The platform sets the standard. Whether we’re talking Instagram, YouTube, etc. What platform one develops for dictates what gets seen. You play to the strengths of the platform… But what if you don’t want to? What if you have a full design philosophy that doesn’t fit what a different platform expects? I’ve realized that serving two masters, Steam and my own philosophy, is leaving my productions ultimately diluted from what they could be. I recently reread a bit of Everything I Know, and Everything I’m Ever Gonna Know, and I realized… It is excellent. That being said, when I show it to people, it doesn’t quite convey what I am trying to do in a single screen. It doesn’t scream “make video games literature”. It can be excellent as a story and as an experience, and still fail to convey what it is that I’m doing long term. This is the case both with Everything I Know, and Everything I’m Ever Gonna Know as well as Oh man, a Train., and it needs to be fixed. When someone looks at the product, I need more text on screen, fewer graphics. I need to target Steam users less, and book readers more. The portraits and the graphics… They need to be there, but only in service of the grander text storytelling. It should, really, be quite rare that we see graphics. At most, the classic “VN” look needs to be shown on a regular basis. Anything more is trying to be something that I’m not. So here’s how my next steps need to look: 1. Be much more intentional about any sort of mediality used. Default to pure text on screen. When people see it, they may say “that’s a video game?”, but at least they’ll get that it is more “literary”. Need to fully lean into this. Separates me. 2. Honestly, should be putting out one of these every couple of weeks or so… Maybe one more mechanical medium, the visual novel medium, and then a bunch of basically raw text. Anyways, that’s the way I’m going. At least for now. We’ll see how it goes.
On a separate note, one of the things that regularly comes up when I try to explain what I’m doing to crowds that don’t normally interact with interactive media is that it sound like what I’m making are similar “choose your own adventure” books. Of course, this is not what the medium is about. But that is a somewhat good pitch nonetheless. Why is this not right though? Since it is such an easily transferable concept, why don’t I just lean into this? It just isn’t what is interesting about the medium to me… Instead, I am more interested in using design as another layer of low-frequency communication.