Patrick R

Two horror movies that I'd strongly suggest to add to the list of potential movies would be Carnival of Souls (1961) and Cat People (1942). Both are films that cast women who don't fit neatly into social roles as The Monstrous Other but show enough empathy so that, viewed with a modern eye, they are now our points of identification and become films about the horrors of the patriarchy. Neither are air-tight feminist tracts (they were made by men before the dawn of second-wave feminism, after all) but they both blossom under a modern feminist critical eye as looks at the crushing terror of rigid gender roles. Cat People is especially potent in it's frank sexuality (it's the story of a woman who thinks she is cursed to turn into a snarling panther when aroused, and as a result is too afraid to have sex with her husband) and it's dreamy atmosphere. Also it's use of shadows and the power of suggestion was a big influence on Ridley Scott when he made Alien. Other good classic films for this (I'll try to link to relevant scenes to give you an idea): Of course the problem with classic films is that 99.9% of the time they're directed by white men. 98% of the time by straight white men. But the good thing is they exist in a world where gender roles were much more rigid, so stories about the obstacles women (and men too, though most classic films are much too homophobic to ever truly question traditional ideas of masculinity) face as a result of these roles are much clearer. </classic film dork>

If you are a Twin Peaks fan the logical next steps would be Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive (in that order). Elephant Man is more conventional but still great and visually striking. Eraserhead is a less conventionally entertaining film, but still really great and also astounding, visually. Then you can start going out into crazier territory like Lost Highway and Wild At Heart. Straight Story is a totally underrated Lynch film because it's so drastically different, but it's worth seeing. Inland Empire only for the most die-hard, as it's punishingly long and is shot on pretty bad looking digital cameras.

So I figure I could track my progress for my Twine game, What Happened To Us, here. I kind of want where it goes narratively to be a surprise, so I won't be revealing everything, but so far I've... Scoped the game. Have written the outline of the story. Have written approximately half of the actual game text. Have decided on where and how the paths will branch. Technically this game will have 40 endings, but the nature of it's second half means that it's more about the player having the option to express themselves in a total of 40 different ways, as opposed to the story actually ending in 40 different directions. What I still need to do: Finish writing the text. Learn how to change background and text color in Twine. Learn how to track variables in Twine. Learn how to play audio files in Twine. Learn how to set timers (if that's possible?) in Twine. Write and record 40 different pieces of music. Record approximately 48 other smaller bits of audio. Edit an additional 11 bits of audio. I'm glad I was able to scope and outline the game so quickly because the real challenge will definitely be on the creative side. The pieces of music I'm going to be writing will be simple, rough and quick. They will be lo-fi one-track recordings of just me and my guitar on my laptop mic, which is demanded by the narrative (and will make the recording process much quicker). But still, 40 pieces of music is a lot in two weeks. I imagine this will end up being much more complicated than I think, so I'll probably be asking for advice or help regularly, particularly on the programming side of things. But my first question is actually a smaller creative one: this is a fairly serious-minded game about two gay men breaking up. If I were to name the two men Jake and Sean (as they are actually whom the episode title "What Happened To Us" is referring to) would that be cool or would it be distracting and come off like Idle Thumbs slash-fic? There's no sex in the game either way, so it'd just be a nod.

You know what's a good movie? All The President's Men. </obvious>

Solo project of the guy from Islands. Really great electro-pop. As heard on The Best Show this Tuesday.

My partner writes a blog about depictions of fat people in film, and just had an article published on the feminist film blog Bitch Flicks about an amazing lesbian comedy called The Foxy Merkins. Read the article, then see the movie on Netflix Instant!

Ok, I want to see more of this game. Someone tell me what you're supposed to do after you get the "Don't be afraid" message.

Just having a variable that increases by one every time you visit certain pages and then forcing the player to a "Time's Up!" page after that variable reaches a certain number would be super easy. http://twinery.org/wiki/set http://twinery.org/wiki/if

Yeah, absolutely, I really appreciate it.

It's a very linear game, as hard as I tried to insert little tiny bits of branching material here and there, so most links are just to move the story forward. I think I'm going to keep the size of individual pages roughly the same because 1) I personally find it hard to focus on Twine games when they just drop paragraphs of text. 2) I'm actually a pretty poor writer of prose, and keeping things brief and fragmentary helps hide that significantly. 3) The whole thing is based on ideas of memory I got from The Sense of an Ending, and how you can jump in and out of reminiscing, in and out of present and past tense, how one memory can make you leap to the next. Hence the format: White text on black background for present tense, black text on white background for past tense, and light grey text on dark grey background for idle thoughts and ruminations that don't fit in either. Basically the whole thing is ripping off Annie Hall's structure (which in turn was a ripping off 8 1/2, and was ripped off to varying extents by Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and 500 Days of Summer, so I'm in pretty good company), but with a mix-tape to give the progression of memories a more rigid skeleton. I will probably have pages with longer bits of text as the game goes on, but I think in general it will stay quite terse. I'm sorry if I made you and your girlfriend uncomfortable! But also maybe a little pleased. Mostly sorry!

I had the same experience with this as I did with the original Syndicate, which is "This looks awesome, I have no idea what's happening or how to do anything, I think I'm too dumb, ok I'm dumb goodbye." So I can say unequivocally that this game is as good as Syndicate.

So as I continue to work on this should I start a new thread in the general Game Development sub-forum or just keep updating this? Probably just keep updating this. I've uploaded the demos I've recorded so far to SoundCloud, so you can an idea of what the final songs will be like. None of the lyrics are final, they're mostly just gibberish I improvised to try out different vocal melodies. I'm pretty happy with how they've turned out, as far as not all sounding the exact same. Some songs are definitely better than others, but some sets of chords are extremely hard to write songs around. You can definitely tell I was stretching to pull anything out of F F#m G. But the plan right now is to write all the songs and then work backwards and record a 40 second clip for each that sounds like your character piecing a rough approximation of the song together. Then I give you the option of going ahead and choosing that or going back and choosing a new set of three chords. That way even people who know nothing about music can still feel like they are making an informed decision as to how the final song will sound. So right now the plan is to finish prototyping the game in Twine with SoundCloud links, finish the other 6 songs I need to write, go back and write lyrics for all 20 songs, then start to rebuild the game in TyranoBuilder.

I think Tiffany not being able to properly defend herself (until the end, kinda*) just added to the surreal nightmare of it all. I felt the same kind of anxiety playing this as I do watching a movie like After Hours**, where the world seems totally dead set on crushing the protagonist into a paste (psychically speaking), but does so while walking a fine line where you can buy that the people really think they are fun and in the right. But they totally aren't. I don't think their needs are as valid as Tiffany's. For one they seem like a totally bullshit think tank. Also they're the ones that chose to work in an office building with neighbors. If you worked from home as a freelance journalist and your upstairs neighbor works at home by playing a drum-kit at all hours of the day, your needs to work at home aren't equally valid. He should find a rehearsal space or studio, an appropriate venue for what he does. So should the think tank, if it's really that important to the process that they feed a peacock lifesavers and use the noisiest printer on the planet and throw parties. *Obviously Clyde was limited by his abilities as a person who (I assume) is not a professional (or even amateur) rapper but that final moment would be amazing if it turned out Tiffany was an amazing rapper and totally wrecked them, but I tried to rap along her lyrics and Tiffany is a terrible rapper. Which is very charming in it's own way, I really really liked the ending, but I had my fingers crossed that the lyrics she spit would be actually good. ** EDIT: I don't think I said it but I really liked this game.

This game is like the generic greeting scene in Schizopolis, but for AAA games instead of domestic banalities. Great work!

I was very happy that so many jammers ended up using some of my music, but I was most happy with how it sounded in this game.

I assumed that I didn't know what button to hit.

I got stuck pounding the space bar in the pause screen, with the birds scrolling up.

I just played through this and it is thoroughly impressive how inventive this is, even within games. The 90's cockpit Freakout control scheme is amazing.

This is out of control.

This is the most stressful game I have ever played. I lasted about six seconds before I started freaking out and had to turn it off.

This game really delivers on it's title, as far as providing extremely satisfying feedback.

I would check out what file you have uploaded to Itchio, my game ended abruptly the moment I crossed the threshold.

Well the timing turned out to be quite unfortunate, as I picked up a lot of extra shifts at work and the free days I thought I'd have to work on the game shrunk from six to one. So I spent the one day I did have (today) throwing together a rough draft of the game to give people an idea of what to expect. Sadly most of the time I've sunk into this game has been musical and very little of that is in this rough draft. I think it'll be a pretty good game when it's done, but right now it's just incomplete. I'll probably end up finishing it in a different program, like TyranoBuilder. You can play it here and check out the Wizard Jam page here.

Ugggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Twinery picked today of all days to completely change their forums and now all my links to good Twine tutorials are broken. I can't find any of them.