Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten has announced a new book project with the working title 12.28.86: One Day. For the next two years, he’ll research stories about what happened all around the United States on that date, whose numbers he drew from a hat.

Gene is currently collecting stories and research leads on the project’s Facebook page; one can also email stories privately to an address found in that page’s description. He states openness to anything from headline-making news down to personal narratives.

The date held immediate resonance with me, and so last night I wrote up a little remembrance. It crosses over with games (and the roots of my lasting interest in games) enough that I feel like sharing it here as well.

If you’d like to see a text game released in 2013 nominated for the XYZZY Awards, you have a few days left to make sure that it has an entry in the IFDB while it’s still 2013.

The XYZZYs are trying something new this year: every nominee must have an IFDB entry. While a perhaps bit wobbly in its homegrown editing interface, the IFDB nevertheless allows anyone to edit its existing game entries, or create new ones. In particular, a game’s creators are not barred from creating or updating their own works’ IFDB entries.

I stress that games you’d like to make eligible via the IFDB needn’t adhere to the classic parser-based IF format. This month I myself have added IFDB entries for both a web-based hypertext game and a commercial game-book adaptation for tablets, both of which I hope to see among the 2013 nominees. The competition’s post on the subject goes into more detail on what is and isn’t acceptable, under the section “Interactive fiction” — though it allows that this style of play does find itself in a period of definitional transition at the moment.

I shared the source of The Warbler’s Nest to GitHub last weekend, a project that took a couple of hours by one measure and nine months by another. I started getting the codebase ready for sharing last spring, shortly after giving an invited presentation about the game at MIT. I considered the event as good a capstone as any on the game’s active presence in my mind, and releasing the source struck me as appropriate epilogue. As it turned out, this preparation would end up perhaps the last personal project I picked up before a family crisis would occupy much of my attention until wintertime.[1] And when, things calmer, I happened across this MetaFilter thread asking about Inform source examples shortly after I received an email from a Warbler player pointing out an embarrassing typo in the story, I thought: Oh, right. And so GitHub.

Mere hours after announcing all this on Twitter and such, I would laugh out loud from the solid upstaging my little effort would receive next to a truly delightful surprise: Daniel Ravipinto announced a special 10-year-anniversary re-release of Slouching Towards Bedlam, an IFComp-winning masterpiece released by Star C. Foster and himself in 2003. Daniel recast the game into Inform 7 (which didn’t publicly exist ten years ago) as an exercise, and this in turn allowed him to easily publish a web page linking to both the downloadable game file and its source text. I sincerely recommend taking this opportunity to try the game if you haven’t already; I quite look forward to playing it through again, myself.

Yes, it's early. No, it's not the Ides of December yet. That's tomorrow. Good thought, though.

I said that I wanted to place the final rooms and cabinets. That's now complete. With all the locks, navigation, and goal-traversal that they required.

I also decided to implement a lot of bits of paper. You'll recall that over the past two months, I chose locations for all the "magic words and recipes" to be found in the game. (Physical objects were basically all nailed down by November.) This information would appear on sheets of paper that you'd collect as the game went on. The first such sheet appears in the HL teaser.

So I decided, what the hey, I'll implement all of those objects. Not their text -- I mostly haven't gotten to scenery descriptions yet. But I wanted to create the objects, place them in the game, and assign their effects: what rituals and formulae do you learn from reading each one? This is all scutwork; I have all this information in my notes, I just have to crank through them. It'll maybe take me one day. And then that'll be done.

I am happy to report that all the items are placed. Every line in my recipe chart has a "found in" notation! ...I'm telling this out of order.

The first half of the month, I caught up on the implementation that I planned last month. That is, I created the ten new rooms (plus some cabinets) that all of October's placements required. And the navigation between them. And the locks on their doors, where appropriate. And the goal-tracking to open the locks.

In the second half of November, I decided all the placements for the latter half of the game. (Two "chapters", but as I said, the chapter numbers do not reflect either game pacing or numbers of objects.) The map grew another couple of rooms, and several more locked cabinets, but I have not yet implemented these.

You might think that the first half of the month was difficult coding work, and the second half was lazily scribbling in locations on a chart. Ha. No. Code is easy. Decisions are difficult.

Every decision is wading into a hazy cloud of "this will probably be okay" and throwing away 99% of it. Most of the possibilities that I discard are fine. Some look fine, but will trip me up later. I have to make sure that the one I keep doesn't trip me up. And then I have to make sure that I like the pacing -- where it shows up in the player's run-through. Or rather, the range in which it might show up. Too soon? Too much confusion early on? Might the player run into the hard-but-correct solution to a puzzle before the easy-red-herring solution? That would be embarrassing.

And then I do it again, and again. I've been doing it all day. My brain hurts.

(Yeah, I'm writing this on the evening of Dec 1st. Procrastination struck after Thanksgiving. I caught up.)

So, okay. I have (nearly) hit a serious milestone, and I am declaring a (sort of) vacation month. My brain needs to stop hurting for a while.

In December I will implement those last rooms and cabinets, so that I can say I've actually placed everything in the game. But I'm not going to work on HL otherwise. I will do holiday things. I will bake a lot of cookies. I may play the latest Bioshock.

I have a sneaky idea for another iOS text game, which I might try to crank out by the end of the year...