August, for me, is always a month marked with its own sense of shifting polarity. Some Augusts are really, really significant (I met the love of my life on the 1st!) but sometimes they’re also just super inert. I had a weird and fairly unpleasant relationship with summer vacation as a kid – it should suffice to say that I was usually pretty eager to return to a structure that regularly took me away from my house – but even that couldn’t suppress the dawn of August and the melancholy heralded by thinking that Summer Was Almost Over. If anything happened during that period, it happened in July; by August, an already limited supply of prescheduled Events was typically exhausted, leaving the whole of the month as a lacuna you generally had to fill in yourself. I spent a lot of that time with nowhere to go and nothing to do that hadn’t been done six times already.
Some (but thankfully not all) of that insensate void seems to have made the jump into adulthood. Also, between Rachel and I having our anniversary on the 1st and my birthday falling on September 1st, the whole thing has started feeling like the non-place between Christmas and New Years. I’m not excited to turn 21, but I am excited for September. September is traditionally a good month. Here’s hoping.
Anyway, that’s sorta where I’ve been since July. Just readin’ and watchin’ and playin’ and workin’ with a sense that I’m floating rudderless to the other side. On the subject of those first three items, this update is a little different from the previous one; I haven’t written about everything I’m experiencing, since these are evidently meatier than I expected them to be. This one is already at 300 words! So I’m gonna stick to my main focus of the last few weeks, which has been game development. You can be assured that I’ll figure out how to structure these at some point, and that, between watching The X-Files, playing Morrowind, and reading Algernon Blackwood, my brain feels a lot like that Witching Hour painting by Andrew Wyeth… if someone photoshopped it to appear as if the Creature from the Black Lagoon is crawling through the open window. I’m largely okay with this.
The blog has fallen to the wayside, but thankfully not due to a lack of interest! It’s less than two months old, so that would be unfortunate. Updates are slow because…
What We’re Makin’
Fun fact: An important location named the silk house (proper nouns disallowed) was originally called the moth house, but then a horror game named The Moth House showed up on my itch.io feed and spooked the hell out of me. We decided to change the name to the aforementioned title, which I like way more. So thanks, The Moth House!*
*I still haven’t played it in fear that I’ll discover that we’ve somehow been ripping it off the entire time. Its contents have become forbidden knowledge to me. If you tell me anything about it, there will be consequences.
… we’re nearly finished our game! Since completing the final draft of the script, I’ve been checking off a handful of creative tasks – including a few lines of ideographic dialogue that I’ve been stalling on – that should make Chiaroscuro Imago more or less Complete, by our standards. Rachel is going down her own list of various artistic & technical tasks, and she’s getting down to the bottom too. I’m still waiting on some music from a friend of ours. After that, we’ll be sending builds to a few of our pals for a final round of feedback, and then we’re out, I guess. Feels weird!
The plan was to release it by the end of the month, but Rachel is in the process of moving house and has also, as I’m typing, been without electricity for nearly 24 hours. So August 31st may very well pass us by. But it’s still going to be pretty close! Probably early September or thereabouts. It’ll come out on itch.io, so there shouldn’t be much prep required on our ends (and I’ll start working to get that page up whenever her electricity comes back with milk and cigarettes, just like it promised).
I’ll refrain from talking about what the game is here, at least until it’s out. To quote David Lynch, the celebrated mind behind Woodcutters from Fiery Ships and Twin Peaks VR, “the game is the talking!!” However, for a mind perverted by a lust for knowledge, I can offer a collection of musings… (These are just for you. Don’t tell anyone else!)
THE SCRIPT
After 3-4 drafts, the final script sits at about 2000 words. That ended up being more than I expected! It got there from about 800-1000 words, many of which contained various false starts and sketches that tried to grasp at what I felt was an essential quality missing from the game’s poetic eeriness. Right now, it feels as implicative and interesting as I was hoping it’d be – the story appears readable between all the more surreal and alien qualities that lend it an ideal sense of benighted mystery, or so I hope.
In lieu of further narrative talk, here’s a loose list of some influences that come to mind whenever I sit down and work on Chiaroscuro:
- Lost Highway
- House of Leaves
- Beekeeping in Ancient Rome
- The Insect God
- Stephen King’s The Shining, But Primarily That One Bit Where Jack Kills A Hive Of Wasps And Then They All Simultaneously Come Back To Life Because The Hive (?) Starts Generating More
- Marvin Cone paintings
- Bugonia
- The Ghost of a Flea
A more general source of inspiration has been late 19th and early 20th century weird fiction. Think The House on the Borderland, The Willows, The Great God Pan, etc. An experience that got embedded in my mind was my first time fully reading Moby-Dick, which happened earlier this year, and which preceded me reading some other books from that period. I find that the past can feel like an alien place, familiar and yet imagined, somehow illegible in spite of everything you can understand. All of these stories contend with the unknown and the unseen, but Moby-Dick’s general esoterica – its use of granular naval terms, chunks of outmoded expression, and entire chapters dedicated to the particulars of 19th century cetology – creates a place you can wholly observe that feels nonetheless separate, as if glimpsed through a murky glass of time and change. Moby-Dick even achieves a similar effect to the weird fiction that would germinate from the turn of the century, since all of these stories are ultimately about bodies of knowledge and experience, often personified, that are foreign to mankind.
I tried to fill the game with snatches of oddly poetic fragments between the more blunt, prosaic exchanges. They’re fun to write, and I hope they help allude to a grander, stranger image of what this place is like and how its inhabitants communicate across cultural lines. The Weavers from Perdido Street Station tend to serve as a blueprint for me.
Digression: As of now, WordPress enforces a 2 MB limit on media uploads that I’m still trying to figure out how to increase to a respectable, like, 5 MB. Until I fix it, keep in mind that some of these screenshots are getting compressed by hand and might secretly look strange to someone who isn’t me. You know who you are.
I tried to achieve a similar effect in Chiaroscuro by using a lot of words I expect the average player to be unfamiliar with: effluvium, palaver, troika, and plenty of others. My hope is that most people will stumble through them, maybe getting some idea of what they refer to, maybe not. Ideally, they create an effect similar to two people with the same language speaking across an insurmountable gulf – like talking to a pilgrim, or alternatively, like someone from France visiting Quebec.
Some of these words are less common synonyms, some are purely outmoded, some are literary enough to be rarely seen outside of books, and a few gesture towards particular mythological concepts that will hopefully make for meatier interpretation and, if nothing else, are just ideas and sources that I find really interesting. If Chiaroscuro Imago encourages you to learn about something you never would’ve learned about otherwise, I’ll consider it a success.
To close, here’s a quote from Blaise Cendrars that I stumbled upon a month or two before completing my final draft of the script:
The passage between the reality of the street and the blazing artificiality of a bar happens so easily, and so unexpectedly. . . . You feel a sense of vertigo. Suddenly, you are hanging on to your table for dear life, like a wreck tossed about a tidal wave of dancing couples in a hot-jazz club. The first shot of alcohol down, overwhelmed by the abstract decor, nothing can help you figure out where you are, or how you got there.
Are you in Shanghai? In Buenos Aires? In a New York “speak-easy”? Or are you in Paris?
Without being aware of it, you have landed, simply and completely, in gangsland—a cynical and triumphant spectacle of neon lights in a miserable little room, where nothing is a mystery, but everything is disturbing.
Nothing so perfectly landed upon that missing element I kept trying to find.
It’s interesting to note that entomology and etymology are close enough to be mistaken for one another.
THE PRICE
The primary export of itch.io has always been its selection of chumbox horror games, often sifted through on a lost & lazy twilight evening by freaks and variety streamers alike. It casts you as an intrepid miner panning for small scraps of gold trapped between clumps of dirt – if the dirt always seemed to take place in a convenience store at night. The ecosystem is one of 10-20 minute experiences, usually with a basic hook, generally riffing back-to-back on a previous “hit.” The space is intimate without being particularly organized – every slight noise seems to echo from one hallway to another. Many are First Games, owing to the approachability and agreed flexibility of creating a horror game over anything else; typically, they’re all free.
We had always imagined Chiaroscuro Imago as a free game (when in Rome, and so on). I didn’t see much opportunity in charging anything for it, and I still don’t – I expect to make somewhere in the ballpark of fifty bucks, if we’re lucky. Primarily, charging money for it just… didn’t make sense? It’s our first game and it’s about twenty minutes long, but moreover, it’s just easier to dump it out there as an oddity you stumble across and spontaneously play vs. turning it into a Product with Customers where somebody might hit a bug and complain that their money was wasted. If there’s not much money to be made, and we’re not desperate for fifty bucks, why charge anything?
I like to think of Chiaroscuro Imago as the videogame equivalent of a midnight movie, a category I hold in high esteem. When I think of midnight games, titles like Anatomy, Growing My Grandpa, and Fatum Betula (et al.) come to mind. They’re short, generally under six bucks, and follow you to bed. They feel like games you might encounter in a dim room, distant and hazy, chiefly parsed by your midnight mind: a framework unable (unwilling) to see what might surround you. What’s that old black-and-white movie on that ancient TV? What’s down the staircase at the end of the hall? Why are the boards creaking against an unseen weight? And if…
More than making money, charging some just strikes me as moving from the unmarked VHS to the ticket booth on an empty, caliginous street. Treat it like a double bill and watch Visitation or Meshes of the Afternoon or Premonitions Following an Evil Deed or something beforehand. (One of these days, we’ll make a game where you can sit down and watch black-and-white movies from the public domain. There’s literally nothing stopping you from letting a player watch the entirety of Häxan in a moist, dripping room. Streamers will love it.)
I’m thinking we’ll set the price at $3.00 USD. It just seems like a good cost for it, and frankly, anyone who complains about being “dissatisfied” by their purchase comes off like a bit of a loser. You’re totally welcome to pirate it – I might put it up somewhere myself so you don’t have to source it from a chintzy torrent. But I think three bucks is a good impulse price that, as a bonus, might make us a little money. With your help, we can buy several pieces of cheese to then feed to Rachel’s wonderful dog, Sadie, who looks like a mouse and does a little spin whenever she knows she’s getting a piece of cheese. So long as she keeps spinning, I am already rich.
WITH ENTRAILS (YOU ARE HERE)
I continue fighting the urge to write about Morrowind. Stay strong.
When the game is out, I want to shift back here. I haven’t been writing a lot! It’s hard to balance it all – bad job, good job, hobby job, shoddy job – and I suspect WITH ENTRAILS will probably amount to a few articles a month until things calm down a bit. My dream was at least two significant “features” a month, which I still think is reasonable, circumstances permitting. We can even call this a feature, as a gift.
If I can, I’ll try to get one other thing out before the end of the month. There are so many things I haven’t gotten the chance to do here yet: short horror fiction, occult topics, more comedy-focused stuff. Part of jumping off Medium was so I could write way more than periodic articles about games and movies, but I’m mostly still doing periodic articles about games and movies. They’re just too easy!
That said, I saw Alien: Romulus and felt like writing a little review-esque thing for it, so maybe I’ll do that. I won’t even write what I thought about the movie here, thus leaving it as unfinished business in the filing system of my brain. Did I like those choices? Did I hate those choices? Maybe you’ll be surprised!
“Special Thanks” to 20th Century Studios, Disney, and the estate of the late Sir Ian Holm, all of whom have ensured that nobody will be surprised (except in horror).
TO CONCLUDE
Cool things happening. Cooler things happening soon. I still haven’t announced this blog! Maybe I’ll do that soon, or maybe I won’t. You’ll learn to live with it – until the day when you can’t seem to forget.
“Nobody is coming to get you anymore.”