Hello :) this is a place for me to share random thoughts and musings that I've been having.
Hello all! This is my first of hopefully many blog posts. I don’t have too much to say today, but I want to get this blog started so here we are! I am hard at work finishing up a parser text adventure written in Inform 7, which will accompany my upcoming album ?_CORE_?://love_songs_for_automatons. The album itself is done, save for any minor mix tweaks I’ll make to for a smoother listening experience (though the whole thing is pretty abrasive at times and I’m ok with that). I’ve had a narrative for the album in my mind for a long time that developed alongside the music, so at this point it’s a matter of translating that into a more tangible and specific world that you, the player, can explore.
This is a little hard to put into words, but I feel that the process of translating the musical world of the album into a game world is made easier by the approach I took to making the music. I composed the entirety of the album using the Tidalcycles livecoding environment, which is a musical programming language. When creating music in this way, I tend to think of a song less as a linear progression from start to end and more as a system with interlocking parts that respond to each other. In a sense, it is already more akin to a “world” with rules than a song. The “song” is something you get when you record and arrange a snapshot of that world.
I feel that in some abstract way, writing the text adventure is easier because I was already thinking about this album’s world in terms of patterns and behaviors. By holding onto those patterns and behaviors and the way they make me feel, I can create systems in the game world that evoke those same feelings. Of course, much of the fun and humanity of creating art with computers is you can inject a little of your own free will into the work here and there, and violate the rules of the world. Finding the right places to do that is very important, and very fun too.