Author's Commentary and Ruminations

So, you want to read what I have to say about my story, hmm? Well, first of all, I hope you enjoyed it. If you haven’t played it yet, you probably ought to do that before reading any further as I will be throwing out some spoilers here. Ok, I assume that if you’re still reading you have already played the game, so let’s get started.

This was the first time I’ve ever attempted anything like this and it’s definitely the longest work of either fiction or nonfiction that I have ever written. I’m sure the writing isn’t exactly Shakespeare, but I hope it was at least entertaining. In order to organize my thoughts a bit, I’m going top break this commentary down into several sections that I thought might be interesting (though that may be up for some debate). Feel free to read them in any order. 

My second idea was to write a horror story similar to what one would find in the Which Way book series. This idea eventually led to the program you see before you. For more discussion on that, continue to "The Writing Process."

At first I contemplated a werewolf story, but I soon abandoned that for an alien invasion. You can still see the remnants of my earlier idea in the design of the aliens, which clearly have a heavy lycanthropic inspiration. The story was also to cover much more territory. In fact, the final version only contains what was intended to be the introduction to the plot. After I started writing, I realized that the introduction of the main characters and the set up of the conflict was taking a great deal more time and space than I had anticipated. If I was going to do the rest of the story justice, I would have to save it for future works, hence the "Part One" addition to the title.

I did my pre-writing planning using Post-It notes that I stuck on the wall. Each note was supposed to be a page or two, but ended up covering several pages each, contributing to the length of the work. This worked well for me as it helped me to see the various plot lines visually and how they interacted together. I worked very hard at making sure that the different plot lines were not mutually exclusive. That is, what happened in one plot thread would not invalidate something that happened in another plot thread. In fact, there are several instances in which the different plot threads (or even different choices within a single plot thread) compliment one another. For an example of this, consider the Morgan and Ortega threads. It would not make sense for you to always get to see the ship crash regardless of when you chose to go to the police station. The ship should crash at the same time in every thread. So, if you go to the station right away, you are inside the building when it crashes. If you spend some time with Morgan first, you arrive just as it crashes and if you spend more time with Morgan, you miss the crash all together. Also note that if you are there when the ship crashes and let Ortega investigate alone, he gets killed. If that’s true, it only makes sense that he should also get killed if you are absent when the ship crashes, which is what happens. If you take a look at other threads, you will see similar congruencies. (Look at how Gunslinger’s greeting changes slightly depending on what your last encounter with an alien was).

One of my original ideas was to allow the player to play either as a male or a female. This is why you have to go to the bathroom so early in the game. Originally, you got to choose which bathroom to use and that choice determined your gender and, consequently, how other characters reacted to you. There were to be two love interests, Tina for the guys and Ortega for the ladies. I still like this idea and wish I could have incorporated it into the story, but I just didn’t have time. The story would have been much, much larger as the Tina and Ortega threads would each be twice as long. Now you know why there are almost no references to your character’s name or gender in the story outside of the Tina thread. That was the thread I wrote first. I wrote the Morgan and Ortega threads later and tried to keep the references as neutral as I could to limit how much I would have to rewrite for the female’s point of view. Eventually, time constraints compelled me to abandon that idea. This is the one idea I had to lose that I truly regret. In order to compensate for the fairly blank slate nature of the protagonist, I came up with the "book bag" idea, which allowed the player to get a little background on the character. Now he had a name, a face and even an ex-girlfriend. From this, I got the idea to put other pictures into the story, which I will discuss more later.

The web site on the Tina thread was a real lifesaver. At one point, I realized that I needed to give Tina some background. So, I had this ridiculously long scene in which Dave and Tina were hiding in the bathroom and talking about Tina’s past. It ended up being completely absurd with statements like, "So, Tina, tell me about yourself," and then Tina going on for pages about her life. I felt like I was screaming plot points at the player and hated how the scene came out. It occurred to me that if I gave Tina a web site with an "About Me" section on it, I could very neatly skate around the unnaturally dense scene I had just written. That was the genesis of AlienWatch.com, which became one of my favorite elements of the story.

It may be obvious from the amount of time I spent on her, but Morgan is my favorite character in the game. The irony is, she was originally included as an afterthought. I mentioned earlier that Tina and Ortega were created to be either a friend or a love interest depending on the gender of the player. There was no Morgan. While writing the Tina thread, I decided that I needed to demonstrate as early as I could that these aliens were big, bad, and nasty. This wasn’t E.T., this was your worst nightmare. So, I wrote a scene in which one of the aliens simply tore apart the most innocent and helpless person I could think of, a small lonely girl. Since I was so intent on keeping the different plot threads consistent, I realized that not meeting Tina would give the player a chance to meet the girl before she was eaten by the alien, which is how the Morgan thread came to be.

All of the pictures were either taken by me with my FinePix 2650 2.0 megapixel digital camera or were used with permission from stock.xchng. The one exception is a public domain picture of Earth used on the front cover. The photos were edited with Adobe PhotoDeluxe 2.0