Writing Archives - The Occult Triangle Lab

August 3, 2019December 22, 2019

Making ‘Black Heaven: A Necromantic Dating Sim’, Part 2: Narrative

Welcome back to my ongoing series of posts on my game demo project “Black Heaven: a Necromantic Dating Sim”!

If you haven’t read part Part 1, go read that first, you animal.

BlackHeavenLogoWhite Blog Crop — Logo design by Joel Clapp.

This time, I’m talking about narrative—outlining the story, figuring out the characters, and writing the opening scene. Because Black Heaven is just a demo at this stage, there are only four scenes, each of which introduces the player to one of the key characters: the necromancer No-Eyes, the scholar Ru Okazi, the martial arts master Izagi Ito, and the conwoman Leathe. Still, putting together the demo meant having a general outline of the plot for the entire game, as well as in-depth outlines for the characters.

Plot and Setting

The first step in creating the game’s narrative was brainstorming the plot. After a few iterations on the general idea of collecting ghosts for a necromancer in a post-apocalyptic fantasy world, I came up with this summary:

Five years ago, a devastating plague spread across the world, driving humanity into the long-abandoned subterranean ruins known as the Starving Kingdoms. As one of the few survivors, you’ve been living a lonely existence, haunted by memories of the world you knew…until a necromancer named No-Eyes offers you a deal: if you bring him the ghosts of three people, he will bind one of them to you for eternity. However, the others will be trapped in his grimoire forever.

This summary was eventually adapted into the game’s overall description, but first and foremost it was a clear, concise encapsulation of the game’s setting, plot and conflict. I split it into four parts:

Setting: post-apocalyptic fantasy world ravaged by a plague
Plot:
- Desire: your character is lonely, and desires companionship
- Solution: you make a deal with a necromancer to obtain a ghost companion
Conflict A: you must find and capture the ghosts, as well as convince one to become your companion
Conflict B: if you fulfill your end of the deal, the other ghosts you collect will be doomed

Apart from the expected challenge of romancing one of the ghosts (Conflict A), I wanted there to be another conflict for the player to deal with, which was a moral dilemma that asked whether the player would sacrifice the souls of the other two ghosts they didn’t choose to romance (Conflict B). The moral implications of Conflict B eventually developed into a third secret, conflict, which I won’t go into detail here…

Setting

As for setting, I drew strong inspiration from the landscapes and worlds of Dark Souls and Bloodborne (the latter of which is also afflicted by a rampant plague). I liked the idea of exploring the ruins of a dark, subterranean city, and decided to set the game partly underground.

When it came to the worldbuilding aspects of the game, such as magic, metaphysics, and history, I drew on my own body of stories. One of the key elements I incorporated was “physiomancy,” the study of the human body with the goal of discovering a path to eternal life. The main character used to be a physiomancer, as were No-Eyes and Ru, and the study of immortality is woven into the origin of the plague that swept through the world.

Here are some of the visual references I used when imagining the world of the game (all are from the Dark Souls series or Bloodborne):

Characters

The first and most important character I figured out for the story was No-Eyes—he’s the primary “antagonist” and the person who gets the plot going. The player meets him while scavenging in a subterranean library, an encounter that serves as the intro to the game.

I decided to use a character profile format I’d picked up when I was interviewing at Gameloft, which included an occupation, personality, and key words. Here’s what No-Eyes’ character profile looked like:

NO-EYES

20190616_222553 — A sketch I made of No-Eyes.

Key Appearance Traits: close-fitting black robes, smooth, eyeless helmet, gloves, no exposed skin, tall, emaciated

Occupation: Necromancer

Personality: No-Eyes is irreverent, outgoing, charismatic, highly intelligent, cynical, and entirely without morals. He sees other humans as amusements or puppets, and is highly adept at twisting them to his own ends.

Key words: relaxed, conniving, cruel, humorous

The other character profiles followed this same format—you can read all of them in the Art Brief.

One of the things I learned during my creative writing courses is to set up “trios” of characters: trios allow a writer to flesh out characters by making their traits opposed to one another, which “bakes in” the potential for conflict and tension. For the demo, I decided to introduce a distinct trio of potential romance interests:

Ru, the shy scholar
Izagi, the fierce martial artist
Leathe, the shrewd conwoman

Each of these characters was designed to be easily and intuitively understood, but with a few hidden dimensions unique to each, which would come into play in their horror forms and relationships with the player.

Of course, there’s already an avalanche of articles, charts, and memes exploring the very well-established archetypes of female romantic interests in anime, like this one:

I’m not a huge fan of this kind of pigeonholing, but I do understand that most characters end up falling into archetypes. Ru, for example, resembles Yuri from DDLC: shy, bookish girl who’s nervous around other people. No-Eyes resembles an archetypal Mephistopheles or “manipulative bastard.”

If Joseph Campbell has taught me anything, it’s that archetypes are a part of writing. It’s not a bad thing that a character is recognizable or familiar, but a writer needs to make their own mark on them to make them unique.

Working with Archetpyes and Creating Complex Characters

After thinking about conversation trees and how I would structure player interactions with the characters, I decided to take inspiration from Mass Effect‘s Paragon and Renegade elements. However, instead of a dichotomous ‘hero’ or ‘rogue’ option for each conversation, I created a three-option system, where each choice falls into one of the following attitudes and appeals to certain characters:

Gentle (associated with Ru)
Bold (associated with Izagi)
Cunning (associated with Leathe and No-Eyes)

The more the player chooses a certain type of option (such as “Gentle”), the higher the disposition of the corresponding characters. However, though Izagi responds positively to the Bold options because her character’s ‘archetype’ is fierce and brash, her personality is more complicated than that.

One key idea I took from my writing courses is that complex, believable characters are built on contradictions. When I was designing the character of Leathe, for example, I wanted her to take pride in her ability to manipulate people, emotionally and physically—as a conwoman, she sees it as part of her craft, as well as proof that she’s smarter than other people. The contradiction is this: Leathe ends up getting tired of pretending to be someone she’s not, but is too afraid of expressing herself genuinely, which is something she associates with vulnerability.

These contradictions are present in each character, and end up branching out into smaller traits that define the character’s personality. If you want to read more about how this kind of characterization is employed in games, check out my piece on Mass Effect 2‘s infamous fight between Jack and Miranda.

Planning the Introduction Scene

Before writing out the introductory scene for the game, I made a list of the things I needed to introduce or establish:

The main character’s connection to the character Ru (a former friend)
The main character’s previous occupation as a physiomantic scholar
The plague that effectively wiped out civilization
Ru’s death
The subterranean setting
The way the player survives in the post-plague world (a filter mask)
The player’s current location (the Library of Gizaron)
The character of No-Eyes (including his background)
The three conversation options/paths (Gentle, Bold, and Cunning)
The deal between No-Eyes and the player
Information about the ghost characters
The beginning of the player’s quest

I decided to start with a horror-tinged dream sequence that introduced the plague and the player’s former relationship with Ru. Dream sequences aren’t exactly original, but done right, they can be surreal and horrifying, especially if the player isn’t sure if it’s the real opening of the game.

The dream is interrupted by an immediate threat: the player’s filter mask is clogged with ash and dust, suffocating them. From there, there’s some exposition and the player gets a chance to relax and take in the setting. Immediately after that, they encounter No-Eyes, who hasn’t seen them yet. The player must make a choice about how to approach him, which leads to the introduction to the three-path conversation system.

Outlining the Scene in Twine

When I first started the Twine outline for Black Heaven, I wanted it to be as complex and non-linear as possible in order to give the player a lot of agency. Each of the little squares below represents a text passage, and each of the lines connecting them represents a connection between two different passages, with an arrow showing which direction the narrative is flowing. Depending on the choices a player makes, their narrative path will be different.

As you can see, the map below has a pretty small number of text passages, but has a whole lot of connections:

Here’s a closer view of the story map, which shows how complicated and multidirectional the narrative can get. You’ll also notice that a big branch in the narrative happens at one passage: “Get Up Intro”. This was meant to be one of the key choice moments in the scene, and would cause the player to branch into one of the three routes based on how they handled the initial meeting with No-Eyes.

Unfortunately, this structure caused some pretty significant problems. Because the conversation could go so many different ways (and even cross over into different ‘routes’), each passage in the narrative had to be somewhat modular so it could fit together in many possible combinations. Though this modularity meant the player could get to the same place through multiple routes, it also meant the flow of the interactions between No-Eyes and the player came across as abrupt and choppy.

This caused a realization: the more player choice you allow, the less control you have over the unified effect of the narrative. It’s much more manageable (and impactful) if choices are restricted to a few key moments, rather than try to offer a hundred ultimately minor options that sacrifice quality for the illusion of freedom.

After a few revisions, the story map looked like this:

Notice how clearly defined the three routes are (top, middle, and bottom, joining together about halfway to the right), how many fewer lines cross between the routes, and how few lines there are in general. Though “linear storytelling” is usually a dirty word among gamers, writing this short scene showed me that it’s especially useful in the beginning of a game, when the writer is trying to establish the setting, characters, and situation. Here’s a closer look at the story map:

Conclusion to Part 2:

Like with Part 1, this covers a very small part of the work that went into the narrative aspect of the game—instead of diving into the minutiae, I’ve tried to hit the highlights and big ideas.

In Part 3, I’m going to cover my first interactions with the Ren’Py engine, including learning how to use Python and set up a scene.

You can play through the Introduction scene for “Black Heaven” on itch.io using Twine now! Keep in mind, it’s still a work-in-progress.

July 29, 2019January 31, 2021

Making ‘Black Heaven: A Necromantic Dating Sim’, Part 1: Concept

I haven’t finished a novel in at least two years. It’s a pretty shameful thing for someone with a degree in Creative Writing. It’s even more shameful for someone who originally wanted to work in book publishing. Instead, I’ve been playing games like Doki Doki Literature Club, Katawa Shoujo, VA-11 Hall A, and Mass Effect (among others).

I’ve written articles about the characters and narratives in those games, and after a long gestation period in my head, I decided to put together my own game. Or at least a demo of it.

That game is Black Heaven: A Necromantic Dating Sim. So far, it’s been one of the most rewarding and challenging projects I’ve worked on, and I’m looking forward to sharing it with people once it’s complete. This series of articles is gonna talk about what it’s like putting it all together, from concept to (hopefully) final demo.

A Story of Two FAN Letters

I don’t think that any creative person ever stops being a giant fanboy (or girl) for the people that inspired them, no matter how experienced or acclaimed they become. So I wanted to start off by talking about two fan letters I wrote to the creators of two games that really shaped this project.

A big part of my drive to create a visual novel game came from playing Doki Doki Literature Club, which won over fans and critics despite being one of the most disturbing, twisted games in recent memory. After I finished my first playthrough, I opened up a window in Gmail and wrote Dan Salvato a letter. Here’s an excerpt:

…I wanted to send you a letter saying how much…I’m not sure. It’s a terrible thing to say I “loved” a game about girls committing suicide. To be honest, I felt sick playing it–it felt like it was slowly picking apart my sanity in ways I believed nothing could…

When I was done, I felt like I was looking at the whole world in a new light. For me, DDLC reignited my passion for storytelling, for games, and for creating elaborate fantasy worlds where, as Yuri might say, you can lose yourself.

You can read my full thoughts on DDLC here, but that game wasn’t the only one that really inspired me.

As the internet legend goes, Katawa Shoujo started as a joke on 4chan that progressively became more and more serious. Forum members started pitching ideas for a dating sim, which ranged from disgusting to surprisingly thoughtful. Some committed posters got together and assembled the game in Ren’py, a free visual novel engine.

The game’s story revolves around the male protagonist’s transfer to a high school for handicapped youth after he suffers a heart attack, and from there, becomes an exploration of vulnerability, honesty, and empathy. After my first playthrough (Hanako’s Path), I wrote another letter, to one of the writers behind the game. Here’s an excerpt:

“…every now and then, I come across something that illuminate my life, whether it’s a song or a conversation with a friend. Katawa Shoujo was one of those things, and I’m so thankful that it exists. I hope that one day I can write something so well-crafted and devastatingly honest.”

What was so striking about these games was how engaging they were, despite having very limited animation and relatively little player interaction. Instead, the strength of the writing had to carry the game. As a writer myself, I wanted to create something that evoked the same feelings I had while playing these games.

Brainstorming Black Heaven

I’m a big fan of necromancers. I wrote a whole post about designing a terrifying helmet for my necromancer character No-Eyes, who appears in this game. I also published a standalone short story about No-Eyes in the professional fantasy magazine Beneath Ceaseless Skies. I’m fascinated by immortality, forbidden arts, and riding the line between being human and…something else. Horror really hooks me, and I wanted to weave that into the game.

joel culaith helmet sketch oroboro — Concept art for No-Eyes’ helmet, by Joel Clapp

I’m also a big fan of worldbuilding, to the point that nearly everything I write or create takes place in the same world. So when it came time to lay the groundwork for Black Heaven, I decided to set it in my shared world. Because of my love of DDLC and Katawa Shoujo, I decided to make the game a dating sim, but with a necromantic twist: you’d be romancing ghosts.

One of the guiding ideas of ghosts in my stories is that they’re shattered mirrors of who they used to be–the memories, traumas, and desires of their past warp and twist their mind, and their memories become muddled. This added an interesting dimension to the ghost characters: instead of just building a relationship with a ghost, you’d need to learn more about their past and psychology.

After several iterations on that theme, I came up with the central conflict: your character makes a deal with the necromancer No-Eyes to collect a list of ghosts from across a post-apocalyptic landscape and bring them to him. In return, you get to keep a ghost as a companion. However, as the game goes on, you realize that turning any of the ghosts over to No-Eyes may mean condemning them to an eternity of torment…

Laying the Groundwork

As soon as I had the central kernel of the plot and some rough sketches of where I wanted it to go, I started thinking about the project as a whole: what would the final product look like? How would it be framed to potential players? What would the guidelines be for the art? And what would be the game’s “pitch”?

The original draft of the Black Heaven logo, made in MS Paint.

I came up with a proposal document, written and outlined so that I could show it to possible collaborators to give them a quick, effective summary of the project. Mostly, though, it was meant to be an internal reference document: I’ve found that pretending to explain a project to a complete stranger can quickly solidify what the project is and what it should be, and the proposal did that. In essence, the doc galvanized the specifics of the game and gave me a clearer picture of what needed to be done.

In addition to the game’s description, I listed the art assets I needed for the project (such as character and background art), narrative content, character profiles, and marketing materials (such as a logo and cover art).

You can read the proposal here.

The proposal became my guide for the rest of the project, but I realized I needed to create separate docs to start outlining and designing the characters.

Character Profiles and the Art Brief

You can see the Art Brief for the demo (which includes Character Profiles) here.

I decided to sit down and sketch out backstories for each of the characters, covering their history, personalities, and key experiences, as well as their deaths. I boiled down these backstories into very short, succinct profiles for each of the characters, which listed key traits, physical descriptions, and a summary of their personality. After that, I found reference photos from real-life models to help get a clearer picture of their appearance and assist the artist in drawing character art.

A reference photo for Ru Okazi, one of the characters.

Visual novels live or die based on their art and visuals, I wanted to make sure the art brief clearly expressed what I was going for. In the brief, I give some samples of the type of art style I envisioned for the game, as well as samples of character art from Katawa Shoujo. I also outlined how I wanted the concept art and design process to work.

Because of the visual novel format, each character would need at least three “portraits,” each of which would express a different emotion: happy, neutral, or sad.

In addition to their normal forms, I decided to give each ghost a “horror form,” which must be dealt with before sealing the ghost in the player’s grimoire. The idea was that the player must see beneath the horror form to find the person underneath, and then appeal to their humanity to convince (or force) them to enter the grimoire. Each horror form had its own description and set of reference photos, which were meant to guide their design.

Horror forms were partly inspired by the monsters in Silent Hill, which were designed to be expressions of the protagonist’s suppressed thoughts and feelings. Another influence was my reading into the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which described the many layers of psychological hang-ups a soul must peel away before moving to its next reincarnated form.

Key Question: ARE WE JUST MAKING PORN?

I got in touch with Joel Clapp, an artist friend of mine, to discuss creating some of the concept art for the game. I sent him the art brief I’d put together, but soon after creating some sketches for me, he brought up an important and troubling question: how sexy should he draw them?

Screenshot from Bandai Namco’s “Girl Friend Beta: A Summer Spent with You “

This led to a conversation about the morality of dating sims in general and how comfortable we were with creating a game in a genre where women are explicitly treated as sex objects. Here’s an excerpt from my email response to Joel:

“From the beginning, I’d planned on Black Heaven being a subversion of your normal dating sim, but as you point out, just because Doki Doki Literature Club is a subversion doesn’t mean it doesn’t exploit sexuality to attract players and implicitly promise them sexy times to get them to play—the characters still have accentuated breasts and curves, which were designed to attract people.

This brings up two questions:

Are we making low-key porn and putting up fancy window dressing in the form of narrative and setting to disguise the fact that Black Heaven is essentially a sex doll house, where all the characters are designed to titillate and gratify the player?
If we’re not doing that, then are we being dishonest by calling the game a “dating sim” and marketing it like one?

In my mind, the answer to the first question is no. That’s not what attracts me about dating sims, and it’s not what I have planned. In my mind, this is gonna be a game about romance, but it’s not just gonna be about that—it’s about learning how to put yourself back together by helping others do the same, it’s about being honest with yourself and others, and it’s about choosing between your own selfish desires and what’s best for someone else. It’s not just a pretext for porn.

As to the second question, I think the answer is also no. Games like Katawa Shoujo prove that you can have a conventional dating sim, including sexuality and multiple romantic partners to choose from, and still tell a heart-wrenching story that does not boil down to you picking out a 2D sex doll. It is possible to creating a dating sim that uses romance and sexuality as part of a bigger, unified effect, and I think a lot of players are looking for something like that…

…I think, when designing these characters, we should stick to making them tastefully attractive, but with a greater focus on bring out their individual characters. It’s more important to make them memorable and distinct than making them sexy.”

Conclusion

This is a really short summary of the concept stage of the project, which went through a bunch of iterations and alterations. In Part 2, I’ll talk about the narrative design process, including drafting scenes and revising them in Twine.

You can read Part 2 here!

May 2, 2019

I’m Writing a D&D Adventure for Nord Games!

Story time.

My old DM and long-time friend, Joel Clapp, let me know several months ago that Nord Games was looking for submissions for new D&D adventures, so I wrote up a pitch and sent it in, all excited.

The adventure was a dark re-imagining of a masquerade party, where a troupe of elves descends upon a small town and replaces all of its citizens with their own “actors,” who look and act just like the townspeople. Only one real person is left: a beautiful damsel who ends up telling any stranger who’ll listen that everyone in her town has been replaced by impostors. Mind games ensue, and the adventure culminates in the party entering the Fey realm to face the insidious, cruel elf Queen, the not-so-subtly-named Titania.

Rejected.

The next pitch was a Lovecraftian horror adventure at sea, where the players are shipwrecked on a sprawling ancient city carried on the back of a giant, soul-eating crab.

Rejected.

Finally, I had a long talk with the Lore Master and Editor, Andrew Geertsen, who was patient and kind enough to write me an essay-length email telling me the same thing a lot of fiction editors say to writers: I’m buried underneath a mountain of generic, run-of-the-mill submissions. If you’re submitting something, make it unique. Make it something that forces me to sit up and say “Wow.” And make sure it’s a story that needs to be told.

He also gave me an idea of the kind of submission he was looking for: high adventure, something epic, with memorable characters. After several months of brainstorming, revisions, and fastidious attention to the submission guidelines, I submitted the pitch for “The Scuttling City,” an adventure on the high seas that saddled the players with a wizard sailing a flying ship and turned my Lovecraftian crab-city into Bathyala, the holy city of the merfolk (which is still carried on the back of a giant crab).

I’ve already turned in the first draft (which is 65 pages long), and now Andrew and I are working on the revisions. It’s my first professional game-writing gig, and I’m super excited to bring it all the way to publication!

Cheers!

December 30, 2017December 20, 2017

Hypnotica: A Short Story Discography

“The Yoshira is a dream city, and there are breeds of magicians here that only exist between sunset and sunrise. The most famous ones, the ones only the Yoshira can make, are the dreamwrights, who play their music for the ghosts and the dreamers, carrying their tools in their bones…”

Almost a year since the first draft was completed, my short story “Hypnotica” is going to be serialized on The Fantasy Hive! It’s one of my crazier, fantastic story, and I’m glad I finally get to share it. Here’s the description:

“Hypnotica” revolves around dreamwrights, mages who use music to shape dreams into surreal raves, and the Yoshira, a ghost-city that exists at the boundaries of waking and sleeping. In “Hypnotica,” two dreamwrights are left picking up the pieces of their lives after one of their shows in the Yoshira turns into a nightmare.

The two main characters, GRIN and NO-FOOT, were based off of different electronic artists, while the Yoshira was based on the Yoshiwara, the famous pleasure district in Japan. I wanted an image that conveyed the wonder, mystery, and danger of the story (as well as incorporate triangles), so one of the editors at the Hive, A.Z. Anthony, created this:

Since the story is so heavily rooted in music, I’ve made a list of the songs that inspired it to celebrate!

1. Daft Punk, “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger”

As I said in my previous post, the idea of the story originally came from the Alive 2007 concert and the 2014 Rolling Stone interview with Daft Punk, the masked electronica artists whose crazy, elaborate light shows turned concerts into dream-like, surround-sound experiences. This was one of my favorite songs in the Alive 2007 set, showing the two of them rocking out atop their pyramid.

2. Aphex Twin, “Come to Daddy”

Aphex Twin was the inspiration for GRIN, the virtuoso composer partner to NO-FOOT. In the story, GRIN wears something akin to a hannya mask, which mimics Aphex’s famously creepy grin. “Come to Daddy” is one of the songs I have on constant repeat, and the signature scream at 2:36 became the inspiration for a key moment in the story.

3. Deadmau5, “I Remember”

When I needed calming, lullaby-like songs while writing, “I Remember” kept coming up. It lulls me into a trance, and its echoes and synthesizers brought to mind pictures of the dreamscapes and slow-motion dances in the Yoshira.

4. Black Midi, “Pi”

At one point in the story, GRIN composes something called a “death waltz,” a piece of music that’s so complicated it’s considered physically impossible to actually play. The original inspiration was a piece of music called “Fairie’s Aire and Death Waltz,” but the Black Midi series helped me visualize what it would sound like.

5. Me!Me!Me!

Besides being one of the most disturbing, sexually charged videos I’ve ever seen, the song is an ultra-catchy mix of something like Vocaloid singing, J-Pop, hardcore EDM, and glitch music. I wanted to capture the energy, vividness, and pure insanity of it all in the dream sequences of the story, especially the final one.

6. Knife Party, “UKF Birthday Set”

Besides Daft Punk’s Alive 2007 show, the UKF set Knife Party played a few years ago became one of the main soundtracks I listened to while I was sketching out the mechanics of narcomancy and trying to visualize what NO-FOOT and GRIN’s shows would look and sound like.

7. Cowboy Bebop, “Blue”

I wanted the story to be a bit melancholy, something that touched on both the freedom of dreams and the knowledge that you have to wake up and leave it all behind. At heart, though, this song is about transcendence, and as I went through seven drafts, I found that transcendence was at the heart of the story, too.

8. Paprika Soundtrack, “Parade”

Anyone who’s seen Paprika remembers the insane parade scene. This song seemed to sum up the chaos, madness and bursting imagination of the Yoshiwara.

October 22, 2017

Beneath Ceaseless Skies Has Accepted My Short Story “Old No-Eyes”!

After seven years and a lot of rejections, I’ve made my first professional short story sale to Beneath Ceaseless Skies, my favorite fantasy magazine!

Two of the major reasons BCS is my favorite is because they focus on worldbuilding and “literary adventure fantasy,” the latter of which encourages strong characters and well-crafted prose. That’s what I go for when I write, so BCS has quietly sat at the top of my list of places I’d like to be published for a while.

“Old No-Eyes” tells the story of a hermit-like scholar named Yute, who gets a letter from an old colleague that backstabbed him out of their shared tutelage in the art of immortality years ago. His old colleague needs Yute’s help to decipher a little black book that claims to undermine everything they learned about life, death, and immortality, but Yute has his own plans. The story has some elements of horror and suspense, and gives a good idea of what necromancy looks like in my world.

The “little black book” in the story is The Nokizi, which I actually wrote up in five parts (the full text is up on Medium, starting here). It’s a necromantic manifesto that draws on Zen, mathematics, and the occult, and fleshes out my world almost as much as the story.

For those keeping track at home, all of my stories take place in the same world, meaning that references to characters, places, and events in past or future stories will pop up.

It’s really exciting to finally get a story of mine published. I don’t do this for the cash, money, or fame. I write stories so I can share them with people. On that note, thanks to all the people that read early drafts of Old No-Eyes (including the folks at Brooklyn Science Fiction Writers), thanks to Scott Andrews for working with me on revisions, and thanks to everyone who gave me encouragement over the years.

Old No-Eyes does not have an official release date yet, but BCS is tentatively shooting for next summer.

July 16, 2017

My New Post on Magical Warfare Is up on Fantasy Faction!

Here are the opening lines:

“Fallout taught fans that war…war never changes. Military historians, however, argue otherwise. Case in point: the stirrup.

Before firearms dominated the battlefield, it’s generally agreed that the stirrup was the most important innovation in warfare for a couple centuries. Fans of the Rohirrim will recognize why: cavalry is fast and maneuverable, and the stirrup allows the rider to swing swords, carry lances, and fire arrows with ease. Anyone who doesn’t have an army equipped with stirrupped cavalry is doomed to be dominated by those who do. As a result, the stirrup changed the way armies waged war and (arguably) the very face of medieval Europe. Keep in mind, the stirrup is a piece of leather that’s attached to the saddle.

With that in mind, what would magic do to warfare?”

You can read the article on Fantasy Faction here!

May 28, 2017

Hidden Layers: Spell Maps, Illusions, and Neural Networks

Anyone who’s ever watched Serial Experiments: Lain remembers the scene when Lain goes to greet her friends at school, but instead a doppelganger detaches from her and goes in her place–it’s the perfect expression of alienation, and evokes the idea that someone else is living your life. It also brings up questions about reality and identity: can we trust our senses to tell us what’s there or not? How many other things lie beyond sensory perception? Could someone fabricate reality? Are we who we think we are?

I like the idea of doppelgangers, but I like the idea of creating illusions even more. In Ursula LeGuin’s Wizard of Earthsea series, illusions are the easiest thing in the world, but when I sat down to figure out how to create illusions using my own system’s logic, I realized there were all kinds of difficulties: how do you trick all five senses? What sustains the illusion? What happens when you need to create something new, something that has never existed? The goal I had in mind was to create an illusory doppelganger, a kind of puppet that could be controlled by an unseen mage nearby.

Part of the process of creating an illusory person could be accomplished with an AutoCAD-like process–sculpting a person like a 3D model in isolation, adding details and textures like a video game character. But from there you run into the same problems video game characters do: how does the doppelganger ‘model’ interact with it’s environment realistically? How do you simulate the flapping of clothing when running, or when it’s windy out? How do you correctly recreate the sounds of footsteps on tile floors vs. cobblestones?How does the model deal with gravity and changes of elevation in terrain, let alone clipping through things like doors or tables? The model would need to be meticulously crafted to keep it from coming across as a glitchy mess.

The other issue is how to make it move, walk, and talk at all. One solution is to have its controller act out the movements verbatim in real-time with the situation, but that leads to all kinds of problems–if the controller is hidden somewhere, observing the situation, they need to react perfectly in time with outside actions, meaning that if there’s any disruption in line of sight, the whole facade is ruined. The biggest problem is when people or objects try to interact with the illusion model–if someone throws an apple at the doppelganger, the apple will pass through the illusion. Even if a controller were able to weave more illusions on the fly to correct this, by say, making an illusion that the model had caught the apple, the real apple would still make a sound as it hit the floor. The latency issues would be rough.

So there are a lot of issues here, and ones I didn’t really know how to solve practically. Luckily, Google came to the rescue.

One of the big recent announcements from Google’s I/O conference was that developers had created a method called AutoML, which is a system that guides artificial neural networks in creating other neural networks for a specific purpose, like speech or image recognition. Some of the networks created using AutoML actually surpassed the ones created by humans–meaning that an artificially intelligent system had beaten humans at creating systems similar to itself. What really caught my attention, though, was the structure of neural networks:

Image result for neural network structure

The nodes and interconnecting lines reminded me of summoning circles and occult diagrams, like the Tree of Sephiroth:

Here’s the thing about neural networks: they’re incredibly difficult and time-consuming to create and alter. The amazing thing about AutoML is that using a neural network to create other neural networks means that human programmers can delegate the heavy lifting to the AI, which is very adept at trawling through millions of nodes and collecting/changing basic information. With that kind of automation, all the programmers need to do is give it feedback on whether the networks it’s creating are doing a good job.

Here’s an example of what an AutoML-created daughter neural network looks like (right), compared to a human-designed neural network (left) meant to solve the same problem):

With this in mind, I started thinking about how a mage might use the structure of a neural network (and the techniques of AutoML) to create a doppleganger that is not only realistic and responsive, but is (for the most part) autonomous.

Now, just like a real neural network, this magical, semi-autonomous doppelganger would be a dumb automaton–maybe Turing complete, but not capable of doing anything it wasn’t instructed to do. This, however, is where deep learning comes in–the ability for neural networks to independently develop more complex layers to deal with problems. Given enough data and power and a competent neural network, there can be an element of emergence–the arising of a large phenomenon from smaller interactions.

It’s important to realize that neural networks are based off the structure of the human brain, and that when you create a new one, you’re essentially creating the possibility of a new brain to develop, one that can learn, make decisions, and change itself based on inputs. The problem, however, is allowing the system to change itself–as XKCD brings up, you could make a fully functional computer with rocks and enough space, but it would be extremely slow. So how could a neural network-like spell develop and change itself?

What I imagine is a mage who turns their body into a living canvas, with their skin becoming the hardware and the spells becoming the software. After laying down the basic structure of the neural network and employing the techniques similar to AutoML, the spell would begin to spit out output spells, which the mage would then look at and give feedback on. In this case, magic would be the stand-in for electricity, and the human body would take the place of a terminal or OS. Once the networks became complex and developed enough, the mage would essentially be walking around with a second brain on their body, operating in real time and generating a doppelganger like a projector. Creating illusions is just one use–reprogrammed, this same structure could be used for all kinds of magical purposes, including creating new custom spells.

Of course, the process of training the magical neural network and doing backpropagation would still take time, effort, and expertise, but the great thing about the AutoML system is that it can conceivably be used by non-experts to create an intermediary network that can do the more complicated tasks of creating and altering new, purpose-crafted networks. It essentially offers a shortcut to more complex creations.

In the end, it all comes back to Lain and Ghost in the Shell–can we create a facsimile of a person with the emergent property of consciousness? At what point does the illusion become indistinguishable from reality? When do we give up on our senses to tell us who is real and who isn’t? Who slips into my robot body and whispers to my ghost?

April 16, 2017

I Have a New Monthly Worldbuilding Column at Fantasy Faction!

It’s called ‘Worlds Within Worlds’! The first article is an adaptation/revision of my OTL post on the Nokizi, titled “THE NECRONOMICON TO THE NOKIZI: CREATING TEXTS FOR SECONDARY WORLDS“. Here’s the banner for the column:

Worlds Within Worlds

Apart from giving the background on how I wrote the Nokizi, it gives some advice for writers looking to write their own secondary world texts:

Write out as much as you can
Always Write for Two Audiences
Pay Attention to Medium, Style, and Mode
Include References to Other Books, Events, and People

Check it out on Fantasy Faction!

April 2, 2017April 2, 2017

Highlights from GIFCON 2017 and my trip to Scotland!

Hey, so you probably heard I was asked to speak at the Glasgow International Fantasy Conference on my 2015 project, The Rats in the Walls. The talk went great, and I’ll be publishing the full text soon, but in the meantime I wanted to give some of the high points of the trip.

First off, while walking around Glasgow, I could catch a few glimpses of the Glasgow Necropolis, which was awesome. I’d never seen a graveyard like it, and the ‘skyline’ of monuments on the hill made it look like a true city of the dead. The giant doors in the hillside were especially cool–they made me think of the gates of a city, leading into the earth.

Second, the actual Conference took place in Glasgow University’s chapel, which was beautiful. The University is over 550 years old, and a lot of the passages still feel more like a castle than a modern building. The presentations, including Phil Harris’ talks on worldbuilding and game design, Rob Maslen’s lecture on the book as a fantastical object, and Julie Bertagna’s speech about her YA fantasy series, Exodus, were fantastic.

Third, I ended up meeting some great people at the Conference, including professors, writers, and academics. It was great to hang out with fantasists, instead of having to expand the gathering to include the other SF genres, like sci-fi and horror. There’s a lot of things unique to fantasy, and for once I was able to talk with people who were familiar and excited by the ins and outs of fantasy worldbuilding without having to explain what it was or how it worked. Most surprising of all, I was surprised when I found out the University had recently christened a new Masters in Fantasy Literature program, and that many of the attendees were members.

Fantasy has been dismissed for decades as commercial, not ‘serious’ literature. Most people who get their writing degrees see a significant stigma attached to writing fantasy in a university setting, including the director of the Odyssey Writing Workshop, who I interviewed recently for Outer Places. It was good to see more attention and credit given to fantasy as a genre at Glasgow U. At the same time, I felt a bit uneasy when the time came to present papers: GIFCON did so much to accord itself with traditional academia, both in the topics that were presented (including a Marxist interpretation of Dark Souls) and the way people spoke about them. For example:

While listening to a presentation about using a psychoanalytical approach to the dreams and visions in Game of Thrones, the moderator asked the presenter if he had thought about alternate interpretations of the characters’ dreams, ones that didn’t fall in line with his thesis. The presenter responded that there were a lot of visions/dreams that didn’t match up, but he’d focused on the ones that did.

As someone who’s gone through a Bachelors Degree program and written a couple academic essays for Clarkesworld, I’ve slowly realized that academia, especially academic scholarship on literature, is primarily focused on viewing one tiny facet of a subject in one very specific light, then discrediting or ignoring anything else that contradicts it (or admitting the contradictions and claiming that you’re ‘grappling’ with a complex topic that defies even self-definition). I know I’ve been guilty of this–it’s hard to take a complex world and distill a consistent, meaningful pattern from it into writing, rather than just be selective about what you pay attention to and pretend that everything else falls in line. But that latter attitude encourages a very narrow view of any given topic, and the moment it’s presented outside of its very familiar (and tolerant) academic setting, it suddenly appears incredibly myopic and (sometimes) even indulgent.

The ‘indulgent’ element is especially galling. So much scholarship, when it gets down to it, seems to be initiated because the author thought it ‘interesting.’ Certain aspects or viewpoints on a topic are discarded because the author thought it would be ‘more interesting’ to explore what they wanted to write about. There’s also very little consideration for an audience outside other experts in the field, which means all this supposed knowledge will never reach anyone outside a small circle of people. These aren’t new concerns, but they are persistent, and it makes me wary about treading deeper into the academic sphere as a speaker or writer.

GIFCON was a great experience and I hope it grows over the coming years, but I hope that it takes a note from its popular audience and material and moves away from emulating contemporary academia. I don’t know. I’m certainly not advocating for anti-intellectualism, but at the same time, attending GIFCON and seeing fantasy taken ‘seriously’, it throws into sharp relief that there are deep problems in the way academia approaches knowledge and literature. Maybe there’s something to be said for being underground, unexamined, and mocked by the establishment–it means we don’t have to play by the rules.

P.S. The milk in Scotland is delicious, cheap, and plentiful. 10/10.

March 26, 2017

I’m Going to GIFCON This Week!

After a month of preparing, I’m heading to Scotland on Monday to speak at the Glasgow International Fantasy Convention on my Rats in the Walls project!

gifcon thumbs up

You can check out the details of the project here, and read an excerpt from my speech here. You can also check out the promo video Alex Sherman and I made for the project here.

Don’t forget about the Rats in the Walls, son!