"Enough of a Mess" is hereby launched!!!

Hello! I wanted to indulge myself in a few short paragraphs about the process of creating "Enough of a Mess."

In maybe 2012 or 2013, I started working on a long poem sequence which eventually came to be called "Upside-down Crown." The conceit in the poems was that I was writing a sort of walkthrough for a video game that didn't exist. I wasn't a game developer at that time, and had never written any code, but I'd played video games since I was a kid. The game I had in mind for the poem was a sort of chaotic mash-up of Paradise Lost and an actual food fight that I was in while working at Dairy Queen in high school. I felt intuitively that a poem about a game about those things could communicate yet a third (or fourth? fifth?) experience to a reader. Milton's cosmic pathos may seem like a mismatch for something as stupid as throwing ice cream at someone, but my concern wasn't perpendicular to his -- What is chaos? How is our universe created? How do we apprehend its falling?

I mentioned what I was working on to my teacher Laura Mullen after a poetry reading in 2015, and that I was thinking about actually making a video game to go along with the poem, and she immediately said "Oh you SHOULD," as though I could just snap my fingers and do it. But weirdly, her saying that with so little hesitation gave me exactly the boost I needed. I took Harvard's CS50 to learn some programming (which you could do too, for free), I spent 7 years making little prototypes and jam games, and when the book containing "Upside-down Crown" was accepted for publication in February of 2022, I decided to make a little game to go along with it, to be a kind of playable "trailer." 

This game is neither a very close tonal match for my book, nor a very effective realization of the game from "Upside-down Crown." It's meant to be engaging but not overwhelming, and to convey some number of snippets from the book to an interested reader/player. Partly, this is an issue of scope: there was a limit to what I could make in my free time, by myself, in a year and change. And partly, I wanted to leave most of the "Upside-down Crown" game (the demons, the dancing, the paradoxes, the violence) in its imaginal state.

I used the Godot Engine for the game itself (and maybe I should do a separate devlog about porting from version 3.5 to version 4 and then back again because of rendering issues, midway through the development process). I used Krita and Blender for the art assets, I used Audacity to record little ditties I made using three Teenage Engineering Pocket Operators, and I used BFXR for other sound effects. I want to thank Erik Griswold for his permission to use his tracks "Pleasure principle" and "Fallingwater" as menu music -- his music is incredible, check him out. The project can be found on github. If you can wade through it, please feel free to make use of whatever code you'd like.

Please keep an eye out for The Amber in Ambrose (and other poems) which will be out this summer from Trnsfr Books! And, if you play "Enough of a Mess," please leave me a note and let me know what you think! 

--Jon