Jul 24, 2025
at the start of working on my three daughters, i wanted to put together a sort of planning document on the project: its goals, its affect, how i want to put it together, so on. in short:
- a (long form) piece of interactive fiction i’m calling (with no apologies to the more widely used chinese term) a web-novel
- written in my favorite, signiture fragments
- the verbs of choice are search, contemplate, and lie
influence
the story’s old, but the idea for how to structure it’s basically a straight line from her story and other sam barlow games: FMV hyperlink games in which you, the unseen character, seek out answers as well as the questions that led to them. this fit perfectly into the story i had because
story
i hadn’t quite the shape of it yet, only the idea, as well as a title and a first line. the title: my three daughers. the first line: I have two daughters, of which I’m very proud. there’s a lot more to the story, subject to change bc im writing it still now, but the whole idea’s already there: the title has three daughters, the mother only claims two. why’s she lying and what about?
fusion
writing a liar is easy, everyone does it, its old hat. what i struggled with more was the second aspect of my narrator’s personality: avoidance. every time i sat down to draft the story, the same issue recurred. either i’d go on to long describing the other’s daughters, the mother’s life, the themes of the story, anything, in order to put off the “reveal” of the obvious third daughter for too long or, conversely, i’d bring the daughter up too soon, immediately crashing the illusion of the book
(of course, aside, writing avoidant characters is maybe the major struggle of my work, but at least im not usually doing first person, where they gotta do it. like all great works of art, avoidant obsessions are never best described by those who bring them into the world)
thus (see title of this part) my current draft for the story: what if we add another person to the mix, a player so to speak. the mother doesn’t want to tell the story and never will, but what if we add someone external who wants to hear it? you, dear reader/player, can be the active participant (i hope it works)
experiential shape
i dont have a sam barlow sized budget or any real interest in video, but i do got wikipedia. the shape of the story’s simple then: split the narrative into nodes, each which hyperlinks out to a few others. users can click on the words that interest them most (of course, the prose will influence this), and the computer will keep track of what they click. as more information comes out, the nodes will expand or change to reflect that. this way my narrator can lie and leave things out, but the reader/player can drill down into the text until lies break
how tho?
- i’m writing the fragments in a notebook now, with lots of underlines, annotations, and arrows pointing out where text will change
- eventually, i’ll put this in the browser, my text-renderer of choice, and use javascript to track a lot of boolean seen/unseen flags
- i’m not yet sure how to store the text once its written. json seems “standard” given this is 2025 and i know javascript, but im tempted by the more heavily structured shape of xml, maybe bc while working i’ve been watching gdc talks on caves of qud. the biggest deciding factor will probably be how to deal with small bits of updating text (ie “two daughters” -> “three daughters”), whose arbitrary shape may be easier to read in xml
issues
- how to type it up: ie, markdown that generates the pages, or straight into code
- length: how long would someone wanna read it?
- save/loading (just cause i’ve never done it before). it might be nice to hash the save data into the url as well, for use with browser syncing and bookmarks
- readers: who will read it
end
not sure if i’ll have many devlogs on this till im further into a coding stage, but its so far been fun. bye bye