Enter The Story: the manifesto

Then in the early 1990s I discovered a game called Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders. It was a comedy, but was much more than that. It starred an ordinary person in the ordinary world. It was full of New Age ideas, and spanned the whole globe, and the past and the future, and out into space.

It was a revelation! The technology now exists to put unlimited ideas into a game! The whole universe on a disk! Endless stories that could join together to make an even bigger story! And you could get inside and explore and be part of the story and make it happen!

'Enter The Story' version 0.1, 1997-2003

I waited for a game like that to be made, but it never was. So by 1997 I began making plans to do it myself.

The original game was basically one big database that was created as you played. That is, if you opened a door, the computer would create rooms behind that door. If you examined a flower, the computer would add the details. You could go back and forward in time, zoom in to atoms or out to galaxies, and more. The working title was "Doors" or "The Endless Do Anything Game."

In 2000 I took a course in Pascal, then in C++, then began to code the game using Borland's Excellent C++ Builder. (See screenshots at left.) By 2003 I calculated that it would take me another fifty years to finish it! So back to the drawing board.

'Enter The Story' version 0.2, 2003-2007

I gave up the database idea, and looked round for an established adventure game engine, and Sludge seemed to be more flexible than the others. I planned to release the first game in 2012, and feature 100 stories. As time went on that goal became a more realistic ten stories and hundreds of worlds. At the suggestion of David Fox (name dropping!) I revised the plan, and decided to just release one story at a time. By April 2007 I had 5,000 scenes in the game, and a release date of December 15th 2007.

'Enter The Story' version 0.3, 2007

In April 2007 I sent an early version of the game to various people to get feedback. In general, friends and fellow amateur game developers loved it. But professional game developers - people with experience of selling games for money - said that I needed better graphics. So I began all the graphics again, from scratch. The only way to get the game finished in any reasonable time was to reduce the scene count down from 5,000 to about 130. The game would now be the first story (Les Miserables) without any of the background universe. The game was rescheduled for March 2008.

'Enter The Story' version 0.4, 2007-2008

Then a crisis hit. In November 2007 I discovered a catastrophic memory leak in Sludge that was not likely to be fixed before the game was released. With great regret I had to abandon my old friend Sludge. I could not afford any more unpleasant surprises, so chose the safest engine I could find, the market leader, Adventure Game Studio. Complete recoding meant scaling down the game again, and adding four months to the development time. The game was now scheduled for July 2008.

Testers suggested various changes, and things took longer than expected (they always do!) and the first release was finally uploaded just before midnight on December 31st, 2008.

'Enter The Story' versions 1, 2, 3, and beyond

The first story in the game is Les Miserables. The next story was due to be War and Peace, but the two delays (new graphics and new engine) have put me behind schedule. So the second release will now be Dante's Divine Comedy, a much easier game to create, and one that should ensure the next game is released on schedule, six months after the first.

It may seem unrealistic to promise the next story after six months, considering that the first story took ten years to make! But most of that time was spent learning, and going up blind alleys. And I was not just creating a game, but a game creation system. A lot of extra time was spent to make sure that future games could be added as quickly as possible.

And that is the story of Enter the Story. Follow the progress on the blog at EnterTheStory.wordpress.com

Above: a newspaper article about the first story, Les Miserables

And finally...

This project is a lot of work! This is what motivates me. From Steven Grant's advice to budding writers:

"Everyone's looking for 'The Secret' but there ain't no secret. The way to do it is to do it, and every story, particularly if you're creating your own work from scratch and not working with an established, formulized franchise, generates its own needs. ...

"[How do you cope with frequent rejection?] The answer is orneriness. ... Don't write to be great, write because you feel there's something that needs to be said that no one else will say if you don't. You want motivation: that's it. ...

"Don't bother asking around to see what other people think of [your idea]. Because it's new. On what basis can anyone else judge its theoretical value? You can't even judge its real value until you see how you've executed the idea. ...

"Just do it."

And regarding keeping the precious idea secret? Paul Graham wrote:

"Howard Aiken said 'Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.' ... Any really good new idea will seem bad to most people; otherwise someone would already be doing it."

Wise advice. If I'd followed it then this game would have been on sale at least a year earlier, probably two. But I've learned my lesson. I'm gonna do this thing, whether people like it or not. Because I know that, eventually, after a few years when it starts to really grow, then people WILL like it. Why? Because I have great taste. :)