Hi friends, I have some exciting news. Haters, I have some unfortunate news for you.
I have created a new interactive scary Halloween website for you to click around on. Unfortunately, this site will mostly kill you, haters and friends alike. This is the curse of the creator of the Werewolf House. It is more of a burden on me, I promise.
I figured this blog might be a good opportunity to talk about how this all came about since this blog has proven to be my internet dumping ground.
Around Halloween time, I thought it might be fun to make a new animated gif-filled interactive 2nd person adventure based on an internet haunted house I did right here on this very blog. It was one of the few things I’ve written that felt easy and natural, so I had the bright idea to do that again instead of continuously doing shit that’s hard to do that I’m bad at.
I got a little carried away with the Halloween spirit and started thinking of more and more features I could add to this haunted house sequel. First, I had the idea to make it a choose your own adventure style story, which meant that I needed a new, more powerful platform. So goodbye dusty old WordPress and hello hot and fresh Squarespace. Squarespace allowed me to put the whole story on one screen, and have links that scrolled you to the correct section depending on the decision you made. Pretty slick to me, a guy who doesn’t know anything about making websites.
Next, I also thought it would be fun to write some ambient background music for the spooky experience. But then that backing music started coming together and sounding cool, so like a dumbass I got the idea to use some of the sounds in the backing track to create a more traditionally structured song with lyrics and drums and guitar and shit.
At this point this was becoming a pretty involved, real deal project. The internet’s cheesiest scary Halloween gifs might be fun and all for visuals in the actual story, but I needed something actually good to grab people. So I asked my friend Rose to make a front page illustration (as seen above) and she knocked it out of the god damn park. Trying to spread this around has been a lot easier than normal because I figure at the very least, if someone clicks on my site they will see this unquestionably amazing artwork before they have to suffer through my amateur music and “””””””comedy””””””””””””.
Oh yeah and did I mention I thought all this up October 5th and I had less than a month to do the entire website, writing, backing track and song all on my own? WELL I did that’s how it went down.
So like a little shit I started working on the site and story whenever I could, at work a bit (sorry), at home, writing dumb notes to myself or emailing myself caches of werewolf gifs I found online when I was out and about.
I was especially nervous about the song. The last song I did (for my friend Allie’s Dog Concept Album) took me months to finish to my semi-satisfaction. Partially because I planned it out wrong and forgot how to record songs so I had to rerecord most of the thing, but mainly because I knew it was going to be alongside some real deal established people like my teenage bass hero Mark Hoppus, so I figured I better make damn sure it’s as good as I possibly could make it. So it almost killed me but after several months I made it work. It took about 2 weeks to do the backing track, so I only had another 2 weeks left to finish the song which got me shaking in my little chinos. But by some miracle, it all came together almost as easily as the rest of the writing.
Surprisingly, everything came together fairly well, and I somehow managed my time efficiently enough to have everything just ready by Monday for a Tuesday release on October 31st, which some may know as All Hallow’s Ween. I guess that’s a good sign that everything came together so easily? I’m not used to creating anything where it doesn’t feel like a life or death struggle so I’m just telling myself that it’s a good sign and if I like it and enjoyed doing it, I guess that means someone out there as weird as me will too.
Anyway, I’m basically saying I got way too into the Halloween spirit and spent all month working on this new choose your own adventure multimedia website thing (still not sure what to call it which has made trying to sum it on social media tricky). I’m really proud of how it turned out and shocked that I somehow finished it on time and I don’t hate the song.
To conclude this way too long post, in summation, I’m proud of what I have done and you should check out Werewolf House.
Thank you for reading you are now my best friend.
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