The Goddess of Atvatabar

The Goddess of Atvatabar is now live!

It's a few days late as usual, so from now on all dates will say "estimated". Atvatabar is a milestone story for several reasons:

1. The first joined-up story:
   I've added new pages to Journey to the Centre of the Earth so that the stories now join up. At the end of Joueny, where Jules Verne's book returns to the surface, you can now go deeper and discover Atvatabar. And vice versa.
2. The first joined-up character:
   In Goddess the hero needs to make a decision about his girlfriend. This is the first step toward a single character story that moves forward between episodes (see next post).
3. The last un-numbered story:
   the next story will be the origin story, "issue 1". From that point, each story will be numbered, Eventually the first four stories will be edited and re-numbered to they form a consistent story that moves forward.

Enjoy. :)

My free toolbox

For the record, here are the programs and services I can't do without. And they're all free!

• Smoothdraw - the most responsive art program out there.
• Crimson Editor - still my favourite editor. 
• Microspell - spell checker. Very quick and flexible, 
• fnr - find and replace multi-line blocks of text across multiple documents 
• pngquant - for compressing web graphics: gives beautiful results
• Filezilla - for uploading the results

And web sites:

• Project Gutenberg - for the books.
• Myscriptfont - turn your handwriting into a font. Useful when creating your own art.
• Blogger - this site :)

And now you know!

A last! Spell checking!

My built in spell checker stinks. As you may have noticed. Each page is spell checked at least three times yet typos are everywhere!  Aaaaaargh!

This is because

1. I need to type so quickly
2. the spell checker doesn't know the difference between HTML and ordinary words, so every second word is underlined - I can't see the real mistakes from the false ones.
3. There is no way to tell it "next time ignore this word, OK?"

But today all that changes! I discovered "Microspell". It's wonderful! I just told it to check my entire site, and was able to fix about a hundred typos that I missed before. Hooray!! I can't guarantee that the site is typo free - after all, this is me we are talking about - but it's getting better.

New: Theology 101

Bonus track!  A whole new mini book is added today.
http://www.tedagame.com/theology-101/100.html

A lot of stories deal with weird stuff like time travel, aliens, gods, etc. Not everyone is interested in the details, and it take ages to explain it every time, so I decided to put all the heavy explanations in one place.

So if you want the secrets of the universe, they're all here:

http://www.tedagame.com/theology-101/100.html

I call it... Theology 101!  It isn't the kind of theology they teach at church. But it should be.

Progress update

I just added "The Time Machine", the first story since the game launched. No players yet - or else maybe they play but stay very quiet - but I'm happy with that. I'm still finding my way, improving the game all the time. Here are the latest improvements:

Faster art

At first the art was averaging over half an hour per picture. This picture for example ended up taking over an hour. I'm happy with the result, but an hour is far too long when every story has over  a hundred pictures!

By the end of story two (Gilgamesh) I'd got that down to fifteen minutes. Here's a typical 15 minute picture from near the beginning of The Time Machine: 

I'm still not happy with that. I feel pressured for time, and the result is not great. it does the job but as an artist I could tear it apart. Here's the new, improved art style:

The people in the foreground still use the old style. but the hero in the back uses far fewer lines. This enabkles me to just focus on the parts that matter, finish a picture in ten minutes, and not feel rushed. And I can spend longer on each line, so the result should look more professional. Heres a fully "new style" picture:

I like that style. I just draw the parts that matter to the story, and enough extra lines so the reader isn't totally lost, and I'm done!!! Perfect. Of course, I can't change the art style half way through a story, so I added some more lines, like so:

This fits in better, but as you can see, the new lines do not add anything to the story. In fact, they more than double the time it takes to make the picture. Look at the adult's forward arm: in the simplified art I could be free. But when I added more detail it looked wrong, and I had to erase it and re-draw it. Also the body looks worse now: look at the top of the front leg! Urgh! 

The beauty of the simpler art is that your mind will fill in the details in the right place, so I don't have to. Ten minute pictures are the way to go!

Faster stories

The first two stories took six days to write. Meaning six days if working on the game full time. But I have a day job so a six day story usually takes twelve days or more. That isn't acceptable. I have now got that time down to three days. My goal is to reduce that to two days (if I have to read a story for the first time) or even one (if I'm already familiar with the story).

Joined up stories

I now start on The Goddess of Atvatabar, the first story to join up with an existing story! Soon, when you explore the caves in Journey to the Center of the Earth you'll be able to go deeper, deeper, and come out on the other side! That is a big step to making this more interactive: making a joined up world!

Let's add a million stories

The 20 year road map

I call this a game for a reason. I am painfully aware that right now it's just a couple of mediocre "choose your own adventure" books. But think ahead.

One day this will have so many stories, and so many links between stories, and editing them will be so easy, that it will feel more interactive than Call of Duty. because you can do anything you can imagine: if it can be expressed in words and/or pictures, you can do it.

This is how we will get there:

It's all about scale. 

I just added a page entitled "Help Us Add A Million Stories"  That's right. A million.

Right now the game has two stories. This week I will add a third. Next week I will add a fourth. I expect to average one story every three weeks - more if I do very simple stories, like Aesop's Fables for example. So on my own I will add around 17 stories per year. In two years that's 34 stories. Still not much, but enough so other people start to notice. I then expect others to add ideas. Remember, a story can be very simple - maybe just three pages. I expect to have 50 stories by the middle of 2019.

With more people contributing regularly, growth should be exponential. 100 stories by the end of 2020. By then I expect to have regular contributors, and moderators to help me handle the load.

I would also expect a medium size news site to mention it favourably. The focus then will be on getting user comfortable about adding stuff. I want people to add a story in the same way that they'd add a thread to Reddit. And drawing will not be a problem. This site is about the story, not the art. Anybody can go to drawisland.com and draw something (their HTML5 tool is really easy and responsive), then save it, upload it to Reddit, and add the URL.

Moderators

The bottleneck will be human editing: checking that the stuff works and is above a minimum quality threshold. Nothing beats the human touch for stories. My feeling is that every moderator should have their own web space. They are then responsible for uploading game files to there. There is no javascript in this game, so there's nothing to stop it being spread over as many domains as you like. As long as each moderator is trusted. Those mods can then have their own section of the main site, and their own fans. Maybe specialise by genre? Or have their own picks? Make their name as editors, and monetise accordingly. Have ads, their own Patreon accounts, whatever they want.

Automated tools

At some point, maybe in 2022, we'll need to let people draw directly into the game.

That shouldn't be too hard for some tech minded mod to figure out. Heck, I even did it myself in a  previous game - using HTML5 canvas you can get people to draw onto the screen, then use forms to upload the results. Personally, I don't want to touch code any more. My view is that moderators would create their own code, run it at their own risk on their own domains. Their domains would scale, with hundreds then thousands then tens of thousands of stories, manages using wikis, wordpress, whatever. My own central hub would be for my own hand made stuff, and would only grow at one story per month. Let each moderator do things his own way, and reap the rewards.

How big can TEDAgame get?

Automated tools remove any barriers to growth. How big could we grow? The closest thing I know to TEDAgame is Fanfictiction.net. They began in 1998 and in under 20 years they had well over six million uploaded stories. So a goal of one million TEDAgame stories in a similar time (20 years) seems realistic.

The results of scale

With massive scale we can increase quality by having the best stories rise to the top. We can also have more and more links between stories, creating a fabulously rich single game world. Although it will be static pages, with so many choice it be just as interactive as anu computation-based game. More so because, as the name says, this is endless and you can literally do anything you can imagine. Though whether some mod sub-domains are allowed to be "R rated" is a question for another day. My own hub will always be family friendly. Or as family friendly as classic novels will allow.

Thoughts?

Adding science to the stories

Most of my changes are to make stories more scientific. But you might think this is pseudo-science. So let me explain.

Science or pseudo-science?

Science is a method: observe in a repeatable way, and think logically. Science is not a collection of facts. A collection of facts is an appeal to authority: "it's true because the sacred fact book says so!" Of course, the fact book could be right. Authorities are often right, that is how they become authorities. But it is still an appeal to authority.

"But wait, the fact book can be tested, so that makes it science!" Not true. Religious texts can also be tested: do you get a spiritual experience? Can you dig up the walls of Jerusalem? Being testable does not make thing scientific. The test itself is the science.

Good science is science because it is easy to test. Bad religion is bad because it is not easy to test: "what exactly do you mean by a 'spiritual experience'?" But you can also get bad science (claims that are poorly defined) and good religion (e.g. "accept these metaphors, and a nation will have greater economic growth and better indicators of happiness" - OK, fine, I can test that.)

Good science is easy to test. My stories are easy to test. That is why I call them scientific.

Example 1: the underground sea

Journey to the Center of the Earth has a big underground sea, It is usually imagined as a vast cavern, several miles high and many miles wide, and mostly empty. As Jules Verne wrote, we cannot say it its not there until we go and test it. That's science.

In Verne's day, scientists could not be sure how giant caves would behave. Jules Verne took advantage of that fact. Today scientists have a better idea. So in my story the caverns are relatively near the surface and have multiple supports. I have tested scientists and found them to be generally reliable, but also open to new possibilities.. And I present a story that can be tested: go underground and see!

Science and scientists

If science is a method, what use is peer reviewed data? The clue is in the name: the science is the peers, not the data. You can test these scientists. You might not have your own large hadron collider, but you do have direct experience of people who claim to be scientific,. You, the reader, can judge their reputation. These people then become your tools. They look at the data and say the data is good. You, the reader, are not judging the data (though you can judge ts logical presentation). You are judging the judges.

Example 2: the race of gods

In my version of Gilgamesh I suggest that "the gods" are a distinct tribe of elites. Now probably the reality was messier than this: just as today there would be a tangled mess of priests and traditions and land usage rights. Bt my repeatable, direct experience of life - my scientific observation - tells me that all humans societies create elites based on land ownership. And my direct, repeatable experience tells me that data has to be greatly simplified in order to communicate useful information.

So, I state boldly that my idea of gods is scientific. I have tested it directly. I also acknowledge that as I test more things my views will no doubt evolve. That is also a fact that I and others have tested. So that is also science.

Conclusion

Scientific means tested, or testable. These stories are both tested and testable.

Caves really do exist. I hypothesise that really big caves can exist, if close enough to the surface and with enough internal supports. And you can climb down caves and test that claim. That's science.

Elites really do exist. I hypothesise that ancient elites existed in a certain way. And you can dig up sites like Gobekli Tepe and test that claim. That's science.

In future stories I will explore travel to parallel realities. I will try to interpret the ideas in ways that are both tested, and testable. So it will be science, dude!