While my autobiographical character herself did not make it into the game, another character, Yse, was present. The only reason my autobiographical character is not present is because she exists far in the future after the time my game is set in, and I couldn’t find a way to implement her without a time skip, which felt tonally incorrect. This game takes place in the world of my Quiet Year game just before the apocalypse occurs; the apocalyptic event described in my hypertext narrative assignment begins at the end of this game, with hints that this is going to happen beforehand, including a reference to Evelyn Alignton in the news article, “Time Travel Technology is in Its Final Stage, Says Expert.” Evelyn is a scientist character who invented time travel and was present in my hypertext narrative as well.
I crowdsourced a few dozen Tinder profiles I encountered and implemented them in different ways. Some I used verbatim (Sal’s “Hi”) and others I took from text generated by CharNG (Nick, Matt, Yasha). For Nick’s, I also included the phrase “tell me what sonnet you’re obsessed with right now” from n+7, which generated this from the Tinder bio phrase “tell me what song you’re obsessed with right now,” as I thought it sounded pretentious. I wanted to call attention to Matt’s in particular, as it was generated verbatim by CharNG (the others I edited to make legible) and I thought it was hilarious: “Looking for a game of Mario Kart or two (no LTR, sorry). DL.” I knew I wanted gender to play a large role in this narrative, so I typed “gender” into Googlism and got some interesting results. One result was “gender is god,” and at this point I decided to turn the godlike figure Yse into a symbol of the character’s gender identity confusion through their own perspective, and this became the crux of the story. All spoken dialogue portions were recorded in Otter.ai and narrowed down to be more uniform. I mostly wanted to accurately capture the speech patterns of natural dialogue, which was helpful, since I had trouble writing dialogue from scratch. I started with a loose script and had myself and a friend read through it and improvise.
The Oblique Strategies cards I employed were as follows: decorate, decorate (this inspired me to make clothing and dressing up an element of the game, and different outfits have different effects); use an unacceptable color (I knew I wanted a pink and blue color scheme, so I googled “ugly shade of blue” and received a hex code for a color called “ugly blue,” which I used); faced with a choice, do both (I was interested in making something romance-based, but also wanted to use a dress-up mechanic and wasn’t sure which to implement, so I included both); what mistakes did you make last time (I was disappointed with how static my hypertext narrative was, so I wanted to include more branching paths and game-changing decisions instead of arbitrary ones); disconnect from desire (I implemented the character’s thoughts into the text, interrupting them in their pursuit of romance and “disconnecting” them from their “desire”).
I got the title of my game from Botnik, where, using the paranormal romance voice, I got the phrase, “with little victories incarnate.” I used this because I thought it tied into the world of my Quiet Year game, where gender is irrelevant in the future; the little victories the character experiences throughout the game are incarnate, as they remain represented by the somewhat genderless autobiographical character Allistar Galaxy in the future. For anagram generator, I input the name of the cafe, “Mary Sue Margaret’s,” and many phrases involved magma, so I decided to include it in the description of the portal Yse steps out of.