hello, everyone! 

below is a post from my dev blog (here) about my thought process behind writing & coding the hanging heart. it's pretty long, but it was a fun exercise. thank you so much for following & being interested in the game!

the hanging heart postmortem

the hanging heart was my first IF game that was actually planned from the start as an IF game. my actual first IF game was a short story i adapted to interactive fiction and because of that had it didn’t explore the medium very well. it had a few choices, but only the last one actually influenced the story in a meaningful way and only for one passage. i quite like it even today, but it wasn’t very interactive fiction-y, so to speak.

with the hanging heart i had the opportunity to actually try out the medium for real, constrained as i was by time. and… i think i did a passable job at most, to be honest. there is much about the game that i’d like to improve, to make things clearer and add more variation to the story, but it’s a start, and one that helped me learn a lot in a short amount of time, mostly about my process, how i develop stories and how i should proceed going forward with briarheart (my main project)’s development.

the first insight i got from these last two weeks of frantic typing is that i was probably right when i decided not to plan briarheart meticulously like i usually do my regular fiction projects. i don’t have briarheart planned out, just a general idea of what will happen and where the story will end, so i did more or less the same for the hanging heart. when i decided half way through a month long game jam that i was going to give it a try, i had very little about the story.

that’s what i knew about the game on day 1: it would involve a magical tree that somehow had as its only fruit an actual beating heart. mc wanted it for Reasons. it would include angels. the magical tree grew out of one of these angels, somehow. also the world is ending/ended because it can’t be a project by me if the world isn’t ending in some way.

(spoilers for the hanging heart from now on!! please don't continue if you haven't played it yet.)

the mc actually being an angel themselves? the guardian and the songbird being their queerplatonic partner & romantic partner respectively? mc having caused the war that broke the world? the songbird being the one who struck mc down? the guardian having fallen with them?

all this came from writing down the story and/or thinking about what i should write next. hell, even the characters themselves came from writing the intro post for the game. i just came up with them while drafting that post maybe two days before i actually published it on my dev blog. except for the songbird, which i already knew of because of the drawing of them on said magical tree. which i only made because i thought it looked cool. i had no idea about the songbird being the mc’s failed murderer at that point either.

the backwards gardener

as you can see, my “planning” process is a bit of a mess.

but it worked out, somehow. i actually really like the hanging heart and its characters. it could be a lot better, sure, especially in the clarity of what certain choices mean & the game’s overall arc, but it is full of stuff i like. it’s shamelessly self-indulgent. briarheart is supposed to be like that too, except in a much larger scale. so while i can look at the hanging heart and admit to myself that it’s a game that borders on decent at best and a confusing mess at worst, i still honestly quite enjoy it.

so, why did it work? as in, how i ended up with a story that is at least coherent if i had no idea about character motivations, backstory or anything like that? after years of reading writing books that went on about how to plan or plot a story, and years of meticulously writing down character arcs, scene breakdowns and plot beats for my regular fiction, i planned, wrote and coded the hanging heart in 14 days without any of it. and it was a blast!

which is where that first insight popped into existence in my mind: i write based on dynamics or emotions i enjoy and work my way backwards to explain why it exists and makes some kind of sense in the story. take the guardian, for example. i came up with them as i was writing the intro post for the game, which only mentions that they hate mc for Reasons. what Reasons? who knows! certainly not me. but i thought it’d make an interesting dynamic, the mc without a past that somehow managed to infuriate the village guardian in said lost past, though obviously the village guardian doesn’t hate the mc. not really. or maybe they do, but it’s more complex than that.

and from that i worked my way backwards to the guardian being a fallen angel just like the mc, who was so utterly devoted to them that they stood by them while mc did Bad Shit but that grew to resent them in some way when that eventually blew up in their faces in the form of the songbird actually having common sense. there is no question that the guardian loves the mc deeply, but they also hate them in a way, or at least they hate what mc did. in the years stuck in the time loop of the hanging heart, the guardian had ample opportunity to see the consequences of the mc’s actions on the regular people living in a broken world, and it’s their name. they are the guardian, a protector. so that bothers them a lot.

and still they stand by the mc. which is the point of their character, really. and probably something they & the mc should work on, but, oh well.

the same thing happened with the songbird. from tree cryptid to a lover who grew to abhor what mc was doing while still loving them in the span of a few “what the hell happens now” sessions. the intro post mentions the songbird being able to take the heart but not doing so, and mc questioning why. at the time i had no clue why. but by the end of the story it is made clear that the songbird themselves is to blame for that tree in the first place. they never coveted the heart. they always wanted you to take it.

see also: the dreams that mc has near the end of the story. at first, they were vaguely defined in my head as “mc dreams some stuff with chosen route that lets them now more about their relationship & what happened”. it was only when i was about to write these dreams that the idea of them being from the pov of either the guardian or the songbird showed up wrapped in a gift box in my head. it ended up being a good way to show more of the guardian’s/the songbird’s relationship with mc before it all went to shit for them.

in the end, there is planning.

which isn’t to say i didn’t plan at all. i did. but in a very bare bones kind of way. see:

this is me coming up with the overall structure for the game (also with the name!), back when the herbalist route was a thing. i’m a very visual person, so if i can’t see the routes/branches of the story i get lost real quick. so here it was when i decided in the visit tree -> jump or don’t jump the fence (back then it was a gate i guess) -> meet person -> hub of locations structure, which is definitely inspired by the way chapter one of wayfarer by idrellegames is set up and by how visual novels like scarlet hollow and crown of leaves work.

this little chart eventually evolved to this:

(plus me figuring out the “points to reach heart” thingy).

it ended up being fairly accurate!

so i do plan stuff. just not down to the details i used to for my regular fiction. and so far it has worked really well. i didn’t feel like writing the hanging heart was like pulling teeth, like i remember my regular fiction being two years ago when i had scene breakdowns and chapter breakdowns and plot points and all that. it was fun, a bit stressful because of the jam deadline, but it all flowed super well all things considered. and i’m smitten with my characters once again, which is always nice.

i even remembered i have a sketchbook. so here you have pre-fall guardian and the songbird. are the angels in the hanging heart always naked? who knows. certainly not me.

gearing up for briarheart

so, what does that mean for my main project, briarheart? well, for one thing, it means i will keep my idea of not planning it like i did my regular fiction. i will go with the flow, see where the story takes me and fill it with stuff i like. the hanging heart was a very small test subject, so to speak, so i may encounter difficulties in briarheart that i didn’t in the hanging heart, but i’m confident with my brainstorming/“planning” process so far.

which bring us to the second insight this game jam project gave me: my writing process really needs to change for IF games.

i’m used to opening up google docs and writing to my heart’s content but that didn’t work very well for me in the hanging heart. i wanted to include flavor text for a location if you visited x or y before, for example. like, how can mc not think of the guardian’s wing scars when visiting the river of wings in the songbird route if they went to the tavern first? or how the mc would definitely recognize the painting of the songbird in the painted cove in the guardian route, but only if they went to the hungering tree and actually met the songbird first. if they didn’t go to the hungering tree first, then they would have no idea of what this creature the guardian painted is, but they would certainly recognize the songbird from the painting once they went to the hungering tree after.

so, continuity problems. flavor text problems. and managing these things in a google docs was… not fun. i’m not even saying it wasn’t practical (i literally just bolded lines that had to meet some condition to appear, for example, so i could find them later when putting the game in twine) but it wasn’t fun. it was annoying to keep track of these bolded lines and a pain in the ass to come up with variables i didn’t set up before to actually make them appear or not appear in game.

remember planning? yeah. downsides and upsides, i guess.

i’m still thinking about how i want to handle this. should i move to visual studio code, my day job companion, and code as i go? and in a long game like briarheart, how long should i plan these variables? doesn’t this go completely against my going with flow philosophy? some level of planning is required for a game like briarheart, obviously. should i just use variables for most choices, on the off chance that i will need the game to remember which one the player picked waaaay later?

some food for thought. i have some ideas for how i want to tackle these issues, so it was good that the hanging heart came along now and made me realize there are issues.

in conclusion…

deadlines! i work well under pressure. if it weren’t for the game jam deadline, the hanging heart would probably not be done now, or ever. so i need deadlines for briarheart too, though looser ones or it will become too stressful to be fun. i have some coding projects to take care of before i can dive back into briarheart, but my goal now is to have the first chapter figured out by february 10th. not written, not planned out, but figured out. let’s see what happens.

that’s it, i guess. thank you for reading these ramblings and until the next one!