blue lacuna bonus material

Here is some material from my archives that may be of interest to die-hard fans, interactive fiction historians, spidering software, and my future self when I lose all this stuff in a hard drive crash. Everything here is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license.

Right after Whom the Telling Changed, I made plans for an ambitious parser-replacng I6 extension I was going to call GrInform. Many of the ideas in here ended up in my later I7 extensions, although some have yet to appear. 3/6/06

GrInform-Design.txt

Blue Lacuna began as a piece of interactive Myst fan fiction called simply "Lacuna." I sometimes like to work backwards on projects by designing cover art and feelies first to give me a sense of the mood I'm going for: here's a feelie that would have introduced the "Myst" version of Lacuna. 5/8/06

Early Feelie Art

Here's another "feelie" for a non-existent game: the book that would link you to Lacuna, in the Myst-inspired version. 2/7/06

Early Feelie Art

Blue Lacuna underwent a radical redesign after I lost the first few months of coding in a hard drive crash-- or so I thought until I recently discovered this version of the game on a long-forgotten backup! Here are the Inform 6 project files for this (very incomplete) version of the game, during its "Myst fan fiction" days, including early versions of puzzles that made it to the final game, along with others that didn't. 7/1/06

Lost First Version (I6)

After giving up on the project for months after thinking it lost, one night on a camping trip while I couldn't sleep I began to take notes on how to reboot the story. When I got home these notes turned into this rough story outline, which is remarkably close to the form of the final story completed well over two years later. 10/1/06

Lacuna Reborn

Here's an early version of the Inform 7 version of Lacuna, from more than two years before the final release. Most interesting is a much earlier version of the initial meeting with Progue (about halfway through the file), who has different attitudes and speech patterns. 11/28/06

Early I7 Version

The story iterated many times during development. Here's one early step of that process, with me asking questions to myself to try to work out the story problems. 1/21/07

conceptual-problems.txt

Besides living in Hawaii during the winter of 06-07, I also compiled a library of reference image of beautiful tropical places. Here are some of my favorites, many of which directly inspired locations in Blue Lacuna. 2007

Reference Images

I wrote a lot of text in an attempt to flesh out the backstory of the worlds and characters in Blue Lacuna. Here are some of these documents, with details about the history of Forest, City, and the player character. Various 2006-08

World-building Documents

By far the most difficult part of writing Blue Lacuna was developing the character of Progue. It was multi-year process to find his voice and discover who he really was. Here are some documents related to this journey, including conversations cut from the final game, internal monologues, character building notes, and photos-- while none quite look like the Progue in my head, the one acting as thumbnail here comes closest. Various 2006-08

Finding Progue

Early cover art mockup for Blue Lacuna, trending darker than the final artwork. But I still like the idea of vines entwining Progue's legs, trapping him as he stands before a crashing wave. 1/2/08

Early cover art mockup

Lacuna's complex dream sequences went through several complete rewrites, mostly to make them increasingly interactive. Here's my initial pass at what proved to be the final version of the dream structure. 1/25/08

dream-revamp.txt

Countless pages of notes and diagrams were generated in the process of mapping out the many conversations. Here's a map of one of the most complex conversations in the game, the final confrontation with Progue. 6?/1?/08

A conversation flowchart