Enter The Story: a history

My other web sites

AnswersAnswers.com is my real passion. The site isn't finished yet, but when it is, expect big things.

The Zak McKracken archive is my shrine to the greatest game ever made (so far!) Zak's creator, David Fox, called it the greatest Zak McKracken site on the web. Though to be fair there aren't many others.

If you Google my name you might find some unusual sites, so I should maybe explain. I made some web pages for GlobalIssues around late 2001. The guy who runs GlobalIssues introduced me to the concept of land rent, and everything I've been looking for all my life fell into place. Land rent has been my passion ever since.

Years ago I made a series of Mormon related web sites. They're still out there, archived somewhere. I left the Mormon church in 2004 (or thereabouts). The earlier sites are a little angry, but I've mellowed since then. I now hold the somewhat unusual view that atheists and believers all worship the same God, even though they use different words.

More detail about the Mormon stuff

People have strong feelings about religion, and some of the things I wrote were quite strident, so maybe I should say a little more. I left the Mormon church because I believed in it too much. To me Mormonism was all about (a) real physical God and real physical history, and (b) creating a utopian society. I also noted that, historically, there is plenty of room for interpretation, so the other details are less important. I concluded that God is real, in the real universe, and science and religion, while they often contradict, really don't need to. More importantly, after a lifetime of study I concluded that, with a little thought, people really can create a perfect society.

That was how I saw Mormonism as a child, but as an adult the church seemed to be just endless meetings. In 2003 I made a web site about how I thought the church could improve. This led to a threat of excommunication, so I resigned. I didn't fit in the Mormon church, because I was too Mormon. :)

...and how it affects the game

Unsurprisingly, the first three stories in Enter The Story have a religious tone: Les Misérables is about redemption, the Divine Comedy (as I approach it) is about how different people can see the same thing in different ways, and Genesis of The Gods is all about the nature of gods and of reality. But most people are not interested in theology, so from story four we're back to straightforward drama.

But that's enough about me.

'Enter The Story' version 0.1, 1997-2003

The original game was basically one big database that was created as you played. That is, if you opened a door, the computer would create rooms behind that door. If you examined a flower, the computer would add the details. You could go back and forward in time, zoom in to atoms or out to galaxies, and more. The working title was "Doors" or "The Endless Do Anything Game."

In 2000 I took a course in Pascal, then in C++, then began to code the game using Borland's Excellent C++ Builder. (See screenshots at left.) By 2003 I calculated that it would take me another fifty years to finish it! So back to the drawing board.

'Enter The Story' version 0.2, 2003-2007

I gave up the database idea, and looked round for an established adventure game engine, and Sludge seemed to be more flexible than the others. I planned to release the first game in 2012, and feature 100 stories. As time went on that goal became a more realistic ten stories and hundreds of worlds. At the suggestion of David Fox (name dropping!) I revised the plan, and decided to just release one story at a time. By April 2007 I had 5,000 scenes in the game, and a release date of December 15th 2007.

'Enter The Story' version 0.3, 2007

In April 2007 I sent an early version of the game to various people to get feedback. In general, friends and fellow amateur game developers loved it. But professional game developers - people with experience of selling games for money - said that I needed better graphics. So I began all the graphics again, from scratch. The only way to get the game finished in any reasonable time was to reduce the scene count down from 5,000 to about 130. The game would now be the first story (Les Miserables) without any of the background universe. The game was rescheduled for March 2008.

'Enter The Story' version 0.4, 2007-2008

Then a crisis hit. In November 2007 I discovered a catastrophic memory leak in Sludge that was not likely to be fixed before the game was released. With great regret I had to abandon my old friend Sludge. I could not afford any more unpleasant surprises, so chose the safest engine I could find, the market leader, Adventure Game Studio. Complete recoding meant scaling down the first release again, to 80 rooms, and adding four months to the development time. The game was now scheduled for July 2008.

Testers suggested various changes, and things took longer than expected (they always do!) and the first release was finally uploaded just before midnight on December 31st, 2008.

'Enter The Story' versions 2, 3, and beyond

The first story in the game is Les Miserables. The next story was due to be War and Peace, but the two delays (new graphics and new engine) had put me behind schedule. So the second release was Dante's Divine Comedy, a much easier game to create, and one that should ensure the next game is released on schedule, six months after the first.

It may seem unrealistic to promise the next story after six months, considering that the first story took ten years to make! But most of that time was spent learning, and going up blind alleys. And I was not just creating a game, but a game creation system. A lot of extra time was spent to make sure that future games could be added as quickly as possible.

The long term goal is to create a game every three months. In theory, each game should only take two months and the extra month is for working on my land rent site. But that's only the theory - I don't expect to reach that level of efficiency until 2011.

A Tale of Two Cities and AGS 3.x

The next major milestone was the release of A Tale of Two Cities in June 2010. This saw a completely different version of the programming engine, Adventure Game Studio (AGS) version 3.2 instead of 2.72. I didn't want to change, as it means people need to download previous games again (2.72 is not compatible with 3.x), but it was the only way to allow multiple languages across different games.

A Tale of Two Cities was also the first game to closely connect with a previous game - it expanded the Paris of Les Miserables. And with four stories available, the project was starting to look like a game world and not just separate stories. This was also when the animated bookshelf was introduced (a static bookshelf image was used for the third game, Genesis of the Gods).

Another major milestone was releasing Les Misérables as freeware. This was always the plan, for two reasons. First, the wonderful music by Paco Santiago (such as the Spanish guitar music) was only available on condition that the game would one day be free. And second of course, added publicity for the game.

Simplifying the code

In July 2010 the game seemed to be working flawlessly, until I got reports from a tester in Holland about intermittent crashes when moving between games. I couldn't reproduce the bug but I'd fixed similar bugs before. The fundamental problem was that I was pushing the AGS game engine much further than it was designed to go. Nobody else had ever made a game this big, and nobody else had tried linking games together.

I realized that I was spending more time on the between game code than on designing the games! So at the end of July I simplified the code: the stories now work as separate games, and I am free to concentrate on what really matters: designing stories.

And that brings us about up to date - this is being written on July 26th, 2010. To see what happens next, follow the blog!

Motivation

This project is a lot of work. This is what motivates me, from Steven Grant's advice to budding writers:

"Everyone's looking for 'The Secret' but there ain't no secret. The way to do it is to do it, and every story, particularly if you're creating your own work from scratch and not working with an established, formulized franchise, generates its own needs. ...

"[How do you cope with frequent rejection?] The answer is orneriness. ... Don't write to be great, write because you feel there's something that needs to be said that no one else will say if you don't. You want motivation: that's it. ...

"Don't bother asking around to see what other people think of [your idea]. Because it's new. On what basis can anyone else judge its theoretical value? You can't even judge its real value until you see how you've executed the idea. ...

"Just do it."

And regarding keeping the precious idea secret? Paul Graham wrote:

"Howard Aiken said 'Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.' ... Any really good new idea will seem bad to most people; otherwise someone would already be doing it."

Wise advice. If I'd followed it then this game would have been on sale at least a year earlier, probably two. But I've learned my lesson. I'm gonna do this thing, whether people like it or not. Because I know that, eventually, after a few years when it starts to really grow, then people WILL like it. Why? Because I have great taste. :)