The Prototype is done; time to start digging.

Hey. How’s it going? Update time: strap in, cause all this is coming out of me like a fire hose.

The new prototype is complete; all that’s left is to print the damn thing and tempt people into playing it with free pizza. And while I would love to detail more of the changes I made and why, I lack the data required to know if anything I’ve done has actually worked. In the meantime, there has been an itch in the back of my head that I wanted to talk about for a while now. And if I don’t get this out, I fear that it might split open my skull, crawl out, and pester me to death.

From the beginning, all the way back when I thought this was going to be a video game, I didn’t really know what identity I wanted the game to have on a micro scale. Macro-wise, I always knew I wanted something stupid but honest, like TMNT or The Venture Brothers: shows that reveled in the ludicrousness of their world without getting overly chin-strokey with the premise. That’s the kind of stuff I like, and it’s the kind of stuff I want to make. Yet I don’t know much beyond that.

As a writer, I’ve never been fond of outlining. I’ve done it more in recent years, as that was one of those personal preferences I had to give up in order to work effectively on a team. However, I prefer to avoid it in my personal writing, when possible, as it boggs me down in too much detail before any actual work gets done.

Steven King, in his memoir, described the process of writing like excavating a fossil. That you can never see the whole thing until you’ve dug it all out of the ground, the process of which (if you want an intact fossil) is slow and methodical; and while I can see how this may not work for everyone, it does for me. What I do instead of outlining a whole story, world, or game is start writing from the rip once I get an idea in my head that I like and go from there. This process repeats itself as the concept mutates, matures, and goes off in a different direction. However, by the end of the process, I gained a much firmer understanding of the concept than when I began. This builds the world up bit by bit as I wander around in it and encounter questions that I, as a reader, would ask if I were given the complete story. Helping me, as the writer, fill in the gaps as they come up.

However, some stories are more than just a single fossil; some are entire cities buried beneath the ages, which take months, if not years, to excavate properly. And in that time, a number of mistakes can occur. When the city of Troy was being excavated in 1870, Heinrich Schliemann (the archaeologist leading the excavation at the time) believed that the city was submerged in a deep layer of sediment that had enveloped Troy over the ages, and decided to blast his way down. This, in reality, was a miscalculation, and he ended up blasting through major parts of Troy itself, destroying more of Troy than the Greeks ever did. What I am trying to say is that you need to take these things slow, bit by bit, layer by layer, page by page – lest you obliterate the very thing you’re trying to discover. The downside of this, however, is that it is very long and at times demoralizing.

I’ve run up this wall a number of times, and I continue to do so even now. Because the only thing to do when you find out that you're digging in the wrong spot is to pick up your shovel, move down the dig site, and start over. Sometimes you luck out and you’re only off by a few feet, other times it’s a few miles, and on the especially heartbreaking occasions, you’re on the wrong continent. Yet I keep digging – even if sometimes I want to backflip into the empty hole I spent half a year digging, I keep digging.

I can only imagine what it is like for an archaeologist or paleontologist to realize they’re digging in the wrong spot. But I also have the sneaking suspicion that if we were to complain over a beer, we’d find a lot of common ground.