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Show HN: LockedAway – A unique text experience

lockedaway.online

65 pointsfoopod24 comments

I like that you can change the number in the login form after the name and type in the according month as the password and it will still work. E. g. addy01 january is valid as well.

Edit: Ok, apparently you just have to enter a password that has the same length as "december" and it will always work, the username is not important.

Tehe. December is always accepted. Otherwise people always get in on their second attempt, user name isn't considered at all.

Nice

My favorite interactive novel,

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Portal_1986

You play an astronaut who comes back to earth after 100 years and everyone is gone. You find one semi working computer. The game is that computer through which you piece together what happened.

It's pre world wide web so my memory of it might be much better than reality given it came out back in bbs/CompuServe days

I haven't played the game, but there's a novelisation, which is basically all the text from the game printed out. It's... very odd, but I enjoyed it.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1315984.Portal

If you'd like to refresh your memory, the game is playable online under client-side emulation at https://archive.org/details/msdos_Portal_1986 .

Possible spoiler alert below.

Your Github repo reveals that one character has a specific mental illness. However, multiple personalities are not a feature of that illness: http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/dissociative-identity-dis...

I should probably clean up the readme then. Those were an initial set of ideas when I started creating the story.

I went a bit off track.

I had the idea to make this game after playing Christine Love's Even Cowgirls Bleed (http://scoutshonour.com/cowgirl/).

Features

- Reverse Chronology to tell the story.

- Told through the UI of an online journal.

The first button says 'What do you?' - I guess it's meant to be 'What do you do?'

Thanks, fixing it now.

There's a lot of promise here! I really like it. Couple of thoughts I had that might be worth sharing:

- Maybe I'm just dense, but it took somebody else mentioning the twist before I caught it. In retrospect, the picture should've been a pretty obvious clue. But perhaps the story could do more to make clear what's going on. It's tricky to write first-person and have it be clear that what the character sees isn't the same as what the reader does, but the payoff is amply worth it.

- I might hesitate to cast a character's unique perception of reality in terms of a specific mental illness with defined traits. Two reasons: First, it opens you up to nitpicks around differences between what you name and what you portray, or conversely constrains the story to fit the disorder. Second, it's a bit disrespectful of both character and reader. "Here," you seem to say, "this person's inner life is interesting enough to share, something of which it's worth your while to partake." And that's great! I love that. But when you kind of turn around and go "I got you good, you were reading the DSM this whole time!", it feels like I've wasted my interest and that's just no fun for anybody.

- Have you seen Twine? It's a platform for authoring static web-hosted interactive fiction. Basically lets you not have to build your own tooling, which it's great that you can and did, but that's time not spent on the story. Not sure if Twine would suit your needs, but it might be worth a look.

- Telling a story in reverse chronological is hardmode. You have to develop a narrative that makes sense and rewards the reader in both directions. Totally doable and this is not a bad first cut at it, but I kind of feel like another style might better reward this story. I mean, the essential tension here is between the character's reality and the reader's assumptions, and there might be other ways to let that tension build and resolve itself. Maybe an epistolary hypertext style where the reader follows her own path through the contents of a web diary, with some progress flags or similar to trigger "new post"-style stuff at points where it will make sense to the individual reader. That's not easy to pull off either, but I think maybe more so than reverse chronological, and it also offers the reader a sense of discovery that I think could be more present here.

Just some thoughts I had. I hope they're of some use to you. And for heaven's sake don't stop writing! I'm really looking forward to finding out what you come up with next.

Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts.

Your first point scares me the most though. If a reader doesn't get the twist a great deal of value is lost and I doubt they are going to put in more effort to get a better understanding.

I never thought about plot like this before, and now that I do, I feel like the way I used mental illness was a somewhat cheap shot I used to create the twist. Twine I discovered halfway through after going back and have another look at 'Even Cowgirls Bleed', will probably use that for my next one.

But taking on reverse chronology was hard as balls. Turns out you can't just write a story forwards and just read it to someone backwards.

Again, I really appreciate you taking the time to comment.

You really did jump in the deep end, yeah! There are sharks there. But hey, even if it didn't turn out quite the way you intended, you didn't drown or get eaten, so on the whole I'd call that kind of a win.

As I said before, I hope you keep going! You seem to have good ideas, and that's the thing that counts. I'm really looking forward to seeing what you'll accomplish with practice.

Edit: Which reminds me, how can I best find out when you publish again? I've followed you on Github, but maybe there's a better option you'd be so good as to let me know about.

Took me a while. But my new site is up. Complete with a way to subscribe to my stuff. More past projects to come too.

http://jono.tech/

Neat, thanks!

(As and when you find the time, an RSS feed would be great to have, too!)

It definitely had the feel of a game made by her. Digital: A Love Story changed my life, I'm glad to see other people are equally inspired by her content.

I really liked it :)

I don't think it was too hard to "get" at all.

I liked scrolling back up to re-understand previous entries with new understanding (e.g. "But everything seems to remind me of him": at first I thought boyfriend). It's much easier to do this with a text-based (with previous entries visible) than with something like the movie Memento.

And then the reveal at the end gave me an instant big grin.

And then I could re-read the entries in the forward direction to re-understand the missing pieces again.

Interesting concept!

My feedback is that I'd frame it more as a story than a game. Guessing the password felt like it was going to be one of those Frvade-type games, but after that it was simply taking in the story.

Probably unintentional, but the picture contains coordinates in the EXIF data which you may want to remove.

Appreciate it. Now that it is in my github history though, it is probably more effort than its worth. But I may as well remove it from the live site. If you are ever in the neighbourhood come on over for a beer.

Thanks

Or you can just relocate

Nice read and flow plus a great end.

Personally i think the typos add to the realism.

I will admit to the apostrophes that I skipped. That was purposeful. But now you have piqued my interest, was there anything else?

Nice read. I liked it ... :)

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