Friday night, 10 p.m.
I was drunk and France had won its second World Cup match, so I was very busy.
Friday night, 11:45 p.m.
OK, I found an old design document I wrote three years ago and thought it could be a good idea to use it.
The concept was simple: an adventure game where you play a journalist investigating the death of a homeless woman. You start by digging info on her, you meet new people and talk to them, trying to make them open up about this woman.
I rewrote part of the concept, read again all my research about the GAB (an American pro-Nazi organisation in the 20's and the 30's) and started outlining my structure.
Saturday morning, 7 a.m.
Not really fresh but still excited by my project, I went for a jog (6km) and had a wonderful, sunny breakfast with baguette (oh oh oh, I’m French) and salted butter.
Saturday morning, 10 a.m.
Facing my computer, I was slowly realizing that my game is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too complex for a 48-hour (well, huh, 36-hour) jam. So I spent three hours writing other ideas.
Saturday afternoon, 1 p.m.
Saturday afternoon, 2 p.m.
In Axure (still my favorite tool to write interactive fiction because it’s the only one I can handle correctly), I had most of my structure.
On my wall: six or seven pages of ideas, characters, sentences, and other bits. I’m now sure of one thing: this is too big for the jam. I’ll have to abandon something.
Saturday night
Drunk, drunk, drunk. It was “La fête de la musique” in France so I was wasted.
Sunday morning, 9 a.m.
Contemplating my notebook, I couldn't think of anything else but “it’s never gonna work.” I then decided to go on with another idea, somewhat smaller and easier to do in… 13 hours.
Oh gosh, I said to myself, contemplating the amazing view and the crazy social security system (I’m French, remember?).
Sunday afternoon, 3 p.m.
While eating some delicious French cuisine, I had an idea.
So I went back to the computer and deleted half of my game, just like that. For the jam, I would only be doing the last part, where you choose how you want to write your story.
Originally, you were supposed to investigate, meet people and have more or less information depending on how well you handled other characters. You could get something between 20 to 25 different endings.
In one of them, for example, you were not even able to publish a book. You had just enough information for a short paragraph in a local newspaper. You could also very easily miss the most important part of the game: Jodie’s mysterious past.
Sunday afternoon, 7 p.m.
In fours hours, I’d written all the game and I was now working on the structure. It became crazier and crazier as I was not able to handle Axure as well as I thought I could. Variables went absolutely berserk at one point. I was, again, crying on the floor.
Then it was time to try the whole game and see for myself how it worked.
Something was still missing. I love writing awful main characters, self-absorbed pricks. I call that passion “Demon Calling”. The character will be a reflection of something I could become… of something we could all become.
So I rewrote several things, including the Epilogue bit and I added the letter from Andrew’s Dad. The idea was: when you create something, you often forget why you created it in the first place. Andrew simply forgets about Jodie, because he has his book in his hands.
Sunday afternoon, 9:55 p.m.
I have to admit the game was not totally finished when I submitted it. I was this close to fixing a bug when I clicked on the “Submit” button.
Sunday afternoon, 10:24 p.m.
I ate, I had a lovely cup of tea and then I started to see the flaws. The broken English, the boring first part with no gameplay whatsoever, a couple of buggy links. I still have a huge amount of work to do.
All in all, I’m very happy about {TITLE}. It’s a great first start before producing and designing something bigger, better and more beautiful.
Thanks for reading: Thanks for playing, too. You can still play the game here.
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