Field Notes

I’m thinking that, in The Demon King, there will be an interlude between every four or five chapters that consists of a short passage about the world of the story written in a formal “natural philosophy” style. It will never be stated outright, but these passages will be written by Balthazar (which is how I jokingly referred to the eponymous “Demon King” before then deciding that it should be his actual name). Some of the information in these passages will be true, and some of it won’t be, and some will be nothing more than hearsay, and it will be mostly up to the reader to decide which is which (or if and why it matters).

The premise is that Balthazar, having propelled himself forward hundreds of years in time, is now taking his sweet time doing what he meant to do. He left an artifact behind in the past to charge like a battery, and he intended to jump forward to collect it once it had been fully charged before then immediately jumping back, but he couldn’t find it, and he became “the Demon King” more or less by accident in the process of looking for it. It’s been about a decade since he arrived in the present, and the notes he’s taken on the future are extensive. Since he sees no reason to explain himself to anyone who lives in the world/timeline he’s trying to erase, his notes are something like an occluded window into who he is and what he’s thinking.

I’m also toying with the idea that there are multiple versions of Balthazar, and that they’ve been passing versions of these notes between them like a baton as they exist at multiple points in time while trying to correct paradoxes and reconnect timeloops. Some of the Balthazars are slightly different from one another based on what they have or haven’t experienced, and some of them may end up occupying wildly different realities. Later in the story, what seems to have been a single timeline is revealed to be the result of intricate time travel shenanigans, and some of the field notes that may have initially seemed a bit odd will make more sense in retrospect.

I think the best way to go about creating these interludes, at least at first, is to write them completely straight. I can start playing around with details after I get a better sense of what I’m trying to do. I’m not that clever, but I can be patient and meticulous, so this device doesn’t have to be perfect right from the beginning of the first draft.

Monument Valley

I’ve been interested in Monument Valley for a while now, and I’m glad I finally sat down and played it. It’s actually much better than everyone says it is, but that’s probably because it’s difficult to describe what makes the game so good.

Monument Valley consists of ten stages, each of which will take most people about five minutes to play (except the first, which is very short, and the last, which can be very frustrating). I’ve heard this game criticized as being “easy,” but I think it’s more accurate to say that it’s carefully designed to facilitate player engagement. Each level (again, except the first and the last) has a core mechanic, and the player is encouraged to learn the limits and potential of each mechanic in a guided yet natural way. My favorite stage is Level VIII: The Box, in which a cube can be opened, closed, rotated, and then opened again from a different perspective. This might sound complicated, but it isn’t; in fact, it’s nothing short of pure joy.

The story is hinted at in a few scattered text panels, and I’m not sure I have a good grasp of what’s going on, but here’s my interpretation: A human society used magical “sacred geometry” to create fantastic buildings (presumably in a valley?), but they fell into decline when their sacred geometry was stolen from them, and now all that remains are monuments haunted by flightless crow people. The player-character Ida is a princess who has been told that she will be given her crown only when she restores the sacred geometry to the monuments. As she does so, she begins to remember that she herself is a crow, and that it was the crow people who stole the sacred geometry from the humans. When she returns the last piece of the sacred geometry, the human curse on the crow people is lifted, and Ida and her people regain their wings and fly away. After spending the entire game forced to walk on linear paths along the surface of the monuments, the final animation of free flight is very satisfying.

I appreciate the narrative progression of returning treasure to temples instead of taking it, and I’m interested in what a traditional adventure game – okay, let’s be real, a Zelda game – would look like if the player’s abilities were limited instead of enhanced as they made their way through the story. I guess this is sort of what I was thinking when I came up with the concept for The Legend of Ganondorf, in which the range of options available to the player becomes progressively narrower until the illusion of choice completely disappears. I think this is what happens with most games – like, the more power you attain within the game, the less there is for you to actually do with it within the confines of the gameworld – but they’re never explicitly framed in that way.

I also appreciate the conceit of realizing that the player-character is actually the bad guy – or, in this case, the bad crow girl. Speaking of power, it hit me really hard when I realized that Ida is a crow. Monument Valley isn’t all that deep, but I can’t remember another instance of a game flat-out saying, “No, you are not, in fact, the hero of this story.” (I think Braid is supposed to be like this, but I’m garbage at platformers and was never able to get too far into it.)

In any case, the Monument Valley OST is fantastic. It’s almost exactly forty minutes of soft energetic ambient music, which makes it perfect for a writing session.