailing around with piece of shit GIMP, wondering if I’d be able to make gifs at all. And now I had dozens of them, some of which were actually not trash.
Now to get to all those columns that didn’t have any X’s at all in them. Time to finalize writing, code, and music. Yikes, that’s a lot still to go.
September 18, 2018
Music seemed like a less-intimidating prospect to move onto next. I was reluctant to cross off any of the music sections even though I already did have a completed beat. It didn’t quite have the clarity I was hoping for–it definitely was spooky and honestly not bad, but it was a lot of atmospheric noises drenched in a lot of reverb to make it sound scary. I wanted something a little more fun that allowed you to hear each part.
So I went back in and tried again from scratch. Since I was only making about 30 seconds of actual musical content, it wasn’t too overwhelming. By the end of the first night working on this new beat I was happy enough with 3 of the rooms (Skeleton, Werewolf, and Computer) that I was willing to cross them off my list.
The goal for the new beat was to use more space, allowing each of the layers a bit of room to do their own thing without it getting too muddy with 6+ layers all fighting each other. Also, I thought it’d help reduce some of the chaos to allow each section to have their own rhythmic identity. So for example, the “skeleton” drum beat was going to be quarter notes, then the computer section could be eighth notes, the computer would be quick 16th notes, etc. Hopefully that makes sense even if you don’t know anything about music theory (don’t worry, I don’t either), basically, each part had its own signature rhythm, which allowed each part to work fine on its own, but also work with the other parts when they all came together without it being a cluttered mess. Believe it or not I wanted to try and have a career writing about music. Wonder why it didn’t work out?
I also technically crossed off the “intro” portion of the beat as well, but at that point it was only background noises and no real music. I changed that down the line to add a pulsing bass line. But we don’t need to worry about that, let’s just say it’s crossed off and move along.
September 19, 2018
I continued on with the music, basically finishing the rest of the rooms. I knew I wanted the final section to be its own piece of music (a full-on dubstep EDM thing) so that would have to wait a bit.
I didn’t want to put it off much longer, so I dove straight into coding the game logic itself. I had seen a couple basic tutorials online for this, and I was anticipating all of the doodling I did in high school math class to really come back and bite me in the ass here. I didn’t know anything about logic or what the fuck boolean is.
But, thanks to Twine’s built-in tools, it was shockingly easy. By the end of this first deep dive I already had all the coding required to make the correct images appear once you complete certain rooms. And I was able to make sure certain text appeared when necessary to block you from re-entering rooms you’d already completed.
Aaaaand that was it? Not sure why I was so afraid of diving into this section. Werewolf House was always very intentionally light on the “game” portion of a game. You could choose how you approached the story but there weren’t a whole lot of in-depth interactions required. It’s not like I’m making Driver: San Francisco or something over here, one of the main jokes of the series has always been that the decision the player makes doesn’t matter.
Stuff going wrong is always funny and adds to the story momentum, but I think a deeper thing about not allowing the player to really control the game was also a reflection of my opinion on the majority of games I’d played. So much effort is put into games to cater to the player. Developers so desperately avoid any point where the player may feel helpless or powerless in a game, even if it makes perfect sense in the story to do so. I get why, games are a billion dollar industry, and each one takes so long to make and is so involved (I got to see a slight glimpse of that firsthand making this) that it needs to be universally liked. There’s no way to really prove this, but it seems possible that gamers are often so vocally entitled partially because of this approach to game design. They’re used to having their every whim granted in games, with as little friction as possible. So when a game comes out and doesn’t live up to their impossible expectations, they try and send the developers to jail, or send them death threats. Or when a woman treats games like a piece of art with a message and critiques games from a feminist perspective… as in, she is critical of the ways games cater to gamers’ assumed male-ness, they take extreme measures to try and make her quiet and afraid to continue to speak up. Really ugly stuff. Doing the exact opposite of how AAA game titles cater to players is definitely a joke first and foremost, but hopefully it’s partially funny because of the ideas behind the joke. Hopefully.
OK so the game logic is done. That’s one big hurdle cleared. An overly long explanation for the silly werewolf joke game’s approach to being stupid is also finished. Great. Let’s keep it moving.
September 20, 2018
I knew I had to start getting on top of the writing portion. Most of it was still placeholder and all of it was definitely nonsense. Not that I made it any less nonsense with my rewrite but you know, I did what I could.
The previous Werewolf Houses were extremely off-the-cuff, I threw in any tangent I could think of, any joke that popped in my head, whatever. This time I knew that I had to reign myself in a bit, no one wants to be bombarded with an entire screen of text when they’re trying to play an actual game.
Plus, given how cocky and confident I was at this point of the process, I figured lots and lots of people were gonna see this fuckin thing so I better try and make it funny and polished if I could.
Also I probably made it seem like I had all the music done and dusted in a previous entry, but looking at my notes from the time, this was not the case. I was still making tweaks and trying to figure out exactly how it was all going to work. The werewolf howl was especially tricky to get right without sounding like a mess with everything else. Adding a bit of rhythm and stop and start to it turned out to be the key to making it be part of the music and not just sound like a big siren on top of everything.
September 21, 2018
More music tweaking on the 21st. This was a Friday so I was probably out doing something cool, just kidding I was at home trying to make pickled eggs? At least according to what I can find from my notes and stuff, I think that was the main thing I got done that day. Let’s say I also worked on getting the writing done, but just between you and me I have no record of that. I only have lots and lots of notes about the eggs. They turned out OK.
September 22, 2018
Not sure what the hell was going on this weekend, but it looks like I was mainly doing musical stuff.
Remember all that bullshit I typed about the story dictating the sounds here so I wasn’t spending an eternity tweaking? Yeah that was sort of right, but also wrong. This whole post is just thousands and thousands of words that constantly contradict each other but no turning back now, huh? Because each music section worked as its own separate sound file it was a lot easier to change specific sections in the hopes of making it all fit together more effectively.
I believe on this day I started working on the music that would appear as the final bass drop for the ending section of the game. Turns out I was able to use the first beat I completely scrapped after all. I re-purposed many of the sounds from that to create the big EDM bass drop moment at the end that all the werewolves freak out to. So looks like it pays to be inefficient, kids.
September 23, 2018
Who knows what wild shit I was getting up to this whole weekend. I had this recollection of me being extremely efficient and meticulous about keeping track of all the stuff I got done each day, but now it seems like that’s not fully true. I definitely did a lot, but I still gave myself some time to stop and pickle the eggs.
I’m fairly certain that at the very least, I worked on music this weekend because by the 24th I had completed both the main beat and the final dubstep section. So let’s say that’s what I was doing.
The truth is that on any particular night, I could have burned hours just trying to figure out some particular coding visual effect. Trying to make multiple pop-ups appear in the computer room was especially time-consuming. That one I had to swallow my pride and ask the internet on a Twine forum, and they were incredibly helpful and had an answer for me within hours that worked perfectly (unlike many other parts of the game that I did myself!! hehe oops).
September 24, 2018
I also got the bright idea to do music for the final credits page, since the only other option was to loop the loud bombastic EDM playing before, and that didn’t seem like such a good idea. I wanted something that gave a “thank you for looking at my piece of shit game I love you” kind of vibe. So I finished that this day.
I also made a big fat list of all the coding I still needed to do and… damn it was a lot.
September 25, 2018
OK so, the good news is that I had biiig satisfying rows of checkmarks all the way down for the music and the artwork.
The bad news was that I had a list of about 40 different small coding things I had to figure out. The border around images, small tweaks like changing formatting for the buttons, removing certain portions of the standard Twine UI. Yep, lots to do and it was getting close to my goal of being done and ready to promote by October 5. Oops didn’t mention that earlier. Flying by the seat of my ass here. OK, moving on.
September 26, 2018
Making my way down the list of coding stuff to complete. The problem is that all of it is CSS so it’s a really drawn out process. Something as simple as making a stylized font for the game subtitle suddenly could take a whole night of tweaking. Or figuring out how to put a border around images would be simple for someone that knew what the hell he was doing, but alas, that’s not me.
The tricky thing I quickly learned about coding is that it’s so removed–you are really writing instructions that will go from your computer, through the internet, to another computer, and you have to hope it’ll listen to what you originally said and do what you’re trying to do. God damn I could not sound more ignorant about this sort of thing which is a mistake because I’m actually a genius at it now.
But it was a struggle dealing with the lack of immediacy I’m able to achieve with music, writing, or even creating images. There’s a certain satisfaction to playing around with the code and trying different solutions until it cooperates, but by this time when I was finalizing the code I was longing for something more straightforward. The tweaking and constant adjustment trying to get code to work takes its toll.
I say that now but I have a feeling I’ll get bored of music or writing and return to the abstract world of coding eventually, and isn’t that the endless cycle of life?? Who would have thought this dumb thing would get so deep??
September 27, 2018
Even more coding and visual updates. Found some code online that made the buttons look cool and all Matrix-y so I added those in. I poked around and found another custom Twine macro that I could use to let players add funny and fun items to their inventory in the Frankenstein room. I take the items away immediately after because like I said, gamers could use some tough love to be honest.
September 28, 2018
Big step on this day, I finally added another checkmark to my status tracker–I checked off the computer room. Definitely the most involved in terms of fancy interactions as you try and not get haunted by Fear DotCom the real haunted website from a 2002 movie.
For a while I was imagining I’d add some custom CSS styling to each room to differentiate them. Like maybe the wolf room would have a red background or different font or something. When I first started I was really worried about clarity, like, if there was no map or not much visual feedback, how would they know where they were? How would they know what their goal was? That’s where a lot of the design elements came from. The moon status bar would tell people how far along they were. The image in the main room would change and display a big fat check mark as you beat each part. I even toyed around with having some sort of map or inventory page that you could click on to see your status as you went along.
But eventually I realized it wasn’t super necessary to be even MORE explicit by differentiating each room. The game was only really 15 minutes long at most, and there was no real way to lose, so even if people didn’t get it, they could still see everything and get the full experience.
Plus on my coding pass I added some stylized fonts and effects for the text in the werewolf room and the computer room. So that was good enough for me. Everything seemed straightforward enough.
With that plan scrapped and the hardest room (Computer room) finished, I was ready to start finalizing the coding in all the different rooms.
September 29, 2018
The next day I was able to cross of the “code” section for the sidebar as well. I customized it a pretty good amount compared to the default. I had just finalized the name to “Werewolf House: Synthincisor”, so I was able to add a stylized “Synthincisor” subtitle in an 80s sort of font I found, I was able to reuse the button format from the Skeleton room, and I was able to do some quick game logic to add a counter that told you how many pieces of your beat you had assembled.
Yeaaahh look at that.
Having the sidebar all completed gave me an extra boost of excitement after the fatigue began to creep in. Seeing the new name next to the 8-bit moon made it start to feel like the full package was coming together. It had a title! It had actual, complete presentation. Granted, in one very simple part of the game, but either way, it was something I could look at and realize that eventually, this would be a final thing.
All very cool stuff, but I was starting to feel a bit of time crunch at this point. I hadn’t gotten to finalizing the writing in any page, and I was realizing that it was extremely possible to burn an entire night just tweaking code and trying to get stuff to work. At this point I didn’t have nights to spare like I did back earlier in the month when I was burning whole days for frivolous things like eggs and spending time with friends.
September 30, 2018
Finished coding all the logic for the skeleton room as well. In Werewolf House fashion, all the choices you make don’t actually have any consequences, each option takes you to the next room regardless of what you pick. BUT I still had to make sure each button was working correctly, and I had to make sure that the button formatting I was using looked correct. After a day of troubleshooting and tweaking it was ready.
I now had 3 of 9 sections crossed off in the coding section of my progress tracker. Good progress, but I was a little wary. Any snag I hit while coding the other pages could easily take me off track.
October 1, 2018
We’re officially into The Scary Month, and I knew I had to get serious about getting this thing done. On October 1st I crossed off the VR room’s code. Not sure what special coding I had to add to that room, one of the beautiful things about the VR room is that it was funnier the cruder and simpler the joke was. It was 8-bit VR that gave you no options other than how you would like to set the entire world on fire. But either way, It was done.
I also finished the coding for the intro portion of the game–this actually took a bit of work to make sure all the logic added up in the main room, since there were a lot of different states of the main room image depending on what order someone beat the rooms in. Took some tweaking and editing but I was done. I also found a slick lil custom Twine macro that shook the screen when I added a simple tag, so you better believe I put that everywhere I could.
Good to go. 5 sections out of 9.
October 2, 2018
Another one down. Finished the coding in the “Werewolf” room. Added some stylized font to represent the wolf’s sensual voice, and added some coding that made the link to the next screen appear after someone has checked an answer from the possible choices.
I also took a pass at the writing, doing my best to add jokes where possible and clean things up.
October 3, 2018
I really buckled down on this day. Not only did I finish the coding in the Frankenstein room, I also was able to feel confident enough to cross off a few rooms and declare their writing more or less complete.
With that, blammo, the coding in each room was done. I think probably in my head I thought I could put coding in the rearview and focus on polishing the writing buuut… well things were gonna get tricky in a few days I am sorry to say.
October 4, 2018
By the 4th I had some beautiful art for what I was calling the “splash” screen, basically the illustration I commissioned would fade in, text would then fade in after tell you to get ready for a cool experience and to put in headphones, then you were off.
Spent a day implementing that and getting the surprisingly tricky timing on all of the fade-ins for this section.
I still had a few screens I wasn’t 100% confident about in terms of writing, but my status sheet was just about filled in. We were right up against my October 5th deadline and I felt like I was at a place where it wouldn’t be perfect, but if I had to release it by then it would be a complete, working game. Or so I thought.
October 5, 2018
I had been doing all my testing and editing within the Twine program. As far as I knew, anything that worked within the program should work just as fine when I exported as an HTML file and put it up on the big bad web.
This is when I really hit the game’s major snag. Testing the HTML file worked great and everything functioned just like it did in the Twine program.
But I was putting off finalizing some of the writing (let’s say I was brainstorming jokes and stuff but really I think I just wasn’t sure if I was striking the right tone in places and tone is hard), so I decided to start looking into ways I could upload the game now that it was complete in every way but the words.
My goal was always to have it directly on Werewolf House dot com, the site where all the previous Werewolf Houses live. A “werewolf home” if you will. I thought it would be especially nice to embed the game into the Squarespace site and have a nice frame for it and everything but that didn’t ultimately work out.
Uploading the file directly to the Squarespace site didn’t seem possible from what I read online and based on my own tests, but from again, using the invaluable resource we all call “dubby dubby dot com computers” aka the internet, I saw that there were a handful of other options for hosting.
I first tried textadventures.co.uk, which I was told would host the file in its raw form, allowing me to link directly to the html hosted on the site without having to deal with any extra nonsense. Sounded good. Not quite as neat and tidy as hosting it directly on the Werewolf House site, but having it be one click away could be cool.
So, right, I uploaded it to textadventures.co.uk and I hit a major snag. Ever since I used some specific music tags, the music on Twine was rock solid. Every loop and section lined up perfectly, and why wouldn’t it? I was using what I thought was a pretty clever tactic, where I had all the loops start simultaneously, but all of them were muted. That way they’d all be lock in correctly and I could just fade them in as needed when the player beat whichever room they preferred.
But when I uploaded it to a site, the loops were all over the damn place. Like a dumbass, I went and made the rhythm of each extremely important so they all would slot in together perfectly when started at the same time. So that meant even a slight shift would cause the whole thing to fall into chaos.
Cue a frantic night of jumping around to different computers, hoping that somehow the solution wold come from me playing the game over and over again. Restarting the game usually helped the loops to line up, but that’s no damn good, now is it? Some random person online isn’t gonna boot up the game, hear the music not working right and think to try again. They’re just gonna flame me online to high heaven! I’ll be dragged, cancelled, you name it.
October 6, 2018
Cue a few more days of trying to figure out this issue. The next day I tried switching hosting to a different site: itch.io.
Still the same problem after hours of testing.
October 7, 2018
I was pretty much out of ideas on how to sort this dang thing out, so I took to a Twine Q&A forum that I had been using as a resource for a long time. Surely one of these gamer experts could give me the straight dope on how to fix this issue.
They did have a solution, but the solution unfortunately turned out to be way beyond my grasp as a brand spankin new baby coder. It was Web Audio API.
October 8, 2018
Spent another couple nights trying to wrap my head around Web Audio API, which some experts say stands for “A Problematic Interface” because it’s hard OK!!! Make it easier so I can make my piece of shit game.
The reality is that it’s actually an extremely powerful interface and allows you to do pretty much anything you could dream of online with audio. But all that flexibility means a lot of stuff I have to learn if I want to get even my relatively simple thing working.
I even found online tutorials that showed how to do pretty much exactly what I wanted to do. So just copy them into the code and tweak a bit and bingo bango right brother? Unfortunately, that theory is bunk, brother. No bingo. Not even a bango.
Copying the code in exactly how it was presented on the site didn’t even work. Not sure if it’s Twine specifically or if I somehow fucked up a copy/paste, but it wasn’t working anything like it was in the example on the site.
I also found some code that simplified Web Audio API and let you control it with easier commands, a lot like how Twine has built-in commands that make creating your game more intuitive than trying to do it all from scratch with CSS and Javascript. But yeah, those audio API things didn’t work with Twine either, or I fucked it up, or both.
October 9, 2018
One last shot. Previously, when I was uploading to sites, I had been hosting the music and images on my Squarespace site, then uploading a pure HTML file to itch.io/textadventures. I thought I’d take advantage of a feature where you can put all your files in a folder, save it as a .zip file, then upload it to the site and they’ll host it all for you.
Maybe that would make the music run smoother?
I tried it, and it did. Mostly. I was elated when it was working flawlessly on every computer I tried. But I didn’t take into account that that Macs and PCs I had access to were all running Chrome. As soon as I gave it a whirl on Safari or Firefox, it got all wonky again.
Unfortunately, I was really feeling the crunch of being past my self-imposed deadline so I decided it running smoothly on Chrome was as good as I was gonna get it with my current skills. Most people use Chrome anyway… right? Yeah maybe…
It still bums me out that there’s the high potential that the music won’t work correctly for folks. Not ideal, but I am truly out of solutions and out of energy to try and make it work.
Plus I got feedback from a couple people that the game wasn’t working at all for them! So I guess the music thing isn’t as big of deal as I’m making it out to be. Wish I had the skills to make it stable but unfortunately I just have to live with the music maybe not working for some people, and the game giving some real wild and crazy errors for others.
October 10, 2018
Well shit, I had to make some concessions, but at least it was sort of running sort of most of the time. I tried to take solace in the fact that any time I had a friend test the game, it seemed to run fine for them, so they were either being nice, didn’t notice the music, or maybe it was just more temperamental when I was flying through the game in an attempt to break it.
On that not-so-upbeat note, it was time to fix the writing.
The good news is that during this time, I got a chance to distance myself a bit from the words. So when I went back in it was a lot clearer what needed to be clarified, what could be funnier, and what I could streamline. I also had been using my time at work to amass a big giant list of potential jokes or “”funny”” things that could happen in certain sections. So I had a lot to draw from.
After a whole night of writing, it was more or less done. I still made some tweaks as I went and noticed small errors, but now onto the REAL horror.
October 11, 2018
I made a new section of my spreadsheet labeled “Promo”.
I probably already explained this but how could a person possibly remember what happened all those words ago at this point. Every time I finished a previous Werewolf House it was right down to the wire, so I had no choice but to send off a couple rushed promotional emails a night or 2 before, then hope the game gets spread around a bit on Twitter.
I had spent a few years on my college school newspaper so I knew most outlets don’t (and couldn’t) really work that way. If a site is gonna write something up by Halloween, they need some time.
So I wrote up a query letter and got some fantastic feedback from my girlfriend who works for a website (and YES that’s a brag) and gets bad submissions constantly. So basically the advice was, make it as short as possible or else the person reading it will hate you for wasting their time.
I also got some advice from a friend who does freelance writing and has worked on some projects in the indie game industry. He advised me to focus more on the fact that I was a first-time developer with no previous experience in coding. Apparently that’s not a common thing even though if someone like me can do it, there is hope for absolutely anyone out there that has an ambition to make something.
October 12, 2018
Promotional stuff was difficult, but again, I tried to think back to my newspaper days. As a person that has a page to fill and content to produce, you are constantly searching for stories, when someone approaches you with something interesting, it’s such a gift. Ideally a mutually beneficial system.
So I just had to suck it up and send it and hope they found it interesting. It felt a little slimy but that’s how it works out there big boy. Knowing all that took some of the pressure off the query letter. I just had to get out of my own way. Give a little info on who I am and what the game is and how it might be fun for Halloween and then let them play the damn thing already. If they like it, they like it, it’s out of my hands now.
I also had to get over hangups of asking friends for help or if they had any thoughts on getting it out there. Still feels a little weird and I feel grateful for everyone who so graciously helped, but everyone seemed genuinely glad to do so, so I should probably get over it, huh. Also I should keep in mind that any time someone asks me a similar favor it’s a little flattering in a way, so maybe it’s the same on the other end.
I’m no good at asking for peoples’ time in general. I feel majorly indebted to anyone that even plays the thing. That’s why I put my games out for free. If I had to give people 5 dollars to play it I’d probably do that too, but don’t tell anyone.
In an effort to speed this up a bit (big time laughs ha ha this is taking forever), let’s go through some of the highlights of the promo process.
October 13 – 17, 2018
Sent out a bunch of query letters to the gaming sites and journalists I was familiar with. No bites, but I also learned from my girlfriend that people get lots and lots of emails daily, so a follow-up or 2 is very common. Just getting started.
October 18, 2018
This day was a whirlwind. I asked a journalist friend of mine if she had any ideas on promotion and she was like “yeah I could do a story for the paper I work for”. I’m still taken aback at how quickly it all came together. She called me and we talked for about 15 minutes about the game, and that was it. Well, shit. Getting written up.
Not long after I got a tweet from an editor at Birth.Movies.Death. I am a big fan of the site, and though obviously it’s mainly movies-based, they do talk about games sometimes too, so why not send off a quick query? He said he liked the game and wanted to tweet about it. Uhhhh yeah dude go right ahead?? I love you.
So that was already an event, a site I personally read tweeted about my game. Wowowow. And right after that my friend lets me know that the article she wrote for the paper is up too? What the fuck? I love you too. It was a real-deal feature that was wonderfully written, just sitting on the main page of my local newspaper.
I sent the article to the UK-based artist I had worked with for the splash screen. She said that it was the first time her work had been published and that right there made all the bullshit seemed worth it. At the very least, if I could help out a talented up-and-coming artist, then maybe this wasn’t some twisted vanity project. She got some exposure out of it as well. And I guess, maybe, if people had fun playing the game it was worth it. Also it was free and for fun so I should probably just relax. If only.
October 19, 2018
Still can’t believe this was a day apart, but the very next day I got a response from Escapist magazine as well. An editor there said the game was hilarious, and he tweeted a very nice tweet promoting it.
My heart was very full I gotta admit. After all the bullshit you read above, the ups-and-downs and long days working on it on top of everything else, people who write and talk about games for a living were saying it was good. People were thinking it was newsworthy. What an absolutely pleasure.
October 23, 2018
I’m not sure whether I was burnt out or I couldn’t think of more options or what (it was both things), but I started slowing down a bit. I spent an hour or 2 compiling more outlets I could send a query out to. I tried fruitlessly to post the game to reddit and other social media, but I really did not have it in me to keep pushing as hard as I was the past 2 months or so.
Just as I was feeling that burnout, out of nowhere I get tagged in a tweet from Werewolf-News.com. They somehow stumbled upon my game and wrote a very nice review. Completely on their own volition, I’m not smart enough to even look around to see if there’s a werewolf-based website but of course there is, and they found and promoted my thing. Not sure what more I could ask for. At that point I was feeling pretty content with how it had all turned out.
October 31, 2018
The week after the Werewolf News news broke, I allowed myself to take it pretty easy. Plus it’s not like I didn’t have other things to work on–I was now producing a fairly involved podcast for some friends/mentors(??) who asked me to help, and it’s been a blast, but a real responsibility to stay on top of making sure our fans and Patreon patrons are being engaged or whatever I’m supposed to be doing.
I did get some advice from friends that a press release might help me engage better with the games journalism world and make it easier on them if they did want to do a write-up for the site. I did one as best as I could and added it to my follow-up emails I sent in the days approaching the 31st. It didn’t end up getting any additional attention, but I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing when it came to press releases so I probably did it badly. One weird point of pride though was looking at the press release and seeing all the info about the game, screenshots, gifs, and everything, all put together in one place.
It let me absorb just how much I had done, and just how many nice things people in the industry had said about what I had made. Just a nice little recap of everything all laid out on my nice little werewolf site.
Coooool it looks cool I think, personally. Everything all in 1 spot.
It was also cool to see it all similarly laid out with a cool 8-bit font on the main itch.io landing page I created. Both instances allowed me to step back for a second appreciate all the work I had done to get to the point where I could send out this completed product to people. It also made me never want to do another one of these fucking things again but I’m sure that won’t last long unfortunately..
All that being said, I needed to make one final push on Halloween, obviously. It was the day it all had been building to. And again, my heart was extremely full like a big sick baby–a whole shitload of my friends tweeted about it and told their friends to play and promoted it, despite ALREADY promoting it earlier in the month and dealing with me constantly talking about it and jabberjawing all the goddamn time about my game. I guess another good side effect of all this bullshit is that it reminded me what wonderful, loyal, beautiful people I have somehow been able to con my way into friendships with.
So that’s it. I’m not sure if I can think of a single new word to say about this thing. I have exhausted every last thought I ever had during this extremely drawn out process and in this fittingly drawn-out blog post.
In addition to making me appreciate my friends and the wonderful support I have around me, the next most valuable thing I’m left with is the desire to go BACK to the freedom of doing something no one will see. I’m gonna use the rest of this year to write a couple bullshit scripts that likely will never see the light of day. Sounds nice after a whole month of trying to self-promote.
All the nonsense and poor recapping aside: This is my favorite thing I’ve ever done. This combines all the things I love. It’s all the things I know had to do. Dozens of things I never thought I’d be able to learn how to do. This is the most I’ve ever had to step outside of my comfort zone to accomplish something, but in the end even one of these highlights would have made it worth it. For all its triumphs and many many failures, the process was a blast on its own, and I am bursting with pride about this silly janky-ass game. After I take a bit to recover, in the near future I look forward to doing something else way way too ambitious and seeing what happens.
Congrats you deserve a big stinky kiss
If you read this, truly, god bless you. I gotta admit, this entire thing was solely for me to get out all the remaining thoughts I have on this project. But if you found even a single thing helpful somewhere in here, then… that’s good. I almost was gonna say it would have been worth it, but probably not.
If you’re a glutton and want even more of my prose, click around this blog or on WerewolfHouse.com and I guarantee you’ll be tired of me in no-time.
Welp, see you around never! I hate the internet and talking about myself now I’m never gonna log on again. Mission Accomplished. See ya in hell.
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