Hi all! This week's vignette was fairly short, a little less than 2000 words. But I had a good reason for slacking off, I promise - I built a website! Maybe you are there right now reading this blog post.
It turned out to be kind of a huge project. I decided to code it from scratch rather that use a website like WordPress, because I need the web development practice. It took me maybe ten to fifteen hours total? Some of that time was learning to use the tools. I used a CSS framework called Materialize. It's a great library, with lots of tools to align elements properly, really good responsiveness (i.e. sites that look good on mobile and on a computer), and cool effects and transitions. It wasn't too complicated to use, but I had some problems making my vision for the website conform to what the tools let me do. The back end (the server) is written in node.js, a well-known JavaScript server-side environment. I used a module called Express to handle HTTP requests, which actually lined up nicely with what I'm learning in Computer Networks class.
I still have some work to (at the moment, it seems like Blogger reply comments show up twice? (EDIT - fixed!)). But on the whole, I'm very happy with the way it turned out. It looks professional and hopefully reflects well on me as a web developer.
On to the vignette! Because I knew I would be short on time this week, I tried an experimental structure based on an enormous work of interactive fiction calls a kiss by Dan Waber. a kiss starts with a kiss in a kitchen, and the options are things like "zoom in to the kiss" and "to the left of the kiss". It reads as almost a series of poems or short stories that come together into something bigger. I tried something similar, albeit on a smaller scale. The vignette is told in a series of discrete but connected moments. Each one is just a paragraph or two, and some scenes unlock further scenes that elaborate on characters or details. This model let me write a fairly dense narrative packed into less words. It's also easily expandable, since I can just write more short scenes that connect to scenes I've already written. I wouldn't want to write the whole story like this, but for one vignette I think it works well.
I only have two vignettes and a conclusion left to write! That means I will have a complete rough draft of this story in three weeks. Three weeks! I'm actually ahead of schedule. There will tons of revisions and additional content and branching to write at that point, not to mention coding the engine itself and possibly a 'proofreading engine' to let people easily give me feedback on the story. Still, it feels great to actually see myself sticking this project through. I guess all it took was a solid plan, huh? I have certainly learned something about the benefits of planning and having a daily routine.
Since this week's vignette was so short, the excerpt will be even shorter, but hopefully it will give you an idea of the structure I was talking about.
That's it for now! Feel free to send me feedback at contact@eighthnotegames.com. Until next week!
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