Hi

I’m Ziggy aka @ArrogantGamer.

Thanks to @karlnp (a total stranger I met last night at Kafka’s on Main street) for convincing me to do this. It didn’t take much, but more than nothing was exactly what I needed. This is my first compo, and I’m really excited! For the record, I pronounce the name of this compo so that it rhymes with pear.

I’m about a day late, and not familiar with any tools. Fortunately the theme is with me. Here I will state my intentions.

Mandala is a work of interactive fiction in which the story is disintegrating. The room descriptions will be stored in the cloud, and as players play Mandala they will be gradually destroying the contents of that database until the game becomes unplayable.

Goals

1. An engine for presenting text and links that disintegrate with use.
2. A text based adventure in a minimalist setting.

Secondary Goals (I will implement these if the first 2 goals are met in time)

1. Some “last room” with a victory condition, including a way to “heal” the setting incrementally.
2. A way for players to “mark” the rooms on Mandala, adding passages of their own. (these will fade too)
3. Integration with twitter a’ la SB: S&S EP

I think these are very modest goals. I will be implementing the “engine” in Ruby on Rails, as that is basically the only framework I am familiar with. It will be hosted on Heroku (hopefully hosting won’t cost me too much! But I hope tons of people play this game).

The room descriptions will be unique: I will seed the database and then destroy the seed file, so once enough players have visited enough rooms the contents of the game will be destroyed forever. Maybe after the compo I’ll spend a bit of time cleaning up the engine and making a DSL for story-telling in this vanishing format. Code will be publicly hosted on github (actual address to follow).

I will be working on my laptop in Vancouver, BC just off of commercial drive. The beer-bottle looking thing beside my computer is a litre of cold brew coffee — one of two I got from my unofficial sponsor Kafka’s. Hopefully this will be enough!

Thanks,

z.