Admissions about The Transient's Detail · 5:56pm Apr 10th, 2013
With the first novel out of the way, it is now at the time where I get to fully reveal the background of how certain sections came to be. I can warn ahead of time that none of what I will write here holds any true significance, it's mostly just facts that I think will be considered interesting to some viewers. Quite a bit of it will be discussing how I handled the hurdle of turning the nonsense of a procedurally-generated game with sadism coding into a flowing and coherent narrative.
I will present this in the form of an FAQ, with the peculiar scenario where most of these questions have never been actually asked to me. These are just questions I have asked to myself as I try to rationalize everything, so perhaps these will be questions that might have at one point crossed a reader's mind as I address them. Of course, if anymore questions are brought up, I will be happy to include them into this list.
I should also note that there are spoilers in this blog post, so if you have not read the story but plan to at some point, it might be best to wait until after to take a look at this post.
1: Why do you mention Dwarf Fortress so much in your notes?
Well, because this started all as a test for myself to help expand my capabilities. Dealing with unknowns can really throw me for a loop when trying to path out a story, so I figured the best option was trial-by-fire, and being that I absolutely adored the stories of succession games of Dwarf Fortress (Like the infamous tale of Boatmurdered), I thought that perhaps this would be the best way to give me those unknowns to work with. As I continued to work with the story, however, I felt that I should go clean things up and improve it, making it more of a story worth posting. The biggest challenge in all this, for those who have not had the pleasure of enduring a fortress playthrough, was trying to weave all of the nonsense and bafflingly crazy happenings of this sadistic little game into a story that did not sound completely batshit.
2: Why Ben?
Truth be told, this did not start with him as the protagonist. Even better, the story did not even start as a HiE fiction at all. My first attempt at writing this story was done with a small fort I had named Clean Ages, which is the story of Compass Rose. Yes, Compass Rose was originally going to be the star of this story, but after witnessing the tragic downfall of Clean Ages, I decided that perhaps it was not the most befitting for a pony to endure the intense struggles of leadership posed. Instead, I opted to give a character that could be more accustomed to brutality and the understanding of neccessary evils. I don't intend to make humans out to be evil, but the society from which Ben comes is a very violent one, and I feel it did well to prepare him for Songring to keep him from going mad by the end.
Also, if it was a pony acting as Development Coordinator through this whole tale, there was the chance that he/she would have become an Alicorn after all the lessons that might be gained during the course of a few forts. After seeing how poorly such a transformation can be done, I'm glad that I did not keep Compass Rose as my protagonist to save me such stress, even if the story faces some knee-jerk prejudice due to the species of the new protagonist. I do, however, have plans to keep Rose a major part of this story in the future.
3: Two Songrings in one story?
Alright, this is going to be a bit more technical to explain why Songring relocated so suddenly, and why I whacked it with a hurricane. The very short and confusing answer is: Tainted cow soap.
Basically, during my frist play through of Songring, the game encountered a fatal error and began crashing repeatedly, not allowing me to even so much as get past the season. After much struggle to recover the save file, I eventually had to accept the fact that I was not going to be able to repair the game, seeing as I can only surmise that there was a glitchy item somewhere in our stockpiles that, when one of the ponies would grab it, would crash the game. Being as it was impossible for me to narrow down to what exact item it was, I labeled it "Tainted Cow Soap" after reading a bug report from another player who had the same problem, isolating his scenario to a bar of soap made from cow tallow.
I thought that perhaps I could just reclaim the fortress in a new save file, neglect writing entries for a couple of seasons, and rename the new characters to their established counterparts instead. Game didn't like that either, for as soon as I loaded up the reclaimed fortress, the world generation suddenly decided that I was now sitting on an Aquifer. Those not familiar with what this does, it means that all digging done on a level considered an aquifer causes the walls to infinitely spawn water until the whole hole is submerged. The Dorm, the access tunnels for the water purifier, and the stockpiles/mines were all immediately flooded, leaving only the dining hall and the office standing. That is why I decided to explain it all with a hurricane, and explain the change of scenery with their move away from the disaster area.
4. You suck for what you did to Hyacinth and her family!
That's not really a question, but I fear this being an opinion of some readers. Trust me when I say that I was as shocked as anyone else when this happened. I remember clenching my keyboard in absolute concentration as I orchestrated the fight with the massive ambush placed on Songring. When it was all done, I sighed in relief to see that none of the ponies seemed to have died, and even found Willow being a moron and getting stuck on top of the water pump for the bathhouse, so I had to get a ramp constructed to help him down.
Then I made the mistake of looking through the Creature/Character list to see two new names at the very bottom categorized as "Deceased". One of them was Glory, the young one that had only been born a couple of entries earlier, and a standard-generated name that I did not recognize. Researching the nameless characters history, it listed her birth date as that year and the daughter of Riverscar and Inutile. The combat logs told me nothing; I could not find either Glory's name or the nameless child's entries in the spammed reports. So I simply had to put the screws to myself and hypothesize a way that this could have possibly happened. That's how entry 46: Numbers came to be.
5. Why the sudden end?
Tainted Cow Soap.
Yes, another game crash. This time, however, I think I know the cause of it and it was a bit different. You see, I was using a mod for the game, mentioned in the special thanks as My Little Fortress, to replace the dwarves with ponies. However, one complaint I had against the mod was that it ranked up the sizes of the characters, giving them a new weight class, and making them approximately 6 times stronger than a normal dwarf (It's been a while since I crunched the numbers, so that's just a guess from memory). To fix this, I adjusted the RAW files to bring the ponies back down to the standard body size of the dwarves, to keep the difficulty of the game in check. When I did this, however, it must have done something wonky with the megabeasts included in the mod as well.
The game would always crash at the same moment of every season, and only moments before the crash, I could see a report message of a name of a megabeast attacking before the game encountered another fatal error and ceased functioning. That meant that this unexplainable creature that was evidently so powerful that my game could not even handle letting me face off against it, now had to become the explanation for the end of this fortress. Since it was my decision however, I wrote out many different scenarios for the "Fall of Songring", and it just so happened that this meeting with the Deicidians became my favorite.
6: Any other nonsense from the game?
Lots of it. Dawnstar's economy chapter was started because Dawnstar was listed as acting Mayor of Songring, and had demanded the minting of silver coins for no apparent reason. Honeysides continually decided to take the top office level as her bedroom, even when I kept assigning her to one of the apartments in the hallways. Tick Tock getting trapped on the second story of the unfinished office was an example of how often such silliness can occur when trying to make multi-leveled structures, especially when a creature has the ability to fly because it will fly to get up on top of a wall, but seems to lack the coding required to realize that it can fly back down, and will instead sit there until they starve to death.
Also that my starting lineup included a Peasant, a Jeweler and a Fisherdwarf was because I took the additional challenge of selecting "Embark Now" instead of "Prepare for Embark" like I should have. Made for a more fun experience at least.
Those are the main points of interest that come to mind right now. If anyone has any questions, be sure to let me know, and I'd be happy to add an explanation here.
I can't wait until you use Tainted Cow Soap in the story.
This is a brilliant way to come up with material for a story. And, honestly, while I'm saddened by the passing of Songring, I think your crashed save game played this just right. It ended the Songring arcs as they started wearing a little thin, but long before I got tired of them. It left me wanting more, not dreading more.
I can't wait to see how Ben's adventures shape next. I'm hoping he and Maple work out their issues about Songring.