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"There is only one admirable form of the imagination: the imagination that is so intense that it creates a new reality, that it makes things happen."- Sean O'Faolin
Interactive Horror Fiction
You sold your house and packed all your worldly belongings. The moving van bound for Las Vegas pulled out of the driveway this morning. Doubt encroaches as you question the wisdom of transplanting yourself almost 1600 miles to a new life.
Through the clouds of doubt comes the shining wonder of Las Vegas. The lights, the glamour and the action beckons. Your new palatial home and high paying job awaits. Office Country Corp. (America's #1 shipping, copy and office superstore) selected you out of hundreds of applicants to manage the new multi-million dollar flagship store in Las Vegas with a salary you only dreamt possible. A high paying job in the lap of luxury in paradise. What could be better?
Nothing for you to do now but make your way on a leisurely three day drive to Las Vegas and begin this promising new chapter in your life first thing Monday morning.
...Or so you thought.
The back roads of Arkansas can be tricky, even under the best circumstances. An ominous red light on your dashboard forces you to take the next exit from Interstate Highway 40 West and navigate the dirt roads in search of the promised land of a gas station. The anticipation of a full tank of gas, a refreshing bottle of water and perhaps even some good food draws you into the sleepy little town of Dead Rock, Arkansas. Unfortunately for you, the town's name is well earned and it's not half as sleepy as it seems to be.
The First Mile will be Unleashed July 15th.
Designer's Journal
8 July 2005
Happy Birthday to Me.
I turned 36 today. Holy shit. I remember blowing out the candles on my birthday cake when I was 12 as if it was last week.
Nevermind my meanderings. The First Mile is now on Release Candidate 6a. Between an excellent transcript received from Stuart, one of my play testers, and my own journeys through Dead Rock while composing the official walkthrough, roughly fifty bugs have been discovered then immediately obliterated. Isn't that typical of so many tasks? Just when you think you're done, can crack open a beer and relax...you suddenly cant. But I will. On July 16th!
7 June 2005
On Sale Now.
-
Every Folio Edition of The First Mile comes with a genuine compass and a hand-written sticky note; both of which are a part of the actual story. The Folio CD contains the story file and all software necessary to run your game on any modern computer in the world.
The First Mile Ships on July 15th.
Order Your Copy Today - Click Here
Release Candidate 5 is in the hands of our play testers as game testing winds down. The new technology of "The Matawan Project" is being tested in-house only in parallel. The results of "The Matawan Project" will be included in The First Mile Folio Edition and be formally announced on July 15th -- not sooner.
25 May 2005
On Sale Soon.
Release Candidate 4 is being distributed over this long weekend in the hopes that testing will finally be complete. Very few bugs have been discovered since Release Candidate 3 which leads me to believe that The First Mile is nearly ready to go.
The First Mile's Folio Edition packaging will be unveiled next week and we will start accepting pre-orders then.
There is a single challenge remaining apart from the testing process that my engineer, the redoubtable Michael Ferrador, is actively engaged in overcoming even as I write this. When he is done, Interactive Fiction will enter into a new age the original founders of the medium itself could never have imagined.
18 May 2005
The First Unveiling
We are proud to unveil The First Mile's cover art as shown above. Eliza Gauger is certainly an accomplished artist who has perfectly captured my vision and expressed it in the artwork with vision of her own.
In other news, Release Candidate 3 is slated for release this weekend. A major event within the story is giving me some trouble but I know I am close to perfecting it.
13 May 2005
"Man, this game is gruesome." - Stuart F.
What better way to celebrate Friday the 13th than with a quote from one of our play testers. He was exploring the elementary school and was startled by what he discovered in one of the classrooms.
Release Candidate 2 will be issued later today. This version corrects a number of minor issues discovered by the two teams of play testers over the past week.
9 May 2005
Shattering Boundaries as I Approach the Finish Line
As The First Mile was evolving and nearing completion for Alpha Testing last month, I hit a memory barrier in the programming environment. In non-technical terms, The First Mile had grown so large in scope that it became impossible to add anything new to the title -- not a location, a character, or even a pack of chewing gum. With some nifty shifting and creative memory management, I worked around the problem and several new locations, puzzles and events were added.
I hit this same barrier a couple of more times over the past few weeks but managed to deftly escape the constraints that Inform, the programming environment, tried time and again to impose upon me.
Today I have hit this same barrier again and, fortunately, worked my magic to cram just a little more into the title. For a while there I was genuinely concerned I hit a brick wall where additions were concerned. But like David Copperfield, I walked through that wall and emerged triumphant on the other side.
Release Candidate 1 is being tested as I write this and the bug reports are down to a small trickle. There will be a Release Candidate 2 and then I shall rest my weary fingers from their tireless efforts at the keyboard...briefly.
2 May 2005
Screenshots From Beta 3
The screen shots may seem a bit tame but that's only to insure that I don't ruin the story for you. As you make your way through The First Mile you'll understand exactly what I mean.
There will be a Beta Four. Probably even a Beta Five. The First Mile is an immense title with lots of interplay, character involvement and plot development to be tested. Even so, nothing will deter us from a June 1 launch.
27 April 2005
"The Prose is Superb."
So says Will L. one of the The First Mile's many Quality Control people.
Will is on Team One of The First Mile's play test crew. He and his fellow team members have submitted piles of reports and observations as they experience The First Mile one calamity at a time.
Beta 2 has been unleashed tonight. It's quite refreshing to have the crushing pressure of fixing/editing/changing/adding to a title at the last minute lifted. I'm sitting back and taking it easy as the bug reports come in and are summarily dealt with.
I broke a sweat this morning as I worked hard to perfect the characteristics of a telephone company technician who may well represent your ticket to freedom.
25 April 2005
The First Mile goes Beta.
Over the weekend Alpha Three rolled into Alpha Four and now Beta One is Out the Door.
Today, two teams of play testers have been dropped into Dead Rock and I am curious to see who will be the first to escape alive.
Since my last journal entry ten rooms or so have been added as well as a new puzzle. A magical artifact I'd completely forgotten about came to the front of my mind as I reviewed the entire game's source code from start to finish.
Roughly 200 bugs have been obliterated since TFM went into Alpha. That's a relatively low number for me if history is any guide. What a great sign of things to come!
Onto other news -- I am officially announcing a June 1st launch date. We're in Beta. It's not even May yet. We have weeks of testing in front of us which makes a June 1 launch an absolute certainty.
19 April 2005
Alpha Three is Coming
I must be getting better at implementing Interactive Fiction. With eight titles under my belt I suppose it was bound to happen.
So far, just forty or so minor bugs have been obliterated since Alpha 1 went into testing. Alpha 2 embodied all of the additions I mentioned earlier and is being taken to task by Radical Al, chief tester at large.
Alpha 3 may see a few tiny additions akin to what a sculptor might do to a
statue he is almost finished with. I might chisel off a piece here,
enhance a piece there and so on. The presentation remains largely the same
but for those few, subtle alterations.
16 April 2005
The First Milestone
After thirty hours of programming and debugging over the past three days, The First Mile now compiles without any errors.
Jargon-free translation: The First Mile has emerged from the development phase and is now officially a complete title. Were I to send you a copy, you could load it, start reading the prose and begin interacting with the story. You could even win the day in a number of ways.
In as much as The First Mile represents the eighth Interactive Fiction title I have written, I still get a real jolt watching my creation compile successfully for the first time. Imagine -- raw source code into playable game. Months and months of work funneled into a single computer file. Before I run the newly-compiled game I always wonder "What kind of bug will I hit first? A big one? A small one? No bugs for twenty rooms?"
This fusion of excitement with the unknown is on the same level as losing your virginity. (A big hello to Amy if you're out there!) You know that something really good is about to happen but you have no idea how things will go. It's pretty cool experiencing something that intense a couple of times per year.
The first discovered bug of The First Mile was an interesting one. A set of train tracks followed me from location to location. That was a pesky bug that took me about five minutes to nail. All fixed now.
While the first alpha version of The First Mile is complete rest assured there is still plenty of work ahead. Without a doubt, a good number of bugs will be found. That is why The First Mile Version Alpha 1 is being sent to play testers today.
Is the game ready for release? Not hardly. Apart from annihilating bugs there are at least a couple of dozen loose ends I'll need to tie up, a lot of interplay to check for and a few game endings to fully implement.
Even so, Alpha 1 is a game that can be successfully completed in a variety of ways right now.
Interesting observations:
The compiled game is larger than any I've written before. Dead Rock and the outlying area stands at 246 locations (thus far!) making it about as big as Greystone as far room count goes. Yet the size of the compiled game is larger than Greystone. First Light has the largest number of locations in the Malinche library coming in at 276 locations yet it also is a smaller game file than The First Mile. I attribute this to the larger-than-average cast of characters in the story as well as all the different options available to you at every turn.
Speaking of size, we have an interesting development here. The First Mile is the first Malinche title created for sale on the open market that has no single structure that is especially large. In succession, First Light, Greystone and Endgame each had a single structure (the castle in Delphin, the main Greystone building and USS Las Vegas itself respectively) that was the largest ever produced in Interactive Fiction history. The First Mile is a departure from that. Some buildings can be fairly large (General Johnson's manor house comes to mind first) but no records have been broken on that front.
Now I'm off for steak and beer at my favorite local pub.
12 April 2005
The First Compile
An an Implementor, my style of development is to write fiction and game code like crazy and not compile the game code into a playable story file until the game is nearly finished.
Well the game is nearly finished and today I compiled for the first time. Then I spent the next six hours just debugging code.
As an artist let me tell you it is more than a little frustrating to be held back from a finished product by the dozens of little mistakes that crop up.
I expect the initial round of debugging to be finished tomorrow. If we're lucky, a small team of people will have the first alpha test copy of The First Mile by the weekend.
This is not to say the story is finished; it isn't. Two dozen or so locations need to be added. There are several endings that haven't been coded yet, a number of puzzles to be completed and a character or two that need some touching up.
When the play testers start working on the first Alpha version the real fun begins as the bug reports start coming in.
4 April 2005
The Art of Interactive Fiction
One of the sure signs a Malinche game is nearing completion is the appearance of one or more interesting pictures in the previews section, one of which always ends up as the cover art on the game packaging. The "Dead Man" picture above is certainly interesting but it is not the cover art for The First Mile.
Malinche always improves every aspect of operations and the art department is no exception. For The First Mile, I have commissioned artist Eliza Gauger to create a powerful piece of artwork that will grace the cover of every folio edition of The First Mile and act as the representative picture on this website as well.
Eliza Gauger's impressive talents will be unveiled here in the weeks ahead.
26 March 2005
Spring is in the air and with it comes the sweet smell of flowers and crisp air. The birds are singing...
...and the victims are screaming.
An Alpha copy of The First Mile is in the air also. I get the sense Alpha testing of The First Mile will begin sometime next month.
If everything stays on course, it looks like The First Mile will be released this summer.
No one should be surprised to learn that The First Mile is a vast game. <grin>
The last commercial work of Interactive Fiction in the genre of horror, "The Lurking Horror", was released in 1987 and the room count was rather modest coming in at seventy-one rooms. Let's all be a little understanding and realize that back in the 1980s a computer's memory capacity was measured in kilobytes and not megabytes.
Thanks to the power of modern computers, Interactive Fiction is more powerful than ever as well.
The gaming area of the The First Mile is roughly three times the size of The Lurking Horror and I'm not done yet. There are several interesting characters, at least as many as you'd find in your average horror novel. There are also many intricate puzzles (some are complete, some are not) and lots of terrain to explore both in town and out of town. And out of town can take you very far away indeed.
18 March 2005
Salvation will be found in Death and Despair.
3 March 2005
No Safe Haven.
Sanctuary is not to be found at the church in town, but the butchered body of a priest will be there waiting for you.
Don't bother turning to the police. You'll find a battered police car down an embankment with the simple message "DEAD COP" spray painted in red on the hood of the car.
The mayor of Dead Rock will be waiting for you in his office. And he will be very happy to speak with you about your new life in Dead Rock as a citizen for life.
22 February 2005
The Hardest Four Rooms of My Life.
I imagine that Wes Craven and Stephen King have a bit of fun writing their incredible works of horror. At this point I can confidently say I envy them because I cannot fathom how writing about dark, disturbing events that typically turn to violence can be in any way gratifying.
I wrote four very dark rooms tonight and I feel like playing some church music to lighten me up. That's a particularly striking statement considering I'm Jewish.
Wes and Stephen write for a reason and they deliver excellent messages through their writing when all is said and done. That said, the dark road I am now traveling to deliver a very positive message is seriously spooking me.
Tommy's House has been encoded tonight and while I am very proud of the writing I am a little surprised at how it darkened my mood. Dead Rock is a battleground of good and evil. And tonight's round of coding clearly shows evil won the battle at Tommy's House.
I constantly remind myself that a powerful message is being delivered in this dark tale. But it is the darkness itself that unsettles me. It's so easy to write about evil in a very tame manner and good in a counterbalancing saccharine-sweet way. It's a whole other order to delve into the extremes of both without the filters.
Fortunately, there is light in the tale that has yet to manifest. But it will. I gravitate towards that light as I remind myself that our world exists in a constant state of combat of light against dark. Good always wins. That's not a cliché, its an axiom. It is towards that axiom that I now strive.
The die is cast and I am committed to releasing The First Mile no matter how disturbing it may be...even to me.
19 February 2005
No Way Out?
Your relief at finding a gas station to fill up your empty tank is shattered by the shotgun blast that kills the station attendant just a few feet away from you.
Things aren't looking up as your car itself is wrecked by unseen vandals right under your nose. Your fear only rises when things go from bad to worse as you make your way through the bizarre town. No matter which way you turn, you feel your own mortality threatened. The nicest people scare you, even a small boy in a playground. You can't help but be disturbed watching him play and frolic amongst the dead.
Your mind reels as it tries to reconcile the quaint southern charm of Dead Rock with the pure evil that has taken up residence there.
You quickly learn that Dead Rock itself just won't let you leave peacefully. A price must be exacted. Will you pay that price or collect it from the evil that has manifested itself in Dead Rock?
6 January 2005
Thirty Rooms
Creativity and imagination reign again! With Endgame's demand for accurate technical detail and ship schematics I was very much constrained in the layout of the game area; faithful reproduction of a Ticonderoga-class Navy cruiser took precedence over the creative process. With The First Mile I am totally unfettered once again in creating Dead Rock, Arkansas just the way I envision it along with all the people that populate that doomed place.
A similar malaise came over me with my private project for a Fortune 500 company; I was very much required to stay within predetermined lines that I didn't draw. While I found both projects rewarding, I was always reminded of the clamps on my creativity. Starting The First Mile saw me freed of such linear confines.
Even completing Azteca last month helped me to get the creative juices flowing again but only to a small degree as I had to be mindful of the historical and archeological constraints of the Aztec people. I took some artistic liberties here and there but more or less stuck to the path of accuracy.
With my freshly rediscovered freedom I was on a bit of a run recently creating thirty rooms of The First Mile in just three days. No small amount of credit is due to my visit to Ernest Hemingway's home in Key West during my recent vacation. Vacations are always supposed to rejuvenate and recharge but I never expected this! I am now coding at a steady pace of five rooms per day with puzzles, scenery, interesting objects and people all thrown into the mix. Things are taking shape nicely as all the elements of a truly frightening story come into play.
To quash the rumours out there -- there is no possibility of The First Mile entering alpha test this month.
21 October 2004
I'm glad I chose a small town in Arkansas as the venue in which the adventurer will be confronted with a horrific nightmare. In the past I've set my works in wondrous, magical places (First Light) larger than life places (Greystone) and exciting, cutting-edge places (Endgame). Up to now, I've had the luxury of relying upon fantastic surroundings to help weave my tales. Not this time.
Dead Rock, Arkansas offers no fantastic surroundings and is forcing me to spend practically all of my attention on the story, plot development and the characters. Marvelous!
Main Street, USA is to be found in The First Mile. Main Street in Dead Rock strikes me as Mayberry after mayhem came calling. Malevolence, murder and evil itself manifests. You'll just want to get away and back to your cushy new life waiting for you in Las Vegas. You'll shout at Heaven for the unfairness of it all and beseech the Higher Powers to rescue you from the nightmare. But as is the case with all adventurers, it is up to YOU to save yourself. This time, though, you get the opportunity to save countless others in the process.
Make no mistake about it; The First Mile is a dark tale. Humor is to be found but only quickly enjoyed. They are coming for you and you haven't a moment to spare.
14 October 2004
Entering the town of Dead Rock, Arkansas, the reader will be stepping into a nightmare. From the very first moment, any visitor to Dead Rock will know that something is very wrong as fear grips them. The insanity is firmly divided on Main Street as the player can traverse from Order to Chaos and back again.
For the first time in my professional Implementing career, I'm working on two projects at once. First and foremost, of course, is The First Mile. I am also working on a private project for a major corporation bringing Interactive Fiction into the boardroom. This private project is certainly interesting and challenging, but fortunately it doesn't call on my creative faculties. There's plenty of imagination for what's to come In The First Mile.
