It’s been slow on the novel front the last few months, because I’ve instead been trying to beat an older novella I wrote into shape. It’s a platonic love story, about finding deep, meaningful love outside the realms of romance, of realising someone’s your soulmate despite not wanting to have sex with them. It’s a topic I’ve always been interested in, because for a long time it was how I felt - that my ‘other half’, as Aristophanes called it, was my best friend, and not any of the girls I was dating at the time. In general, I never really believed in soulmates, other halves, ‘the one’, whatever. But then, after I read Gore Vidal’s autobiography Palimpsest, I thought that maybe I did, but not in the way all the Hollywood films and the romance books I never read spoke about it. In Palimpsest, the story itself, despite nominally being about his life and the interesting and famous people he wants to namedrop, is really about a boy named Jimmy he fell in love with when he was a teenager and who died away at war. The narrative is coloured, shaped, informed by Jimmy’s existence and absence, and there’s an undercurrent of sadness flowing through Vidal’s otherwise pretty hilarious writing. Despite his having been in a relationship with someone for nearly half a century by the time he wrote it, you can tell, even as he talks about getting drunk with Jack Kennedy or arguing with Norman Mailer, that Jimmy is the second subject of the autobiography, perhaps even higher on the list than Vidal himself.

Anyway, I was pretty inspired by what I discovered about myself while I read that, and so, a few years ago, I set out to write some autofiction about my platonic love story. (Vidal’s wasn’t platonic, actually, but something about the way he wrote inspired me nonetheless.) To begin with, I took a few pages I had about Berlin, inspired by Night Moves by Jessica Hopper, basically just the personal journals of her as she experienced life in her twenties while being part of the early 2000s garage rock revival in Chicago. I wanted to do something similar with Berlin, even though, at the time, I wasn’t really a part of any punk scene. (How things change.) But it evolved into a 25,000 word musing on what it meant to be platonically in love with a friend who didn’t love you back in the same way. And, since October or November last year, I’ve been refining that down into a tight 15,000 words - barely even a novella, any more; more a short story. Still, it has the heart of a novella, if not the word count.

I’m nearly finished, I think. As with my other work, I’ve been using Claude to help me edit. Claude doesn’t do any of the writing itself - it just offers suggestions on parts which aren’t working, tells me where to expand and cut, and I decide whether it’s talking shit or whether I should keep it. And so I lost nearly 10,000 words, and I’m pretty happy, now. All that’s left is to read the whole thing through, out loud, in one sitting, which I’ve been meaning to do for nearly three weeks now and haven’t managed to. The problem is that rereading it is actually quite a painful experience, more painful, even, than editing it was - emotionally and mentally. That is, editing itself is already the most difficult part of the writing process, and, because it’s essentially a memoir with some embellishments, rereading something so personal and painful isn’t the easiest job in the world. I was hoping I would desensitise myself to the emotions, which has happened to an extent, but I am nonetheless finding it hard.

Still, eventually I will, hopefully this weekend, if I can face it, if I manage to get enough sleep.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently, because I’ve been reading the Expanse, about why in most space science fiction, spacecraft are referred to with the military language of ships, and what an alternative could be for my own version of this, which is something I’ve decided I want to write. (Yes, another idea, of course.) There are reasonable historical reasons why this is the case: the earliest science fiction was mostly written by Englishmen around the turn of the twentieth century, and at that time the British Royal Navy was the most powerful in the world. Our Navy was a symbol of expansion and empire, and so it made sense to use that terminology. That language then got taken up by basically all future sci fi writers without a second thought - speaking of spaceSHIPS, of fleets, of corvettes and destroyers and carriers and all the rest - and it’s become the norm.

But why should it be? There are, to be sure, a lot of parallels between wet navy warfare and space navy warfare, at least in books (though I identified some issues here - of which more later), so at least to an extent it makes sense. Space, in some sense, is a vast ocean, and the way space travel would work, or at least would work in the sense of hardish-sci fi, would be far closer to being on a galley: you’re there for weeks, months, possibly years at a time, and (again problems, of which more later) there are different sizes of ship fulfilling different roles - carriers, destroyers, cruisers, etc.

I also find it telling that ground force language isn’t used whatsoever - at least, in the space sci fi I’ve read, you rarely hear about battalions and regiments until a landing force is involved. This, to me, makes more sense, because even in space warfare, there would be ground fighting to take over a planet or a spacestation, or whatever. I brought all this up to Claude, and it said something interesting: ‘ground forces language breaks down at scale because armies are organised around the assumption that you eventually run out of horizontal space.’ True, but the ocean eventually ends at the land, too, whereas space, for our intents and purposes, is infinite. And there’s something nice about a platoon of scout ships, a company of assault ships, and a battalion that functions as an enormous fleet (there it is again!) for full scale offensives.

All that being said, isn’t being in a spacecraft (and just to illustrate how ingrained it is, I initially wrote spaceship there without even thinking, before correcting it to spacecraft) more like flying rather than sailing? The language of aviation, at least on its surface, makes more sense. True, you don’t necessarily need wings in space, and so wingman might not make literal sense any more, but you also aren’t quite on a poop deck, either. Had space science fiction started being written after the Second World War, it might be more common in the literature to read of squadrons, sorties, bandits and intercepts. And it would scale, too: two aircraft are an element, four are a flight, squadron is eight to twenty (ish), and a wing is usually multiple squadrons.

The big issue I see with this is that the language of aviation - scrambling, sorties, bandits - implies quick but short-lived operations. Aircraft need things like carriers and bases in order to refuel, because they simply can’t go more than a few hours or a day, perhaps, without having to land somewhere. Claude put it nicely: ‘The airfield or carrier is home, and the aircraft is a weapon you briefly inhabit.’ At the distances in space, and the hypothetical distance between potential resupplies, the language breaks down somewhat; a sortie would have to be smaller craft (rock-hoppers, as they’re called in the Expanse) staging short strikes against relatively close targets. For anything longer than that, the language of the sea, of long-term wet deployment, definitely makes more sense. If you went extremely soft sci-fi, where faster-than-light travel is possible (so, you know, so soft it’s basically a mushy paste), then the language makes sense. The craft becomes a weapon that can be deployed quickly, that can be sortied, if you’ll allow me to verbify. For hard sci fi, unfortunately it doesn’t.

What’s nice about aviation language is that most of it is original. They didn’t take their language from the navy, but invented their own, or their own developed over time, as is more often the case with idiolects. So… why isn’t this the case with space warfare, aside from the historical reasons? I feel there’s an enormous opportunity for a really original language to be used that’s specific to space warfare and organisation, one that a writer could invent from the ground up, stealing and borrowing from other naval, aviation, and ground branches. I can’t think of any writer who’s done this. Even writers of space sci-fi that try to completely subvert the organisational structure of the military tend to leave the vocabulary alone, even as Tolkien invented multiple languages for his world which, in some senses, contains technology more familiar to us than that of the spacecraft.

Consider this. Military language used today comes from Norse, Dutch, Portuguese, Arabic, Latin, probably other languages I’m forgetting. The internet tells me that starboard and port are Viking words, and Admiral is Arabic, for example. Imagine a future space sci fi where there are other languages, which would inevitably develop if we’re talking a couple hundred years in the future, and those words, or their roots in the languages we know of today, are in use in military language. Something totally alien, which would fit the completely alien expanse (sorry to steal the word, Corey) of space.

Second, both naval and ground warfare operate, at their most basic level, on two planes. Space is three-dimensional (which is why I initially reached for aviation language when I was thinking about this), and that demands a new kind of language. Who are the most important people when it comes to space? Engineers, mathematicians, really. So why don’t we see more vocabulary that goes above the plane of the ecliptic, vocabularies of vectors and planes and apexes and envelopes? Why aren’t astronomical terms used, like apogees, occultations, perihelions? Claude suggested that a force holding position at a gravitational chokepoint could be an ‘occultation force’. I like this already. And structures could be organised around durations and functions, rather than sizes. If your enormous battlecarrier can only fly for a week before it has to refuel, it’s only suitable for certain operations. Your smaller corvette (and I still can’t get away from the naval jargon) that can fly for two years without having to restock has a different role, potentially a more valuable one. A yearer, a monther, a dayer, or something better than what I can come up with off the top of my head, makes a lot of sense when we’re talking about the distances of space.

One problem of inventing this language actually gives a fascinating solution. Military vocabulary - most of it, anyway - didn’t just fall out of the sky. During the Battle of Britain, the term ‘scramble’ was invented, as the aircraft had to get up and into the fight as quickly as possible. Now, it’s used regularly by English-speaking airforces around the world. In space, over the years that space exploration and especially engagements happened, something similar would occur. So if you know that there has to be history behind the language you’re using, you’re forced to INVENT that history for your novel, which leads to an extremely rich and alive world. This crazy, sci-fi sounding word you’re using instead of cruiser? It exists because of X specific event that happened in this sci fi world I’ve created - I didn’t just pull it out of my arse in an attempt to make my novel sound different. And for that reason, of course, lots of terms would be the same. The vocabulary of hierarchy still makes sense, as would having a wingman (if, indeed, the types of craft that need wingmen would even exist any more - of which more later), as would an escort, as would a scout. Some terms would remain; others would be born of history and necessity.

And you wouldn’t necessarily have to explain all, or any, of that history in the novel, as long as it was clear to the writer. You could, of course, if you wanted to flex your worldbuilding muscles, but in real life, plenty of origins of words have been forgotten or mythologised. Even scramble, the example I used earlier in this paragraph, might have messier origins than I let on. I just haven’t done my research properly. Here’s an interesting one: what do you think of when you read the word ‘tank’? Because of everything I’ve written in this post, you’re probably thinking of the armoured military vehicle. But that word was itself a codeword during the First World War for what the machine was. The original meaning of tank is, obviously, something that holds a liquid or gas, like a watertank. It was a piece of misdirection, and it’s just stuck, though it has basically no relation to the actual item in question. And in the military, tanks are often referred to as ‘armour’ - an armoured regiment is a tank regiment. Armour is something that protects the body, the soft bits, which makes far more sense - it’s exactly what a tank does. Not to mention the fact that tanks themselves are, of course, armoured. The word itself comes from armatura, the Latin, and means equipment, which is exactly what armour is.

As an aside, I learned of two others while I researched about this: “Deadline” comes from the line drawn around a Civil War prison camp — cross it and you were shot. Now it means when your article is due. “Blockbuster” originally referred to a bomb large enough to destroy a whole city block. The RAF used it during the Second World War. Now it means a successful film. And, an aside within an aside: there’s a famous idea that, after the Normans conquered England, our language developed on two tracks at the same time. So we have the word beef, which the rich people used for the meat they ate, and the word cow, which the poor people used who actually looked after the animal. The same with deer and venison, or pork and pig. Claude suggested the same is true of military language. Sword, shield, war, fight, are all Anglo-Saxon words. The organisational words - army, battle, captain, lieutenant, are French. And while this started as an aside, it actually has relevance to inventing space warfare vocabulary: the words for the organisation of units and battles would be different, potentially, from the words used by the crews and spacefarers themselves in their craft. Who built the institutions and who fought for them would, potentially, speak in different ways, invent different words, and those words would become entrenched in that history.

So that’s my rant, and the idea is that someone - probably not me, because I’m not smart enough, but maybe I’ll give it a go if I ever come up with an idea for a science fiction space opera - should come up with a more interesting vocabulary for spacecraft and their associated military institutions.

BUT. There’s a problem with everything I’ve said, a problem that extends also to ground, aviation, and naval language, when it comes to space warfare in general in science fiction: the uselessness of smaller craft.

In naval warfare, the carrier killed the destroyer. With a carrier, you ride out miles and miles away from your opponent, with a cruiser or two as an escort to make sure no submarine comes and blows you up, and you can send out planes without ever coming into danger yourself far further than any guns you mounted could fire. They made total logistical sense in that arena.

But if we assume that in a universe like the Expanse missiles have also become more and more technologically refined, what would ever be the point in smaller spacecraft? A corvette, a frigate, whatever you’d call them in the amazing new vocabulary you made up, become completely obsolete. There are no horizons to shoot over in space, and bullets and rockets just keep going until they hit something, or, more likely, don’t. Fights wouldn’t consist of carriers holding tens or hundreds of smaller craft; they would consist of enormous missile platforms that fire barrage after barrage at each other until one of the point defence cannons eventually makes a mistake and one gets through. In the navy, a carrier has an escort because it doesn’t do all the jobs - it can’t protect itself against a submarine while also sending out its aircraft. A carrier that does both of those jobs at once means if it gets disabled, the fight is totally over.

The same is true in space - if the capital ship (there it is again!) gets disabled, the fight is over. But a small escort frigate or cruiser isn’t going to help with that. There is no ocean underneath you - just empty vacuum. So all you need is to also have missiles and PDCs on the relative bottom of your capital ship, and you’re set. The only escort ships that would be needed would be for refuelling, resupply, and maybe some sort of electronic jamming - there I can’t think of a good reason this wouldn’t be done by the capital ship itself, too. If a missile essentially becomes a much safer, extremely manoeuvrable analogue to what a fighter plane does on a current wet navy carrier, why do you need corvettes and frigates and strike ships?

Unfortunately, the reality of my mind when it comes to literature ideas - taking everything to its logical endpoint, just absolutely bashing the logic out of everything - makes space warfare pretty fucking boring. You sit in your capital ship (or maybe you don’t even do that - maybe they’re unmanned, now), you fire your missiles, until one of your PDCs does a bad job, or you run out of ammunition. Luckily, I’ve read a lot of war memoirs, and they all revolve around one central point: war is extremely boring, until it isn’t. So that would still work for my novel, too. However, it does mean that inventing a full-blown vocabulary for it doesn’t make much sense.

Well, anyway. I’ve nattered on enough about this for now. This is the longest post on this blog now, I think, and it wasn’t meant to be. Maybe it should have been several posts, but ah well - I started, and I wanted to continue, so I did.

Finally, some housekeeping. The actual, real novel has been sitting in Novelcrafter, the first act finished, the second two waiting patiently - or not so patiently, actually - for me to finish them. It’s difficult to believe that the last time I worked on it was nearly six months ago, but it seems to be true. Getting back into it is going to be an exercise in mental fortitude; luckily, I’ve spent the last six months thinking of nearly nothing else, so I know where I am, know what’s happened, and (vaguely) know where it’s going next. It’s just sitting down to do it. Part of the reason I’ve not worked on it is because I’ve not been sleeping well, though I never do, really, and the other part is because I’ve been playing far too many video games, making myself feel guilty, and then not sleeping again because I’m lying in bed planning my writing, which I should have been doing instead of playing video games. Such is life. I’m only really writing this blog post so I can feel like I’m actually making progress on something other than Prison Architect.

I’m coming to the end of the penultimate Expanse novel, and I’m enjoying it, though the first five are still my favourite, I think. One thing I’ve noticed is that the authors aren’t afraid to stay in their characters’ head for several pages in each chapter before the action happens. This, interestingly, was something Claude told me not to do, because it was making my initial draft bloated and slow. Now I’m wondering whether I’ve cut too much out of the first act, and actually there were some interesting bits in there that I should revive. When I reread sections of the new draft, it felt a little breakneck to me when going through the chapters - like I was pushing the story on extremely quickly and unnecessarily. I still managed to get to the end of act 1 with a healthy 25,000 words, but I think if I brought back just a little of the thinking my characters did in the first version, the characters might feel a little more real. Anyway, something to think about. Or, for me to think about, rather.

The video game? It’s there, it’s waiting for me. All the systems are in place, the game is ugly but playable, and all I need to do is write the story. The problem is, three stories at once are too much for me, especially while I’m spending my time playing games rather than making them. Perhaps - and this is something I’ve thought to myself on a monthly basis over the last ten years - I need to write myself out a routine for every day, so I make the most of my time.

Then again, we’re all going to die, and nothing means anything. Just remember to wash your hands.

P.S. When the novella is finished, I will be posting it on this website for free, and recording it as an audiobook myself, also. Enjoy!

Until now. I started writing the second act earlier this week, and I’m reasonably certain everything is now working and that I have structure for the novel which actually works. The opening act is similar, but condensed, with more action, and plot points that actually speak to the characters’ motivations rather than just scenes of them standing around discussing stuff and not actually being active at all. Also, they encounter the antagonists much earlier on again than they did in the last version, which I prefer; there’s something interesting about having an antagonist who only appears towards the end, like a Big Bad type thing, but it wasn’t working in the context of my manuscript. The second act starts from Mo’s perspective, and starts to reveal internal factions within the antagonists, further complicating the kids’ situation. I’m only a few hundred words in, but by the time I finish his chapter, the kids should have a decent understanding of their enemy, their potential allies, and what they need to do next.

There hasn’t been a devlog in a few months because I’ve done nothing to the game since I got my first working prototype done back in November. It’s a bit dumb because I’ll probably have forgotten absolutely everything I learned about G script and video game coding, but whatever - I can always relearn it. I did recruit a writer to help me do some side content, a talented girl I know from work, and while we’ve not brainstormed anything yet, we’re planning on doing a monthly meeting to motivate each other to write/code, and maybe talk about where she could help me, if she has the time.

That’s it, creatively. Still recording material with my band, still writing new songs for them. I FINALLY finished laying a new kitchen floor - it’s only taken me like six months to get it done - and it’s the best feeling ever having a nice, new, shiny, cheap, but most of all clean, floor in there. I also bought myself an enormous Modigliani print which I framed and put up above the sofa; I love it, it’s one of my favourites of his (my actual favourite I unfortunately couldn’t find), and it’s certainly going to be a talking point when I have guests over.

So that’s my new year update, thirty days too late. But like I said, I’ve been busy. I’ll check back in the next time I do - well - anything, really.

Remember to wash your hands.

1. Added a ‘can discard’ feature, so some cards have to be played, and some can be discarded. Most will be discardable, I predict, but if you’re in a dungeon-type location, or if there’s a combat encounter, you’ll probably have to pick an option.

2. I made it trackable from where you are when you open a storylet. It means I can add storylets which are openable from the inventory, and the player is returned to the inventory (or wherever I want, in the future) once the storylet is over.

3. Finally added a time tracking system. There are four ‘ticks’ per hour, equating to fifteen minutes. I can define how many ticks an action will take, if any. Then I added a clock to the UI which tracks time and day - no dates, because I want it to be ambiguous when the story takes place.

4. Cleaned up some old warnings which weren’t breaking anything but were annoying me. I also identified an unused parameter for stats, but I’ve left it for now in case I need it later. For the life of me I can’t remember what it does.

5. Improved the inventory. Each item in the inventory is now loaded from an item database, which will be a set of jsons - one json per item. As I said before, storylets can now be opened from inventory items which I can define in the json itself. I can also add a forbidden_effects parameter to them so once the storylet has been opened, the item can’t be retrieved again - one item per storylet. But you can still open the storylet from the item for those that remain in your inventory; this means you can, for example, read books multiple times, but you’ll only get the item(s) from them once. Eventually items will be able to heal health, boost stats, etc.

6. I added a gold border to usable items in the inventory, to make them clearer. I’ll probably make it look prettier later.

7. Finally, I had a system where specific cards would only appear depending on certain circumstances, dicatated by hidden effects which are added to the player based on other story choices. Now, though, I can also add them to individual choices, meaning the storylet might still show up, but specific choices won’t if the player has or doesn’t have an effect or requirement respectively.

I think that’s it. Remember to wash your hands.

Aside from cleaning my bathroom, which was in a bit of a state, I finally implemented the barebones of my UI into my game. After spending weeks doing shit sketches and trying to find something pretty and practical, I went for a pretty boring but extremely practical setup: three columns, with the stats, inventory button, and current location on the left, the hand, deck, and permanent location actions in the center, and the quest log and faction reputation log on the right. It’s not interesting at all, but it works well, everything is übersichtlich (don’t know how to say that in English), and it’s functional. On top of that, I made a basic inventory screen, which shows equipped items on the left, categories along the top (clothing, weapons, quest items, etc.), and all the items as small icons in the center, with quantities included. I’ll either change it all later, giving myself a real pain in the arse, or I’ll make it pretty with artwork.

Speaking of artwork, I also asked a good friend of mine to do the initial sketches for the card backs. The design will be the sun and the moon together, like a tarot card or whatever. I’m looking forward to seeing what he comes up with for me; generally, I like most of the stuff he paints (I have three of his pieces up on my walls, including one he did for my birthday) so I have high hopes. I also know another artist who lives elsewhere than Berlin who I might ask to do my character models, as she does pretty great figures which I think would work well for my game. However, all of this means that the artwork in my game will be 2d, and actually, I’d like the backs of cards to be animated. Only slightly: maybe the sun and moon slowly revolve around each other, or something like that. But anyway, that’s an issue for the future.

I’ve finally begun properly thinking about one of the main storylines for the game. (Didn’t you know that thinking about writing is about 50% of actually writing?) It’ll focus on the revolutionary element within the city-state, who are disappointed (for lack of a stronger word) that although the world has experience enormous upheaval, the basic structure of society has remained unchanged, despite the majority of humanity having emigrated to the equator. And so, they begin a plan to overthrow the Anglo government in Caerdyf, and rebuild society from the ground up. You, as the character, can be involved in this revolution, fight back against it, or possibly even ignore it and simply see what effects it has on the rest of your story. That’s my basic idea at the moment, anyway; over the coming weeks I’ll see how far I get with it.

I believe as well that I’ve finally figured out a way to fix my novel. My last post documented how I was pretty certain that my novel is unsalvageable. Well, I no longer believe this. My solution is quite simple: isolate the town from the rest of the British Isles. When the kids are put in hospital, they’re quarantined. While there, more and more people begin to be admitted to the hospital with similar symptoms of theirs, but no immunity, and therefore most of the die or are seriously impaired by the failed parasitism. This causes the British government to put the entire town into quarantine, with military checkpoints on the roads, physical barriers, and patrols through the woods. It solves almost all of my problems: my kids not being believed, the government getting involved too early, the fact that my aliens aren’t really spreading outside of the small town the novel is set in, and a host of other issues which caused the plot to be neither fun nor realistic. So I’ve been writing (read: sitting around thinking about) that, too - rewriting it to not only fix the plot, but include the quarantine worldbuilding which, I hope, will mean I don’t need to throw the whole thing off my balcony.

So that’s where I’m at. On Monday, I recorded the drums for my band’s next single. I mean, I did the engineering, and my drummer played the drums, of course. We only used four microphones, but we got a pretty excellent sound out of it. After a bit of production, it sounds really professional - I used an isolated take of Smells Like Teen Spirit as a control, and I got it sounding pretty similar in terms of quality. One little trick I used which worked surprisingly well was adding a sample to the snare drum (which was sounding a bit thin) which triggers on every single snare. It gave it a lot more meat and punch. We’ll have to see how the rest of the recording goes - the drums aren’t really played to a click, so we’re sort of winging it when we record the rest, but I did some test guitar parts at home and it worked pretty well, so I’m hoping my bassist can do the same and we can finally mix our own single, which is what I’ve wanted to do since we started this band. DIY ‘till I die.

With regards DIY, I bought myself a grow tent the other week, planted two plants, and now I’m just waiting for them to flower, which should take around three months. I’m a little worried about Christmas, where I won’t be here to water them, but I did buy a homemade self-watering system which consists of a small spout that you stuck a plastic bottle into, and it drip feeds the plant. I need to experiment with the timing still - the first bottle was done in a day, and the next one I tested still isn’t empty after three - but it might be a solution for the fortnight I’m away for in December. Either way, I have more seeds I can use at a later date if these two die, so it isn’t the end of the world, and everything’s a learning experience, right?!

My girlfriend is visiting this weekend, so I imagine there will be a lot of drinking. I don’t think I’ll work on anything until Sunday, but I do have the whole day as she leaves quite early. I’m trying to get one small thing done on the game every day; this was a similar system I had with my novel, where I tried to write even just thirty minutes every day. This got me through my first draft (which is shit, obviously, but still) very quickly. If I can do that with the game, I should have all the mechanics in place pretty quickly.

Then it’s just the case of actually writing the fucking thing, which I’ve been putting off because I started reading the Hunger Games after finishing the films. My mate Billy was a bit incredulous that I would bother reading them considering I know what’s going to happen, but years ago I saw an episode of QI where they said people often enjoy things more if they know how they’re going to end. If someone had ruined the ending of Breaking Bad for me I would have been sick in their eyes, but then again, I think I preferred Better Caul Saul, and we all knew what was going to happen there (for the most part), so maybe there’s something to it. Anyway, they’re written in a pretty wooden style, but they’re nonetheless compelling - the characters are well fleshed out, and I find myself both sympathetic to and occasionally annoyed with Katniss when she’s having a tantrum. Then I remind myself that she’s allowed to have tantrums and act irrationally sometimes, seeing as she’s basically facing constant death throughout the first two books, whether from the Games or simply from starving to death. They’re surprisingly good (though I don’t know why I’m surprised, seeing as they were critically lauded when they came out). One nice thing about them is that events which are a bit confusing in the films (Thresh knowing about Katniss helping Rue, some minor details about Finnick becoming an ally during the Quarter Quell, etc.) are actually explained really well - believably, in fact; this was really nice, and they almost act as a companion to the films. One thing that annoys me, though, is why during the Quarter Quell, all the tributes who try to help Katniss and Peeta don’t just decide to not fight at all. They could all just sit on their podiums at the beginning, and the Capitol would be forced to either kill all of them, which would definitely spark the revolution, and leave them with no victor, thereby defeating the point, or let them all go free. Still, they’re like, 17 year olds, and are human, so they’re probably QUITE scared of being brutally killed. Duh. Anyway, I’m about halfway through the second book, so no spoilers. Or, give me spoilers, who cares.

Remember to wash your hands.

It does bring up a host of other issues which I need to figure out, though. I tell you, writing a novel is pretty easy, to be honest. It’s writing a novel you don’t want to throw in the bath along with your toaster which is fucking difficult. First, it decreases the level of character development I’m able to write. My five characters, my likeable but flawed teenage protagonists, have already been a part of a war for however long it’s been going on. They’ve already experienced the anguish of having their friends and family taken; they’re in the middle of their PTSD. Rather than writing a story which deals with them getting to that stage, it’ll be about what they’re like now they have it; the memories of who they were before, and reconciling that with who they are now. Still interesting, but not necessarily the story I wanted to write, and requires taking some time to rethink who my characters are, now, in this new world.

Which is all okay, I suppose. Realising your story doesn’t work whatsoever is annoying, but frankly, I wasn’t that hot on the plot anyway. What I really like is my characters - I think my aliens are interesting and believable (and the science is correct, as far as I can tell), and my protagonists are really enjoyable to write; it’s like I’m writing about my friendship group when we were teenagers - except the alien invasion stuff, obviously.

I’ve been quite inspired by watching and starting to read The Hunger Games over the last couple of days. I never used to like the films that much, but rewatching the first one actually made me realise it’s really good. Like, really good. And for a teen film, surprisingly violent, particularly the first scene when they enter the arena. The third one slows down the pace a little, but I’m kind of okay with that. Everyone likes the second one the most, but I think the first is the best. I’ve had it on in the background while doing up my flat, which I’ve been putting off for months after I painted the thing, got a new sofa, and decided I was done. But I had a load of pictures I needed to hang on the walls, and the place is in general in a state. So I tidied, drilled some holes, hammered some nails, and then went to get drunk with a friend of mine.

It’s now tomorrow, when I finish writing this short post. I’m hungover, so I’m going to finish the Hunger Games films and then, if I find the energy, start rewriting my novel. Remember to wash your hands.

I got together a couple of first sketches for what my UI might look like. I started with something really basic, baed pretty heavily off of cyberpunkdreams. The problem I’m having with it is that I think it’s extremely fucking boring. The UI obviously needs to be functional, but does that mean it needs to be so tediously practical?

The issue I’m having is that my game focuses on having lots of cards. So I need a place for decks, and for the player’s hand. And I need a place for the inventory and the equipped gear. And even for reputation among factions and stuff like that. It could obviously be on a different screen, or some of that stuff could, but I figure if I can fit it all on one, then why make people click more than they have to?

So this would be a very basic way of doing that. The hand at the top, with various decks, location-specific actions in the middle, quests and rep on the right, and character stuff (stats and gear) on the left. Somewhere else there’d be a button for the inventory, because that obviously needs a lot of space, assuming I add a lot of items to the game. Here’s a slightly prettier version Claude mocked up for me:

I don’t really like Claude’s either, but it’s barebones, of course. I did have the idea of making the UI an actual location - so for example, if you’re at the central square, there’ll be a statue you can click, a coffee shop, a government building, whatever; they will be actual elements you can click. Then the hand will be fanned out at the bottom of the screen. But that’s a lot of work, and I don’t actually know how to do that, and also I’d have to design or find nice artwork for all of that, and I don’t even know it’s what I want.

Well, anyway. Instead of answering all of those questions, and making a basic version of the UI (which I basically need to do before I continue writing and coding; otherwise I’ll be making a rod for my own back in the future), I’ve been playing as England, and after as Britain, in Europa Universalis. France were bossing me around for ages, but I recently cakewalked them in a humiliation war I started with the help of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Hilarious that there’s a casus belli which is just ‘humiliate your rival’. When it’s against the French it’s even better. Nothing I like more than humiliating the French.

Anyway, that’s enough for me today. I should go to bed, seeing as I have work tomorrow still and it’s pushing four. Remember to wash your hands.

Today I finally implemented a levelling and stat system to my game. It functions in a very similar way to cyberpunkdreams and Fallen London: you draw a challenge card and are given a percentage chance of success or failure if you attempt the challenge. Each stat, of which there are currently 11 (which I might streamline later), levels independently of one another; however, theoretically, I could challenge one stat, and also give XP rewards for another, though I’m not sure when I’d ever do that (with one exception, of which more later).

The maths behind the curve are currently 100 x (1.06 ^ level). With a target of maybe 500 challenges throughout the game (which is possibly very, very ambitious) you could potentially get to level 80 in a single stat. But these numbers might change, as might the balance - I simply don’t have enough content to know whether it’s fair at the moment. My big problem with cyberpunkdreams and Fallen London was that they feel very grindy, especially for games that have an action system: if you only have twenty or fifty actions, and you fail half of those, the game begins to feel like a waste of time. In my system, if you really want to, you could grind levels and make the later game a cakewalk. I’m actually okay with this: if you put the effort and time in, you can make the game really easy. If you don’t bother to grind, the game will be more challenging (i.e. how it’s meant to be played).

Multi-stat challenges are possible: you could have a challenge which requires both sneak and fighting (not their actual names at the moment), and if you have different levels in each of these, the success chance will be an average. XP gains will be weighted by the requirement ratio - for example, if sneak difficulty is 60 and fighting 40, sneak gets 60% of the XP gains.

Success chances initially started with flat penalties, but it felt broken, so I changed it to an experience scaled system:

const SUCCESS_AT_LEVEL = 85 - Base % at your level const SUCCESS_PER_LEVEL = 12% change per level difference

Basically, if you’re level 80 in sneak, and the challenge difficulty is sneak 85, you’ll have a better chance at success than if you’re level 1 sneak and the challenge difficulty is 6, even though the actual difference between your level and the challenge difficulty is the same. To give some percent examples:

At the moment, it feels fair, but as I said, I’ll know more when I test after I have enough content.

The other main change compared to Fallen London and cyberpunkdreams (as far as I can tell) is that failure gives you more XP than success does. I could be wrong, but I think a difficult challenge in those games gives you more XP if you succeed, or in Fallen London’s case, the same XP regardless of whether you succeed or fail. I never liked this system - first, it doesn’t correspond with reality; almost always, you learn more from failure than from success. Second, rewarding failure gives players the incentive to try riskier challenges, and (hopefully) have more fun and reap more rewards, rather than playing it safe, grinding, and getting bored.

The system I used to have simply gave flat level increases when you picked certain choices, and there was no challenge element to the game; frankly, it was fucking boring. Obviously I’m still at the beginning stages of creating this game, but nonetheless, it needed changing. Now, the flat level increase still exists in case I want to just reward a player with a full level jump. I control this manually within each card - I’m using .json files for my stories AKA storylets. And, I added a new system, which gives a flat XP gain. This is less ideal, because I won’t necessarily know (though I could roughly predict) the level a player is at when they attempt a certain challenge, but still, it felt easy to add and it’s better to have the option. I can always remove or just ignore it if I never end up using it in cards.

I have some special stats which are only used in certain locations and in storylets. I call these ‘tracking stats’, and they are, for example, ‘searching for someone’. These stats level in the same way, but with an XP buff - at the moment it’s x2, but to balance this, you can fail checks and gain no XP or lose XP. (They’re the only stats that work this way.) For these, you HAVE to succeed to increase the XP of the stat, and when it hits the required level - say, 10 - it resets to zero, you get an added effect (found XYZ!) and the storylet continues.

Let me clarify with an example. You’re searching for James. You need 10 searching_for_james for him to appear. You do challenges and you increase your searching_for_james stat only when you succeed. It hits 10, and you get an effect added to your character - found_james - after which searching_for_james resets to 0 (or 1, or whatever), but the card ‘You found James’ appears due to its previously having been hidden by NOT having the found_james effect. Hope that all makes sense. Also, to return to my point from earlier: with this system, I can have a challenge which checks sneak, and along with sneak XP, you get looking_for_james XP. This means I can have as many tracking stats as I want, and just check for them using other stats, which makes sense, especially when looking for someone. (E.g. maybe you use your charisma skill to ask around where James is. (Also, please don’t constantly go around asking where I am. Leave me alone.)) This was another huge problem I had with cyberpunkdreams - actually, wait, let me start a new paragraph:

Fallen London couldn’t be slicker: you only have four stats and a health bar. cyberpunkdreams did the opposite - you have something like fifty different stats for various things which require different ways of levelling them up. It means there’s, in practice, more content, but more does not equal better, and in cyberpunkdreams’ case, it really suffers from content and stat bloat. For example, in the late game, you can become a pimp. Pimping: probably need security, maybe charisma, intimidation, and business, right? Wrong: now, on top of all five of those stats, all of which already exist, you have a new ‘pimping’ skill. Oh, and a ‘pimping security’ skill. Oh, and a ‘girls’ happiness’ skill. Uhm - why? If I’m already an experienced businessman, and I’m already at a high intimdation and security level, why the fuck is there a NEW SKILL for pimping? This makes no sense to me. It’s why I was wary about even having 11 different stats, and why I’ll most likely cut it down to a nice round 10, or maybe even fewer: because certain stats can be used in contextually varied ways. At least, in my world. Not in cyberpunk Cincinnati.

Anyway. I tried a lot of different formulae out before I found the one that worked best (for now). A flat penalty for success felt far too punishing at higher levels, as did linear and exponential experience scaling. Initially also, one failure at a 65% challenge meant you levelled up three times - this felt like way too much in the early game. The XP curve was also sort of hilarious: Claude explained how in Dark Souls, you can theoretically hit level 350 or something like that, but realistically nobody gets over 140 or so because the XP requirements get astronomical. Initially, I had a 1.5xp multiplier (for how much more XP you need to get to the next level), and to hit level 100 you needed several billion XP, which is practically impossible. So I changed it 1.06 for now, and, as I keep repeating, I’ll test, test, test.

So it’s all working out, basically. I have stats and xp and levels, a stat-based challenge system, an inventory, your success chance listed on cards (though I’m considering taking this out, and using plain text to tell a player whether they’re likely to succeed or not; not sure abot this yet); basically, all the core systems for my game are now in place. My final job before I stop putting off actually writing the story is to do a rough design of the UI, and see what Claude manages to spit out based on my shit sketches.

Remember to wash your hands.

Well, anyway, I took the last couple of days off work, and aside from coughing in bed and playing Battle Brothers, I’ve been working on the game a little bit while listening to Kate Nash’s first album, something I’ve not done for probably fifteen years. It’s still roughly as good now as it was then, though not all of the lyrics have aged that well.

Rather than lying around all day feeling sorry for myself, I got around to adding a permanent location system to the game. What this means in practice is that there’s a sort of central navigation hub just called ‘The City’. From here, you’ll be able to discover and navigate to other locations within the game world - for example, to Caerdyf Central Square, or to your home. Within each location will be some permanent actions which are unlockable and then stay forever (e.g. in Central Square you can admire the statue in the middle of the plaza, after you’ve drawn the card unlocking it from the deck), as well as other locations which will be nested within that location (e.g. Central Square will contain the location for Central Square Market, unnavigable from The City overview.) Also, each location will have its own deck of cards to draw from; some cards will be universal, but some will only appear in specific locations. Fallen London eat your heart out.

To test it worked - and some bits were a fucking headache, honestly - I created a card which opens up Caerdyf Central Square from the navigation hub. You can then jump back and forth between the City and Central Square as much as you like. Once the location has been discovered, the card to discover it disappears forever (but the card can’t be discarded, and even if it could, it would only disappear after it’s been played - you’d just draw it again and again). So basically, all the logic works - it was just a case of getting the syntax correct and then asking my New Best Friend Claude to help me debug when, for example, buttons started disappearing for seemingly no reason.

I also added a separate page for the inventory, as although I implemented the logic for it last time, I didn’t actually make it viewable. Now you can see a text list of everything you’ve collected, which, for the moment, is just the gear you have when you start the game.

I’ve been thinking more and more about the main story, but I haven’t actually managed to sit down and write it yet, and I don’t think I will for a while: first, Claudeyboy recommends I figure out roughly how my UI is going to look before I commit to more systems. So, this weekend will entail me sketching out some shite UI designs on paper, taking pictures of them, and seeing if my artifical bestie can create the code for me that makes that work. Then I guess I’ll head over to itch.io to try and find some free assets, or maybe I’ll ask one of my artist friends to design some cards and backgrounds for me. Yeah, I know some artists. It all depends on what sort of style I’m going for, I suppose, and I don’t have an answer to that question yet. All I know is that the world is mythic solarpunk, if that’s even a thing. But not, like, this. More, like, this.

So that’s where I’m at with the game, unless I’m forgetting something else. In other news, I also wanted to add a newsletter option to my website, but all the services are paid, which is annoying. If you’re a dinosaur, you can still subscribe via RSS. Otherwise, you’ll just have to check back for updates whenever you remember. Eventually, I will migrate all my pretty well-performing articles from Medium over here, so there might be some random posts about handjobs and academic writing style popping up. Them’s the breaks. Remember to wash your hands.

Nonetheless, I created the inventory system in the backend, which now functions as it’s supposed to. There will be item requirements for some cards to both appear and be played, and item rewards for completing certain stories and playing certain cards. The inventory system doesn’t yet have a UI; that’s a job for another day when I’m less tired and emotional. (The metaphysical hangover hits hard.)

Currently, you start off with some basic items in your inventory: as an immigrant to Cambria, you have a suitcase, a rucksack, some clothes, and a bit of money. Your suitcase goes missing pretty early on in the story (no spoilers) as I wanted the player to start roughly from scratch, but having them be totally penniless felt too difficult. You have to find somewhere to live, after all.

Next up, after the inventory system’s UI, is basically more content. I need to flesh out the content significantly more; this will help me figure out which mechanics I actually need, which actually work, and which are broken. Some stuff sounds good in isolation on paper, but either doesn’t work or isn’t necessary for the game you’re trying to make. After I get some more content in the game, I’ll know what I need; but at the moment, I’m thinking I want to add next:

• Permanent locations with fixed-ish choices (for example, a ‘home’ location where you can always eat, sleep, work out, whatever)
• A fleshed-out reputation system with the games (currently) four main factions
• An actual time system, either based on a day-night cycle, or a turns-based system where each draw/play etc. is one turn. Or, maybe, a system where different card choices take different amount of times, for more realism. This obviously entails more mechanical difficulty.

Those are my next steps. For now, though, time to eat something greasy and play video games. Remember to wash your hands.

EDIT: I ate a burger and gamed for a couple of hours, and I felt good enough to finish off the inventory system - so there’s now a UI which lists, in a very basic form, the contents of the player’s inventory. Hurrah.

I don’t mind taking on so many projects, though. I’m doing most of them for me - except the getting famous with my band and YouTube channel part, obviously - and I don’t expect anyone to care. That’s okay, though; I’ll care so you don’t have to.

The game

The game I’m coding is card-based interactive fiction. It’s set in a world where the gods abandoned humanity and took the moon with them as they did it. This led to pretty devastating environmental crises across the world. To solve their problems, everyone moved to the equator, and humans stole the sun as revenge. And by that I mean, developed a dyson sphere for their energy needs, in order to create the weapons needed to kill the gods in case they ever return.

The player finds themselves in this world without being told this explicitly. All you know is that you’ve moved away to Cambria, to the gigantic city-state of Caerdyf (New Cardiff, if you will), to start a new life in the habitable zone. The city is welcoming - there’s no dystopian, cyberpunk border guards, no walls up around it; you just arrive, and you go in, and you make it work. The opening scenes see you enter the city, get trapped in a protest by a far-left revolutionary group, and lose most of the luggage your brought with you, leaving you with just a rucksack, a bit of cash, and the clothes on your back.

From there, I haven’t quite decided where I’m going to take it, yet. And at the moment, it doesn’t look too pretty:

but UI design comes later. Right now, I’m working on getting the mechanics functioning how I want them to, and writing as much of the story as I can. By writing the story, it helps me figure out exactly which mechanics I need for the future, and when I add a new mechanic, I end up getting interesting ideas of how to use it.

As with this website, I’m using Claude to help me code. I took a course in Godot a few years ago, and I know some of the barebones basic; I’ve also made very, very simple games already, although I did it by following courses, not from scratch. Without Claude, I’d be totally lost. Honestly, for everything about AI I’m scared of, for all the bullshit, for OpenAI adding a fucking erotic AI companion, for projects like this, it’s a lifesaver. I know that without Claude, I would never have started working on this game. If I know myself - and I do - it’s likely it will never be finished; but I like starting new things anyway, and hey, we’re all going to die.

The novel

The novel I’m writing is a young adult/new adult philosophical science fiction dystopia. Bit of a mouthful, right? In essence, a bunch of 17-year-olds stumble across some in-stasis aliens who turn out be parasitic, latching on to their backs. Biologically, the wipe the host’s initial consciousness and take complete motor control over them. (Animorphs, anyone?) However, the protagonists have a certain gene which fights against the parasite as it might an illness, and they retain their own conciousness, while receiving some very minor enhancements to their bodies. The rest of the novel deals with them trying to stop these aliens from taking over the planet.

And right now, it fucking sucks. I’m suffering from ‘Act 2 bloat’, which is obviously the majority of my novel, where basically, not much happens. The kids think up plans, realise they don’t work, muse philosophically and ethically about their situation, and then decide just to react, not to act. And frankly, it doesn’t work whatsoever. There are probably twenty or thirty thousand words (of eighty) which need to go, and then I need to rewrite it so some stuff, you know, ACTUALLY HAPPENS. Because really, between the inciting incident and the shortish third act, sod all happens.

I like my characters, though, and I like my prose style, and I like the themes. I think they all work; I think my characters feel real, and are fleshed out, but I just don’t give them the opportunity to be themselves in meaningful situations. Currently, they’re just described well - they need to be shown to be the people I’m describing them to be.

But I have to tell you, writing a novel is hard. This is the second novel I’ve finished; the first was a crappy set-piece comedy of a young man’s first year at university. (Definitely not heavily based on my life.) I might upload it here, actually, for people to read. Why not? Aside from that, I’ve only ever finished novellas and short stories, which I’ll definitely be uploading here eventually, once I’ve proofed them. Nowhere else wants to publish them, so I’ll just fucking do it myself. But a novel - hoo, boy. Writing is editing; I’ve always known that. Getting to the end of the first draft feels great, but honestly, that’s where I have the least amount of issues. I can write - writing’s easy. Editing is hard, and editing is writing. Wait, that’s a contradiction…

The detective trilogy

Meet Detective Inspector William Blackwater, working for the South Wales Police. Based on the true events of three separate murders and scandals that happened in Cardiff from the mid-80s all the wayup to 2011, I plan on making a David-Peace-Red-Riding-style dark urban noir that looks at the nature of free will, the futility of fighting against corrupt institutions, and the general ACABness we should all be living our lives for. (Only half-joking) I love cop stories, but I kinda hate cops. Weird contradiction, right?

All I’ve done so far is write a crap draft of the first half of the first novel, and plan out the rest of it. The plan also doesn’t work, by the way, because the story is just boring. Writing exciting genre-fiction stories is honestly really difficult, and genre writers don’t get enough credit for that. If you write literary fiction, all you have to do is vaguely meditate on some grand theme, and write really nice prose. Whatever actually HAPPENS in your novel doesn’t matter whatsoever. If you write genre fiction, you can focus less on the prose, but you actually have to make stuff happen, and honestly, making stuff happen is fucking hard.

I recently read the first three books by Derek Raymond, the so-called ‘godfather of British noir’, though he referred to them as black novels rather than noir novels because, presumably, he hated the French. They’re more like studies of the bad guys rather than studies of the detective, though the third one, which is probably the best detective novel I’ve ever read, manages to combine the two in a very satisfying way. ‘How the Dead Live’ combines philosophical insights, social commentary, a banging plot, an extremely likeable protagonist, and a confusing but compelling setting. I urge you to read it.

Anyway, I bring them up because they’re a big inspiration for me in writing my detective series, along with Red Riding, which is the other best series of detective novels I’ve ever read.

The music

I’ve been making music for fifteen years now, and I’ve no plans of stopping any time soon. Personally, I’ve gone through singer-songwriter acoustic slop, James Blake-inspired electronic dubstep nonsense, Aphex Twin-inspired put-you-to-sleep ambient, Thomas Köner wanky pretentious noise/soundscape, and everything in between. I like all of it, and I like making all of it, and I don’t really do it for anyone but my, though getting a 7” on a trance label would be nice, so if anyone knows of one that might accept my stuff…

My band plays a mix of skate punk, post-hardcore, and contemporary (read: spoken-word) post-punk. A couple of years ago I realised I had a load of rock music I wanted to play, and nobody to play it with, so I turned to Vampyr, which is like Tinder for musicians, found a couple of people - after a couple of false starts - and we’ve been playing together ever since. In 2024, we played nearly a concert every two weeks, which is made more impressive because we only played our first gig in March. This year’s been quieter, but we’ve been recording and having some well-earned holiday breaks. If you’re interested, we’re playing at the B-Side in Berlin on Hallowe’en.

At a bar with some friends of friends a few years ago, someone asked me if I would sell out. I think, honestly, the answer would be yes. I’d sign on to a lucrative contract to make two albums of pop slop if I meant I was then financially set to make basically whatever music I wanted for the rest of time. Obviously the money would have to be right; the whole point would be to do a Scott Walker, where you make some trash for a bit and then suddenly turn into the best experimental artist the far side of Anthony Braxton when you realise you’ve got the funds to do it. That’s the dream, isn’t it?

There’s a certain romance in staying underground, but maybe that’s just what people say when they aren’t successful. My band has a pretty dedicated following of I’d say ten people, who are almost always at our concerts, and that’s a great feeling, and I’m extremely fucking grateful to those people. They aren’t even just there to support us as mates - some of them we didn’t even know before we started playing together - they genuinely like us and our music. And anyway, most of the punk bands who went on to be really influential started playing in small scenes in their local towns. Berlin isn’t a small town, obviously, but honestly, the punk scene here isn’t as big as I expected when I started this band. I guess we need to move to Bristol.

Well, time for dinner, and then I’m off to a concert later. Remember to wash your hands.