Wow, that prose is rough. Whatever. Here we go. 

THE ENGINE: Twine 1.

THE PREMISE: Some sort of fantasy vaguely 1890s-level tech city. A mysterious greenhouse emerges from the ground, magically displaces an entire factory district, plunks itself down, and does absolutely nothing. You're a wizard professor sent by the city and your university, along  with an assistant, to investigate the greenhouse, assess whether it's a threat, and take samples from the inside. 

Needless to say, It's Much Bigger On The Inside. 

DAYS 1+2

Well, I'm starting this on vacation, which is nice. (The not-nice thing is that my internet access in the place I'm staying is garbage!) I've been brainstorming this for the past week, and I've spent the last two days doing further brainstorming/outlining. What I want to do is model this as a severely scaled down version of porpentine's howling dogs--in the sense that it's a series of... stories linked by a central hub that you return to, and which changes gradually as you go through the sub-stories. 

The original plan was to have there be three sub-stories: a trip through high mountain, deep forest, and the chaparral. I was sitting down and working out story beats for each one, and went, "oh, this is too much, I should scale it back, I only have two weeks to do this shit," so it may be only a trip through the forest and a mountain.  The chaparral is fascinating, though, and if time permits I may put it back in. 

I've only barely started putting this into twine. I'm excited to do something a little more complicated than just a short story with some clicky bits! 

p.s. it's gonna be gay 

DAY 3: 

303 words. I'm not on my actual computer, so instead of writing this directly in Twine I'm doing this in a google doc.  I don't know if this is going to make it take longer, but I do know that rearranging text will be a lot easier if it's not stuck in tiny boxes. 

TO-DO

- write more.

- hunt down the code I used for "a planet of certain mass," you know, that one, with the clicking

- figure out how to do whole ass image backgrounds in twine 1 for the aesthetic (this should not be hard)

- implement having a choice of a chill butch swordswoman assistant or a nervewracking sorceress assistant, which will change the story in small ways here and there

DAY 4

Uhhh like 1000 words? As it turns out, writing this in google docs was a good idea. Probably? I can code later. In a perfect world I'd be doing in Notepad++. The "bit of code" I was talking about yesterday was the cycling link macro from here, which is a blessing and which I'm linking here so I don't lose it. Anyway, it's going fine. I want to start putting this into twine proper by the weekend. Today I figured out the structure of the thing, which looks like this aggressively garbage MS Paint diagram:

TO-DO:
- Keep writing, mostly. I need to be at my actual computer before I start putting together  the game proper. 

DAY 5

I did not do a thing today except make a draft of what will eventually be the game's cover image. I like it so far, but I will probably change it like five times before I post the game! 

DAY 6

Word count: don't look at me, I'm so tired. No, uh, I sat down and wrote  550 words in an hour after work, which is pretty much on pace for me.  Here's a problem I've identified: theoretically, someone playing this can play the routes in roughly any order (1 or 2 first, or 3 and 4 first.) But! I'm writing them in an order.  I guess the challenge is in revealing different parts of the world in each without rehashing things I've revealed in other paths.  

To-do: 

- Finish the river path

- Write the clearings, valley, and cave paths 

- Write

- TOMORROW NIGHT: start getting what I have into Twine, ffs. 

DAY 6

I'm still working, I'm just taking a break from one (1) miserable hour of struggling with CSS in twine and thirty minutes of writing. Progress: I have made it. 

Eventually, you come to a place where the walls of the chasm are so far out you can hardly find them, and your hand brushes something. You scream and wake <<$compn>>, who grabs you around the waist and tries to haul you up. 

But you don't let her. Your light is nothing, in this leviathan blackness. You push more power into it, and you see that what you've found is not the end of the chasm, it goes down beyond this, it never ends, you're sure of this by now. What you have found are [[tree roots, infinitely long, stretching out from the dark.|river19]]

DAY 7

4,039 words. Today:  we grind. I fixed my dang CSS, got everything I'd written in google docs into Twine, got it formatted, and wrote a shitload more.  To have a functional game by the end of the work period, I may have to scale it back again, but you know what, I've got until next Sunday, I can pull this off.  

DAY 8

That second picture up there is last year's Big Twine Game vs. this year's Big Twine Game. Haha! Bye. Today I finished sub-story (route?) 2/4. I also got my roommate to play through it and see if she could find any formatting errors

TO-DO

- Re-write the whole ass beginning

- Write stories 3 and 4

- Add cross-referential  bits to the various sub-stories

- Cry because I'm a withered husk of a person

DAYS 9-12

6079 words. Guess who got sick and had to work through being sick!! Guess who has come home exhausted for the last three nights. Me. It's me. Tonight I managed to scrape together enough brain cells to know that I have to scale this back one more time--what I scraped out is assuredly going to make an interesting game someday, just not this game, and that's okay. Visions are meant to change. I also know sort of how this ends, and that is in blood, tears, lesbians, and fungi, but not necessarily in that order. There's an outline. I'll have it done by the deadline.