The Pickle: A Conversation About Making Digital Books

11: The Left-on-the-Floor Weirdness

We went through so many jumping-off points for The Pickle Index. Because there were no definitive time constraints and no looming investors or CEOs, we went nutty with ideas. But, each failed concept led to a conversation about what was important to the narrative and what things were plausible and engaging for the app to do, which informed Eli’s writing and then fed back into the app. That initial lack of pressure meant we wasted so much time on nonsensical ideas, but we wouldn’t have gotten to where we got without them. That eventually created an ever-narrowing cone of things we were happy with and by the time the app was conceptually done, it just felt done — we’d exhausted our discussions. Of course we still have a lengthy list of nice-to-haves, non-essential aspirations, and endless fiddles, which we could have worked on forever. But, the paperback release date gave us a hard stop to aim for and a reason to make decisions about what to drop.

Weirdness mainly got dropped because it was too weird or wrong or hard. For example, this was the very first main-menu design:

At some point we planned to map the fictional place names to wherever the user was located in the world:

Note to readers: This is (going to be) a long, loopy conversation. The Pickle Index is crisp and compact. Consider sampling its tangy delights.

1. Opening Salvo [Robin Sloan]
2. Blank Slates! [Craig Mod]
3. Opportunity Cost [Robin Sloan]
4. The Struggle (Sorry) [Russell Quinn]
5. Self Selection & The Jaws of Venture Valley [Craig Mod]
6. The Many Futures of Storytelling [Eli Horowitz]
7. Recruitment [Robin Sloan]
8. Blarp [Eli Horowitz]
9. That Oracular Feeling [Robin Sloan]
10. Benevolent Leaders of the Frothy Kingdom [Craig Mod]
11. ➡︎ The Left-on-the-Floor Weirdness [Russell Quinn]
12. Territory of the Book [Eli Horowitz]
13. At This Moment [Robin Sloan]
14. Make a Book, Even Just One [Craig Mod]