As I’m recovering from my surgery, I suppose it couldn’t hurt to throw up some— Actually, that’s a poor choice of words since I’ve been feeling pretty nauseous since the surgery. Anyway, here’s some designers’ notes. Yes, plural—I created this with my amazing partner.
We had been listening to Ghost’s album Prequelle a lot. It just kinda happened. A friend of mine pointed me to the album a while ago, but it just resurged in my brainspace, and my partner got attached to it as I hummed it and sang it while driving, doing dishes, etc. I was also getting into MÖRK BORG, and I really loved the community-suggested idea of doing an album crawl: taking an album and turning the ideas within into an adventure. So, I thought it would be fun for my partner and I to work on that, and I was mostly right. Admittedly, I was a bit of a butt in the beginning as I took on way too much self-inflicted pressure, but we got better at working together, which is, of course, a great skill to have, and we don’t usually work on projects together unless cooking, dishes, cleaning, laundry, etc. all count.
The hardest part for me was killing my darlings, which I had to do a couple of times. First, I had to be more relaxed in how I could fit the ideas together instead of trying to force everything to feel perfect, which is what really helped me relax from my self-inflicted pressure. Even then, I had to kill more darlings because all of our ideas wouldn’t fit on an A4 spread. I had an idea for a fun-but-simple puzzle door that I had to cut, and I’d explain it in more detail, but I plan to reuse it.
I also kept making dozens of small edits. Fitting things better. Formatting. Making certain pieces of the adventure stand out more. Squeezing in the licensing at the end. Tweaking the color because I had accidentally left Night Light on. It really taught me a lot.
But what does my partner have to say after all of it? She says it was fun even though it was a bit stressful in the beginning, and that it was a fun way for us to continue learning how to work together. She also really enjoyed the putting-it-together part, pulling together all of the public domain bits, which she felt really crossed over into her own work as a librarian.
We also agree that it was really fun to play it. She really enjoyed making something that we could actually use, and I definitely agree with her there. She was a good sport at not cheating when we played through it together with the rest of our group.
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