The very first part of Ripple.
Most of you who visit this blog should, by now, know that I’m writing a story. But for those who don’t, I’m writing this post. (Also, its good to start with an introductory post, so I don’t just jump out and say something random about a project new visitors might not know anything about — and have no way of looking up.)
Ripple is the current (working, but hopefully will be the permanent) name for a project I’ve been working on for a year — and probably will continue working on for longer than that. It’s the story of how a teenage boy must make a life-or-death decision and the consequences that come of it. Along the way, he meets up with all sorts of forces, from CLIMA, his clandestine employer (I completely forgot where the name came from. It was an acronym at some point), to Ashley, a ditzy precognitive teenage girl whose only weakness is her inability to predict his future. (I know, cliché, right? I had to make her fallible somehow without severely weakening her ability…)
Ripple actually came to me as a unformed idea last summer for a FPS game I would never be able to make (but imagining games is more fun than playing them anyway). At that time, CLIMA was nameless, and the player was kept in a little pod and released and sent out to kill someone. Nice and simple. Until one of the missions sent you off to kill someone who had been helping you the whole game. From there, the player could choose between two paths: kill the helper and end the game, or not kill her… erm… the helper and then play an extended plot where you go back and destroy what is now CLIMA.
Of course it was in the middle of summer and I was in the middle of Half Life Two Episode Two so I quickly forgot it and moved on.
Towards the end of the summer, I went to a leadership education program, where I met someone who was good at writing, and as I was having a polite conversation with her (what else do you do at breakfast after you’re done with breakfast?) I mentioned that I had an idea for a story. She suggest I should try writing it out.
Writing. I hadn’t thought of that when I thought of the idea for Ripple. But since I was worse at making games than writing I thought, Why not give it a try? And so I did. But first I would have to work a few things out. Since it wasn’t a game, I would have to make the choice whether to kill the helper or not. The choice was obvious. Then I had to turn it into a full story. I couldn’t just say over and over again that the person was released, killed someone, and then returned. That’s boring. So I made him go to my school, made CLIMA more freeform, and now I’m here, 72871 words (150 pages) later, typing a blog post about a story I’ve been writing. 