At Miniature World in Victoria, they have a room that’s full of incredibly elaborately detailed dollhouses that were constructed over the course of decades by couples who are no longer alive. These dollhouses represent a lifetime of love and labor. They are literally the culmination of these couples’ lives together. But when these couples pass away, their children are faced with a dilemma. Obviously they can’t throw the dollhouses away – that would dishonor their parents’ memories and all the work they put in. But who in the world has room in their house or garage for a gigantic, fantastically-crafted dollhouse? So these dollhouses go to Miniature World, where they linger, memories of the love that dead couples share, until they are entirely forgotten.
I feel like those couples sometimes when I work on my Big Project, the story that I’ve been making for over a decade now. It started as an outline in college, then became a half-finished novel manuscript, and now it’s a narrative game in an episodic Life is Strange sort of manner. I’ve worked on it off and on for so many years that I can practically see the locations, the design of the characters, all the way down to the UI. This is my own Miniature World dollhouse, only it’s the work of one person, who so far has had to do programming, character design, and write every word of dialogue and every description.
I did a draft of the script that was well over 150,000 words, then scrapped it to rewrite it in Ink, an open-source markup language developed by Inkle Studios, makers of Heaven’s Vault. This language is useful for my purposes because it has Unity integration, which other narrative game engines like ren’Py and VN Maker don’t allow. My dream is to someday assemble a team and make this game for real. Until then, though, I’m simply tinkering, building this mad dollhouse bit by bit.
I guess this makes me sort of crazy, I guess. I think all creative people have to be a little crazy. And I will admit, my mental health, she has not been so good since I’ve been unemployed. I’m thinking of getting out of Seattle for a while, at least until the current economic scenario isn’t completely shittered up. I know this place is my home, but still…
In any case, that’s just an update on what I’ve been doing. I also did a count recently and found that I’d written eight short stories this year, and it’s only May. Perhaps working with my Resnick writing group has kickstarted my imagination in that regard. Or maybe I’m getting better at writing short fiction. Either way, I view this as a positive. It’s been my dream for years to have a short fiction collection one day. Perhaps this is a step towards that goal!