This is the game that didn’t happen. I started out imagining it as a top-down adventure kind of thing, but ended up trying to make it a text adventure; unfortunately the tool was too obstinate to be learned in the kind of time I had with the kind of attitude I had.
Here is the story, interspersed with passages excerpted from the IF I was working on for it:
The main character is a woman called Lily. She has rented a small house and has been using it as a writer’s retreat while she works on her novel. In her time there she has rarely left the room upstairs.
This is the room you’ve spent the last week in (or was it longer?) The walls are just starting to yellow from the tobacco smoke, and a vague grey haze hangs in the room. The study is a dingy and uninviting spectacle; nevertheless, you find yourself drawn to this room. Stairs lead down to the living room, and directly across from the stairs are the desk and chair which have been your constant companions for the last weeks (or has it been months?) Off to your right side is the couch where you’ve been sleeping; the bedroom, somewhere downstairs, remains unused. There is a skylight which lets natural light into the room.
On the Desk are a Brass Lamp, a Typewriter, and a Manuscript.
However, when the player eventually decides to leave the house:
The stale air of the house is abruptly exchanged for the most unusual sensation of sea breeze; particularly unusual given that until recently this house was hundres of miles from the ocean. Now, though, the waves lap gently at the steps of the house. Somehow, while you’ve been writing, everything has washed away. The house stands alone above a featureless sea. Last time you were out here, just down the hill was a small town where you could buy cigarettes and tea and sometimes food; no sign of it remains.
This was about as far as I got before the i7 environment started to become a serious impediment to progress. The gameplay would consist of waiting for the tide to start going out, then wandering out into the ever-shifting ruins left by the receding water and seeing what could be found. After several hours (in game time) of wandering, the tide would come back in and the player would have to run back to the house or drown. The first time the tide came in, it would wash into the living room and lower floor of the house, about waist-height, and would prevent certain actions. The second time it would completely flood the lower floor, leaving only the Study the player starts in accessible. The third time it would wash the house away and the game would end.
The later the game went, the stranger the items that would start washing up. Maybe the first day would be fairly normal things, like a candy bar or shoe, but by the third day there might be a strange alien device or a burning sword or a shrink ray… something like that. The goal would be to escape the island or to otherwise survive/prevent being washed away.
The environment would tend to reflect Lily’s attitudes about herself and the world. Lily is a woman who’s driven herself to isolation believing that that’s the path of true art; she has few friends, never speaks with her family, and is despised by most of her students (of course she teaches, she’s an English major). She thinks of her parents as dead even though they aren’t because that’s more dramatic. She thinks she’s horribly unattractive, but she’s actually okay (though somewhat slovenly). In a nutshell, bitter and misguided and unhappy, but intelligent and generally reasonable. She does much of her writing under the pen name “Rose,” which has always been a flower which appealed to her much more than the lily, believing it derives beauty from being solitary and unapproachable.
That’s the basic set up, but one final note is that the world operates on a kind of twisted literary dream logic. Lily starts with a Pack of Camels (cigarettes) in her pocket, but can take one out and ride it to get more exploring done before the tide comes in. The undo function is initially disabled, but by retrieving the White-Out from the top drawer of her desk Lily can undo past actions. Integrating the alien device with the typewriter yields the literary device, which provides an instant escape from the island… and so forth.
Unfortunately, odds are I’ll never get around to making this game. I like the concept but there are a lot of other projects that I’d like to be working on. Oh well, thanks for reading if you’ve gotten this far, and I’ll see you at LD18!
