Solitary stars

I've finally finished my interactive fiction Solitary Stars, which has finished me off in return.

It took me more than five years of hard work and painful introspection to enrich the first draft, which I made public under the title L'Observatoire, on the occasion of the French comp 2016 organized as every year by the Fiction-interactive website.

The amount of additional content seemed to me to justify a change of title, so that it would be understood that this was not simply a 2.0 version: by way of comparison, a walkthrough of Solitary Stars is around 16,000 words long, compared with 6,000 words for the version released at the end of 2015.

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All in all, if I had to assess the creation of this interactive fiction and determine what I think of the result today, I'd say it's rather a failure. Its greatest merit is that it exists, and that's no mean feat, since bringing a work into existence is always an accomplishment and a source of satisfaction. But both in terms of the story itself and the way it develops through the player's actions, I'm not satisfied.

The whole dark, melancholy, pessimistic, pathetic, etc. side of the character and his story gradually became unbearable for me, and wanting to be rid, purely and simply rid, of such a concentration of negativity in my life played a big part in my eagerness to finish the game, to the detriment of improving it.

Over the past few months, I had planned to implement even more additional content and even introduce a fourth playable character (who would have been an ex-militiaman, with his own memories, specific NPCs, specific actions, etc.) but I gave up out of tiredness and disgust.

The fact that many of the character's memories and those of the NPCs he encounters, Paloma in the first instance, are more than inspired by my own life, is obviously no stranger to this growing unease; I was torn between perplexity as to the point of stirring up a number of memories that didn't need to be, and a growing doubt as to the interest this "autobiographical interactive fiction" could possibly hold for someone else, for a lambda player.

Paloma (whose real first name is Laura), the students evoked in the character's memories, and even the essential locations (the boulevard, the park, the barracks, the bistro, the swimming pool, Laetitia's apartment building, aka Letizia – all these elements of the game are inspired by a small neighborhood in Nancy that I've frequented quite a bit in my life.

There's a consolatory side to writing (fiction, interactive or otherwise), which is being able to "revisit" people or places you'll never see again, or to change the story. Or relive it over and over again. I've put a lot of my nocturnal dreams into the game, too - I've been writing them down for twenty years, and they're an inexhaustible source of characters, places and situations.

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Parenthesis: perhaps two years ago, I discovered a bistro in Nancy called "L'Étoile" on the corner of avenue du Maréchal Juin and rue des Frères Voirin. Knowing that it's exactly where my game begins, located in a dreamlike double of Nancy and even of this very neighborhood, and that it does indeed speak of the end of the world brought about by a living, evil, Lovecraftian star, I found the coincidence rather tasty.

A little creepy too.

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All this being said, regardless of my growing reticence towards its intimate content, my biggest regret about Solitary Stars is that I didn't manage – but this is precisely due to the story itself, which is very contemplative - to implement more concrete actions, more interactivity with the surrounding world, the objects, the few NPCs. This can give the impression, alas partly justified, that it's just one big short story where the only choice, or almost the only choice, is the order in which you want to read miles of narrative and lore.

I say "in part" because the character's path in the first part of the game is still very free, with quite a few possible variations, and in the second, the dialogue with Paloma can unfold and end in a variety of ways.

In this respect, I think I've given players a real choice of character type. Solitary Stars is a role-playing game in the original sense of the word.

But, yes, it's true that the clickable link system is less satisfying for exploring a neighborhood and trying to get all you can out of it, than the good old parser.

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Which leads me to the following conclusion: not only the pleasure, but the real object of interactive fiction is the interactivity itself, not the fiction. You need an interesting story, but that's not enough.

A phrase impressed me a few years ago, which I can't remember exactly, but it said that good games weren't about things, they were about people. That's partly true: it's more interesting to play an F.I. that offers interactions with NPCs with a minimum of differentiation, than to spend the whole game solving mechanical puzzles and Myst-style enigmas. At least for most people.

But a good story, good writing and good characters aren't enough either. They can even interfere with the game and its fundamental appeal: being able to perform actions, test things, and be offered interesting answers by the game.

I had to write a quasi-novel, partially interactive, to realize this.