I got excited while writing this commentary, because I was going
through my earlier drafts and I remembered that Constellation
Games has deleted scenes! But then I was a little less excited because the deleted scenes don't start until chapter 25. Let's not think about the deleted scenes for a while.
Also missing from the second draft was a sense of how Crispy Duck
Games came to be. Crispy Duck was always supposed to be important to
the story, but Ariel kept futzing around on side projects until very
late in the book. The idea of remaking CDBOEGOACC games didn't come
up until chapter 14, and the company name wasn't mentioned until
chapter 24! I got rid of one of the side projects (more about this
later) and dramatized the creation of the game studio in a way that
makes it clear that Jenny is involved in the project from the start.
The two new scenes also flesh out some character bits I didn't cover in
the second draft: why Ariel thinks the CDBOEGOACC is a gold mine, why
others disagree or don't care, and why peoples' objections just make
Ariel more determined to prove them wrong.
You might have noticed that Gatekeeper is very similar to Pong. I wouldn't be surprised if one of the settings on Atari's Video Olympics was equivalent to Gatekeeper. It's such a simple game we considered implementing Gatekeeper for iOS as a subscription bonus, but... no time!
And there we go. Tune in next Tuesday for the heart-pounding chapter 6, when Ariel will say, "This form is a fake. There's no Paperwork Reduction Act notice."
[Drawing credits: Brandon Eck and NASA.]
(2) Tue Dec 27 2011 11:31 CG Author Commentary #5: "Let's Play":
After some polite outcry we're back to commentary on Tuesday. I don't
have a lot to say about this chapter, and/or I'm fighting off an artisan seasonal cold,
so this one's relatively short.
Most of this chapter is new in draft 3. Ariel's dysfunctional
relationship with Reflex Games became more important the further I
went through the second draft, so I had to add an early scene to set
it up.
Now that Ariel has (limited) ability to translate the CDBOEGOACC I
can dump all my unused ideas for games/hardware into the Twitter feed!
Except that I didn't do that. The stuff you saw last week, the computers
powered by pulsars and so on, was all new material. Almost all the
stuff going forward is also new. I'm not sure why I reused so little.
Partly because the Twitter medium
allows for different kinds of jokes, partly because my leftover material wasn't as good as I'd been imagining, but also because it's fun to come up with this stuff. Every game or piece of hardware is a little SF story, a glimpse into an alien culture.
- Comments:
Posted by zztzed at Tue Dec 27 2011 13:58
The description of the Brain Embryo's interface in Ariel's review of Gatekeeper did a lot more (for me, at least) to make the Farang seem alien than Ariel's description of the Farang themselves in the blog post in chapter 3. I'm not sure exactly what this says about me, but at a minimum it probably makes certain implications about the amount of my life I've spent using computers.
Posted by Ben Heaton at Thu Dec 29 2011 17:51
Yeah, I had the same feeling. Hearing that an alien looks weird doesn't seem nearly as important as how different their interfaces are.Also, when I read the "I am going to do research on human zombies to prove you wrong" teaser last week, I assumed they'd be philosophical zombies. Not sure why.