Carolyn VanEseltine is one of Interactive Fiction’s hardest-working and most brilliant creative figures. Newcomers to the community may have encountered her moderating the intfiction.org forum or breaking down the intricacies of Inform 7 in a series of informative articles. On her website, www.sibylmoon.com, she compiles in-depth insights and details regarding her personal experience in the ever-evolving world of game design. After securing a BA in English from Beloit College specializing in creative writing, she now works as a professional game designer and is an enthusiastic game dev hobbyist. She resides in the Greater Boston area with fiancée Danielle Church and her dog Megabit.

 

Her professional career in gaming began in 2002 working on GemStone IV at Simutronics Games, and since then, she's worked for Harmonix (Rock Band and Dance Central franchises) and Giant Spacekat (Revolution 60). She has released three full-length interactive fiction games: One Eye Open (with Caelyn Sandel), Beet the Devil, and XYZZY winner (for Best NPCs) Ollie Ollie Oxen Free.

 

>What was your first encounter with computer/electronic games?

 

My dad introduced me to Adventure when I was 5 years old. When I got stuck, he printed out the Fortran source for me on our old dot-matrix printer. I used to bring the entire printout to daycare and comb through it during free play time.

 

>Your first IFDB entry is Phoenix’s Landing: Destiny, which won IntroComp in 2008.  Was that your first IF?  Do you have any “cellar” games (i.e. THIS SHALL NEVER SEE DAYLIGHT!)?

 

Not at all. There have been a great many cellar games!  Apart from that, I wrote multiplayer IF from 2002 to 2006, though never in IFDB-qualifying form. But to back up....

 

IF has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. My parents were opposed to commercial games, so we didn't have any of the Infocom games at my house, but my dad was a computer hobbyist, and he used to write text adventures in Turbo Pascal on an old system called Grow. He wrote some of them on his own to entertain me, and he wrote others by asking me what should happen next.

 

I don't remember the details very well, but we made one game that was full of sorceresses and dogs and wizards, and there was a hostile rosebush that grabbed your ankle. That one triggered a choice-based interaction - you could either scream at it so that it would wilt, or uproot a tomato plant and throw it at the rosebush to distract it. (I'm glad this was choice-based, because talk about psychic author solutions! Of course, no one ever saw it but us.)

 

Later, I got my hands on LOGO, and I tried to write a text adventure with it. I wanted to accept verb-noun commands, but I hadn't figured out how to build a parser, so "get rock" had its own subroutine and "get coins" had its own subroutine and... you get the idea. It did navigate nicely between rooms, though, so that was something.

 

Fast forward to 2002, and Simutronics hired me to work on GemStone IV. I sometimes describe GS4 as "the last of the really great pay-for-play MUDs" (it's a reference to The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles, though no one ever gets it.) In many ways, working on GS4 felt like coming home for me. It had the text-based interface that I loved, but with thousands of other people all playing at the same time. I joined the Quests and Events team, and we made stories for our players to experience.

 

We told big stories about invasions by extra-worldly monsters and struggles between god-chosen paladins, and we told small stories about people finding self-confidence and laying old ghosts to rest. We told our stories with specially crafted areas, pre-written game code, and GM-inhabited NPCs. The stories were magical, and through our stories, we made an RPG into a universe.

 

But by their nature, these stories were ephemeral. We didn't run and rerun our epic events - we planned and prepared for months, but the actual in-game event would only happen once, leaving only repercussions, memories, and player logs behind. It made major events special, but there was something dismaying about it as well. When I discovered Inform 6 and the existence of the single-player IF community, I jumped at the chance to write something more permanent.

 

My first solo, single-player IF game was the typical terrible "my apartment" first game. It was called "The Daily Grind", and it was about trying to get to work on time despite being trapped in your apartment by a bright orange Chow Chow with a nasty temperament. I wanted to enter it into IFComp, but the organizer told me firmly that I'd missed the deadline. (Stephen Granade, I owe you one.)

 

>I got the impression that you primarily wrote horror, but I think Smoochiepoodle and the Bastion of Science has probably one of the funniest premises I’ve come across.  Where do you get inspiration, and have you ever considered an expansion of Smoochiepoodle?

 

I actually think of myself as a fantasy writer first and a science fiction writer second, with horror somewhere after that. My games have been all over the map - One Eye Open is psychic horror, but Beet the Devil is religious comedy, "Homecoming" is twisted sci-fi humor, "Wildflowers" is somber slice-of-life, and I don't even know what to call Monkey and Bear or Ollie Ollie Oxen Free. Games, I guess? They're definitely games.

 

>"Smoochiepoodle and the Bastion of Science" came out of a desperate attempt to fulfill as many of the SpeedIFJacket prompts as I could. Here's the list I was working from:

 

"Much time is wasted in irrelevant flirting between parser and PC. >GET ROOM, guys." -- Sam Kabo Ashwell

"Not, surprisingly, an unreliable narrator game."  -- Caelyn Sandel

"The writer is a strange, strange, strange individual."  -- Tanga

"I'll never look at frozen peas the same way again."  -- C.E.J. Pacian

"It's painfully obvious that the entire game was written solely to set up one rather weak pun." -- David Fletcher

"At first I thought this was just another boring empty-apartment game. Then came the piranhas." -- Sarah Morayati

"Brilliant! This is the first four-move game I've actually enjoyed." -- Royce Odle

"With a naked eye or microscope you will be able to identify 180 hardwoods, softwoods and tropical woods." -- Roger Carbol

"The wryly savage condemnation of the 17th-century Neapolitan court is a knee-slapper, despite being couched so shyly in metaphor." -- S. John Ross

"Writing a keyword-based game using no verbs, not even in the descriptions, must've been nothing short of impossible." -- Marius Muller

 

I didn't successfully use them all, but I still assert that Smoochiepoodle is the only possible game that I could have written from those prompts. And no, I've never considered expanding it. I think one version is enough!

 

Props to ClubFloyd - I can't believe they won before checking the walkthrough. I was pleased with the core solution, but I thought it was dreadfully cued.

 

>You’ve experimented with multiplayer and persistence in Interactive Fiction.  Do you have ideas about how you’d like to push this farther?

 

Multiplayer IF fascinates me. No matter how beautiful an IF game is, there's a certain measure of soullessness that comes from knowing that it's just you and you alone. Interacting with other real people through a game - that's powerful.

 

I have a number of multiplayer IF experiments in process, both choice-based and parser. Most of them, like “This Is A Real Thing That Happened,” handle multiplayer asynchronously - you are affected by the people who played before you, and you will affect the people who play after you, but you don't interact in real time. The exception is Greetings, Survivors, which would be synchronous if completed, but which is less groundbreaking than the others.

 

>You've collaborated multiple times with Caelyn Sandel. Do you recommend collaboration for other people? What do you look for in a collaborator?  

 

I like collaborating with other people because projects that I build with other people are so different than projects I build alone. With the right people and the right project, there's an upward spiral of energy and excitement, and the end result is better than anything I would have made alone.  One Eye Open and Does Canned Rice Dream of a Napkin Heap? are shining examples.

 

But whether a collaboration succeeds or fails really depends on who I'm working with and what we're working on. With the wrong people or the wrong project, it goes the other way - everyone loses enthusiasm, energy, and motivation, and eventually everyone hates the project. I've had a couple projects fall apart that way, and it's pretty awful.

 

As for whether I'd recommend it - I do think it's worth trying! I suggest that smaller events like Ectocomp or Shufflecomp are a great opportunity to find out whether this will work for you. If you find a good teammate on a three-hour project, then you have the starting basis to try something larger.

 

One thing to note: in the commercial game dev scene, most devs work in small groups, rather than working alone. Notch, Dong Nguyen, and the Toady One do exist, but they are exceptions rather than the norm. Knowing how to collaborate creatively is an optional skill in the IF authoring community, but it's a critically important skill for professional game devs.

 

>You were an associate producer at Harmonix, did you work on Rock Band and Dance Central?  Did you have any input on the direction of those games?

 

I worked on a number of titles in both the Rock Band and Dance Central franchises, but I didn't directly affect their design.

 

"Producer" is an important role in the video game industry, but it's sometimes tricky to define. A former director of mine once put it well by saying, "The director's job is to determine what and why. The producer's job is to determine how and when." In essence, a producer's job is to ensure that the game gets made - not by making the game, but by ensuring that the people who are making the game can do so with maximum efficiency and minimal interference. In the day-to-day, it involves a lot of risk assessment, scheduling, communication, and paperwork.

 

The Rock Band Network was my favorite project at Harmonix. The RBN was a user-generated content project of unprecedented magnitude. It  allowed any musician to put their music into Rock Band, as long as they had separated stems and rights to the masters. The artists received a cut of the payment for their songs, just like artists featured in regular DLC.

 

I originally joined the Harmonix web team as a QA specialist on the RBN project, but eventually I joined the production team as the RBN producer (under the project director, Matthew Nordhaus). It opened up a whole world of music - not just to me, but to everyone else discovering new music via Rock Band. In my 3+ years on the RBN, we released over 2,000 songs!

 

>You wrote about how you learned to sing playing Rock Band, if someone puts you on the spot, what track do you choose?

 

Depends on which songs are available! I just went to a Jukebox the Ghost concert last week, so if you put me on the spot with my own library, I'd pick their song "Empire" (from the Rock Band Network). If I had to stick with official Harmonix DLC, I'd pick "Somebody to Love" by Queen, because I'm proud of being able to hit Freddie Mercury's high notes. And if I had to stick with on-disc songs, I'd pick "Roundabout" by Yes, because the harmonies are gorgeous.

 

>Fish Dreams was shockingly disturbing.  Are these the kinds of dreams you normally have?

 

I am very happy to say “no".

 

>Roller Coasters:  Do you love them, or are they twisted monstrosities of potentially deadly kinetic energy?  (What Are Little Girls Made Of? was an Ectocomp 2012 entry involving a terrifying experience on a roller coaster)

 

The last time I was on a roller coaster, it was the Yankee Cannonball at Canobie Lake, and I was sitting with Rob Noyes (Spatch). I didn't have contact lenses at the time, and as we took the first drop, my glasses jounced straight off my face. Rob reached out and snagged them out of the air like "'tain't no thing". I will never stop being impressed by this.

 

For my part, I clung to the bar and tensed up so hard that my shoulder spasmed and I had to use a heating pad for the next three days.

 

TL:DR; Twisted monstrosities of potentially deadly kinetic energy that tried to steal my vision. Run away! Run away!

 

>I’ve noticed A.I. seems to recur as a theme in your games, do you have any specific interest in producing machine intelligence beyond “graceful NPCs”?   

 

From a Feb 25, 2015 chat log:

Caelyn Sandel This is you: "I can write a game without an AI!!!! am writing a game without an AI RIGHT NOW, ok back to writing games about AIs"

 

It's true - I'm fascinated with artificial intelligence. I got to dig into heuristics and metaheuristics while writing The Chessboard Lethologica, because I had to explain a fictional breakthrough in AI technology without actually having an AI programming background. That was a lot of fun! (Also, I got to make a whole lot of chess references. Yay for chess references!)

 

More than half the incomplete games in my I7 folder deal with AI in some form. I think it stems from the same root as my fascination with multiplayer IF - I want the player to have a believable, meaningful experience of the game responding to the player. I'm also drawn to the idea of machine intelligence because it would be like and yet unlike us, which always produces fertile space for fictional exploration.

 

Actually working on machine intelligence would be fascinating, but it seems like the kind of thing that isn't realistic at the hobbyist level - either you do it, or you don't do it. Right now, I'm opting for "don't do it", but I make no promises about the future.

 

>Have you ever had a game concept that just got out of hand…like you were designing for technology that doesn’t exist yet?  How do you keep things manageable?

 

This hasn't really happened to me. Odd as it sounds, this is my coding speciality. Given an engineering problem (or a game concept), I can generally solve it with the tools at hand - regardless of whether or not those tools are the best tools existing for the job.

 

This is kind of the opposite of "if you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail." To push the analogy, if I have a hammer, but the problem is a screw, then I'll screw it in with the hammer-claw. It might make more sense to go find a screwdriver, and it would certainly be easier on the screw if I did - but if there isn't time to find a screwdriver, I can get the job done anyway.

 

The down side is that I am terribly prone to reinventing the wheel - or (among other things) the hash table, the state machine, and the strategy pattern... not to mention quite a few Inform 7 extensions. This is not particularly efficient, and I'm working to overcome this tendency.

 

>From your articles on your blog, it seems you know or are learning an extremely great number of languages and coding systems.  What are your favorites and how do you think you might use them and/or apply that knowledge for interactive fiction or any other application you might design in the future?

 

Inform 7 is far and away my favorite - it's just so excellently made to fit its intended purpose. I also found it extremely accessible at a time when I didn't have experience with non-scripting languages.

 

I'm enjoying C# a great deal these days, but my purpose is quite practical: C# is a powerful, versatile language that is heavily used in game dev. I plan to build my mostly-undiscussed solo commercial project (aka Project Sunflower) in Unity with C#.

 

>What’s it like running your own Comp?  Any suggestions you can give to would-be Comp organizers or participants in the future based on what you’ve experienced?

 

Running ParserComp has been fantastic! I've been delighted by the strong positive response, both among authors (there were 14 submissions!) and among reviewers.

My advice to other first-time comp runners would be to read the full rules of other IF competitions, figure out what questions everyone else had to answer, and make sure you have answers for them. I never thought to specify a) whether beta testers could judge games they tested or b) whether or not people could update their entries later on. If I'd considered it in advance, I wouldn't have had to scramble when both of those questions came up.

 

>Okay, you’re on a desert island maintaining an outpost by yourself for eight months with no internet and lots of free time and scant luggage space.  What single video game do you take with you?  What one magazine or publication would you have delivered?  What book that you have been meaning to read do you take along?

 

Video game: Dwarf Fortress

Magazine: The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy

Book: I'd take my Kindle! The fact that 90% of my library can fit in my purse simultaneously is one of my favorite things about the modern age.

 

>…not to mention neatly circumventing James Lipton-style psychological questions!

 

 

 

Carolyn’s most recent project is Does Canned Rice Dream of a Napkin Heap? (with Caelyn Sandel, Danielle Church, and Jamie Sandel) It's part of Antholojam 1: Golden Age of Sci Fi, an experimental collection of 15 short games organized by Zoe Quinn and Alexander Lifschitz.

 

Carolyn says: Canned Rice is a graphical, reverse-IF storytelling comedy. Two aliens, a robot, and a canine cosmonaut walk into a bar, and you have to entertain them with a tall tale so that they'll pay for your drinks. The press has been extremely positive, and the transcripts have been hysterical!

 

Play DCRDoaNH here in your browser! (Requires Unity plugin)

 

Or pay what you want for a download of all the Antholojam games!