Premise

A Twine game. In the future, humanity has colonized the solar system. You're a doctor on a space station, say, 20-40 crew, including you, built to do upkeep and maintenance on a segment of a Matryoshka brain--a supercomputer the size of the solar system itself. (There are some very interesting papers about Dyson spheres/Matryoshka brains.) 

You signed on for a three-year tour of duty out in the black, and you're two months from the end of it. Freedom is in sight. Just 60 more days of keeping the engineers from stealing the pain meds, treating plasma burns, and regrowing limbs after the latest raider attack.

You wake up one morning to find that you're the only one on board. 

The captain, your nurse,  the botanist, the guards who keep the station from being plundered, the engineers, the technicians who do the real work, everyone is gone. The station recognizes you as captain, now. All you have is yourself, your command override, a space station that you surely can't keep running by yourself, and--is the Matryoshka talking to you? It can't be. 

DAYS 1-2

Oh god, is this even feasible in two weeks? I mean, it's basically a short story with some bells, whistles, and two endings. I can pull that off. 

Yesterday I wrote out a big long flow chart of all the stuff I  might  include, including a lot of else-if-ing, because the original idea, while I was brainstorming, was to allow the reader/player to choose to be either one of the station's engineers or the station doctor. And then, once I'd barfed everything onto the paper, I started hacking away. Less narrative branching, the player locked into being the station doctor, etc. 

Also, I decided I was going to use the SugarCube format, rather than Harlowe, just because there are more resources out there for it. So I found a stylesheet I liked, and a macro that will do what I want. 

Today: 

ME: Haha, I'm totes going to make a new flowchart, a much neater one this time

ALSO ME: 

So this is what the game looks like. I've hashed out the three points where you get credit toward the good end/bad end, and tomorrow I will get down to the actual writing. (I have about a paragraph and a half in twine already, but that's it.) 

DAY 3

1200 words.

Condensation on the ceiling. Atmo controls must be on the fritz, you think, as though you know anything about station engineering. At least it didn't rain on you in your sleep. This time.

I switched to Old Twine, because all the useful resources I found were for Sugarcane, not SugarCube, and any time I spend on trying to figure out what the hell is going wrong with the javascript is time I could spend writing the thing!!!  (I don't know anything about Javascript.) I'm also having trouble with nesting if/else if statements , but that's easy to circumvent, so I'm not bothering with getting the code cute and nice.  I'm almost through the first part of the story. Now... there is much more to do.

resource links, for my reference:

cycling link macro /css

Twine CSS stylesheets

DAY 4: Oh, god, I got next to nothing done, except, like, snapping everything to the grid so it looks pretty. 

DAY 5: 2,457 words.

You have one more option. You didn't want to do this. You put both hands on your desk, wait for it to scan your palms and verify that you're the station's Medical officer, and you call up the [[Crew Vitals Access Manifest|manifest destiny]] HUD.  The CVAM shows a three-dimensional display of the Al-Biruni. All of the 42 crew members and their locations should be marked, along with their heart rate, pulse ox, body temperature, and blood pressure, as well as the status of their connection to the Cortex, the better to catch people slacking off.

(You're not supposed to have access to this. It sure isn't in the Matryoshka Maintenance Medical Officer's Manual. (The MMMOM.) Back when you and Maryam were still speaking, she helped you fix the connection between the auto-surgery software and your cortical implant, and the two of you uncovered the CVAM deep in the registry files.)

I spent the morning before I went to work writing, went to work, and came home and got to typing it up.  Then my computer BSOD'd (it does that. it's awful.) and I lost all my progress, so I had to re -type everything. I guess it helped, though; there was a lot of stuff in there I didn't need to code in. Also, I have discovered that I cannot fucking spell the word "maintenance" for the life of me.

Tomorrow: write more. Make the doctor more of a doctor. 

DAY 6

3163 words, but, like, it feels like 40,000, let me die here, bye

You are so small! Your mind moves so quickly! You are a decimal place. It has to hold you close to speak, if it doesn't want to kill you with its words. It communicates this in its joy. It has always wanted to speak!

Today time around I focused on just getting the words down from paper to Twine, and not so much on the coding--there's not a ton to begin with, really. I took a few minutes and got the CSS right so that the page would switch from white-text-on-black-background to black-on-white when I told the passage to, and all I have left to do with that is to make the links in those passages, uh, actually show up. But that's tomorrow.

Tomorrow's goals:

- oh no, it's the halfway mark

- agonize over whether I'm frontloading all the weird shit in the first third of the story.

- agonize more

- get through this particular storyline

- maybe......... ask on the discord for someone to draw me a header image? no, I cannot do that. 

- make the CSS actually work. 

- agonize

DAYS 7-???

4158 words

Plerex is one of the dozen or so drugs you have to keep locked away under a voiceprint, a retinal scan, and your command authorization. In fact, it's the sole thing you've used your auth for, until today. You only had two hypoderms in the the kit because you'd been called to the airlocks two days in a row, and there was a third EVA walk scheduled for today. 

I have literally no idea what day we're on. 10? On Friday, I hammered out my one little issue with the CSS. I knew the weekend was going to be miserable--I had to work--so I gave myself permission to say fuck it, I'm not doing this game thing, I'm going to come home, take a shower, and pass out. And today I'm back on the horse.