Honoring the traditions of our ancestors, I shall reveal my process, with all its flaws and failures.

So I did my this odd little thing called In My Garden, a text based… well, is it game? I’m not sure. It is some sort of experience and I guess, this was my starting point. I took the theme “Connected Worlds” more as a structural idea and thought about two different layers that might influence each other, without being to closely connected. I hoped this would give a more elusive and “magical” connection between video/sound and text, possibly stiring and creating subconcious motions.

So, what went well? I got some positive feedback for the writing. I spend the bulk of the time, almost eight hours, simply on that text, writing, editing, writing editing. I think this led to a particular quality, considering the short amount of time. My native language is German, so I was rather nervous to write and “publish” something in a language, that I learned for less then four years in school (what a vain sentence; I have been working in the English speaking world for a good decade, so I had enough time to practise…). I think there’s some substantial improvements that one could make considering the dramaturgy of the text, more garden, less retirement f.ex., but all in all, the general structure does seem to work.

What went wrong? My camera broke (video was recorded with mobile). My binaural microphones “broke” and I couldn’t record without a really annoying hissing noise, possibly the cable is. I would have liked to have a really good video and audio layer and possibly also have more footage, but I lost a good chunk of daytime, shouting at my equipment and accusing everyone around me to have tinkered with it.

What went… amiss? There’s plenty of things, that could have been done differently. Obviously an integration of video and text in the same layer would have been an option. I chose not to do that, since I would have spend most of the time fiddeling around in Unity and the file would have been slightly large. I prefered to spend that time writing.

What’s next? Other works. Me and Mr.Headchant will finish a nice action rpg over the next week, do some of our serious adult work and then I will make a post-compo version. Not sure where to go. Bin the video/audio and just make something for e-readers? Or at least attempt to bring the layers together in Unity. I’m happy for any advice and/or remark! And thanks for playing and drinking all that beer in the garden.