I finally made it. I convinced my doctors and care takers, that sitting in front of the computer for a weekend wouldn’t result in yet another stroke. It’s very unusual for a resident of the Flamingo Assisted Living Facility to skip a meal, I shall skip up to six. Now for the good news: no need to make bathroom breaks here, I will simply ask for a temporary urinary catheterization (with an extra large bag) during my weekly checkup.

Oh, I’m psyched! Now, most of you young folk here are witty and skilled at this computing thing, I personally have very little knowledge of any of this programming languages. I know, a little silly of me, to be even here, but I shall harness the power of language instead. Thanks to some friendly folk in England, there’s a tool available, just right for my purpose: the inklewriter. And what can one do with inklewriter? Write, of course! I will attempt to write a nice story, all interactive of course.

Having spend some time in wilder times, when kids like you would drop acid instead of developing tenosynovitis at the age of 12, I also have access to the radical writing tools of women and men long gone. The cut-up of the Beat Generation. William Butler Yeats’ automatic writing. And the secret tools of both Ernst Jandl and Gertrude Stein.

Time for my afternoon nap. See you soon, kids.

My physician insisted, that I make a game that involves outdoor activities. Here’s the first screenshot.

Now I’m getting myself aquainted with something called “binaural microphones”.

It’s been 7 hours of straight writing and I do have some sort of short story now. Next step: chop it up and transfer it into Inklewriter, followed by some soundrecording. I still don’t understand my own structure, so failure is still lurking around, ready to move in and trash the place.

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.