what died didn't stay dead - "...the lakes..." ramble

Hi hi! Naarel here. So, Velox Formido 2 is still ongoing when I'm writing this. My entry, take me to the lakes where all the poets went to die, or just ...the lakes... for short, is out and ready for you to experience it. I'm pretty happy about it! I suggest you don't read any further if you don't want to spoil it for yourself (and absolutely don't read if you're a Velox Formido participant and you didn't rate it yet...) because I will be discussing some plot aspects in this post. You're fine with that? Okay, good. Also, this will be very loose, I just need to yap a tiny bit about it all.

take me to the jam where all VN devs go to cry

I didn't know whether or not to join Velox Formido 2. I'm working all the time on Passerine Hills: Just a Bite lately and I didn't know if I'll want to take time off of that to go on and make a whole VN within 36 hours. I didn't know if I have it in me to work under such pressure in those circumstances. I've been moving away from the VN world for the sake of my own sanity because I realized that IF format, where I don't have to focus on visuals nearly as much (or at all!) just works better for me. It gives me a lot of independence.

But, y'know. The themes were cool and I needed a little bit of a break to not go insane from working on the same thing all the time. And the later theme reveal was, believe it or not, really beneficial for me. I'm in Poland. Usually, Velox jams start around 2am for me, which means that I need to stay awake for at least 2 hours after my bedtime to check if the theme will be something I vibe with. A later theme reveal made me able to go to sleep peacefully for once. And sleep peacefully I did. The theme dropped when I already ate my breakfast and drank my coffee.

take me to the themes where all ideas go to die

Okay, bit of a dramatic flair in this title. I actually started a bit earlier than the theme drop for two reasons. One, I was bored. Two, I had a vague idea of where I can go once the theme drops, based on the themes from the last voting batch. The general idea of the lakes and someone dying was always there. Just for the fun of it, I'll present you with the ideas for different themes that weren't chosen, just so you see that I was prepared. Feel free to skip to the next segment if you don't want to read about it.

Something Bitter, Something Sweet - "You" are basically Elizabeth Flanagan's summer fling. You are here by the lakes to say goodbye to each other after the entire summer of, well. Flinging. It's this whole thing where you reminisce on the good stuff before you inevitably have to part ways. Turns out Elizabeth's been dead for a while (obviously, by drowning) and you just keep coming back to the lake because her... ghost, I guess, is there waiting for you every summer so you can reunite. So the "goodbye" isn't really a goodbye because you'll see her again, just... well, she's dead, you can never have a future together or anything.

Beneath the Mask - Again, you meet up by the lakes with Elizabeth. You know that she's meant to be perfect and all but you also know that she's not as innocent as everyone thinks because you've seen her by this lake and you know that she killed someone here. The thing is: you can't confront her about it directly. You need to get her to slip up. You need her to go fully mask-off and admit to what she did, straight up.

Role Reversal - Vaguely the same storyline as Beneath the Mask, except you do confront Elizabeth about what she did. The whole plot makes it really clear that she's the killer and that you will be her next victim since, y'know, you know exactly what she did and you're a threat now... but of course the roles reverse and you end up killing her instead. This kinda felt weak though and I hoped it won't be the theme.

Necromancy - There's a body in the lake. You know exactly where it is. You know exactly how to bring it back. The thing is that you still don't know if this is what you should do. Y'know, grief, fear of them "coming back wrong", overthinking, all that stuff.

If They Could See You Now - Elizabeth feigned her own death because she couldn't stand the expectations and all and she's having a moment about how she wishes all the people from her past life could see how much better she's doing now. Least dramatic out of them all, I'd say.

WHAT DID YOU DO - Essentially just Beneath the Mask/Role Reversal scenario again but you're the partner and Elizabeth confesses to you that killed someone instead of, y'know, you having to get that info out of her. That felt really angsty in my head because y'know. Your partner tells you that they killed someone. That's an insane thing to know.

Over My Dead Body - Again just Role Reversal. Like that was literally it.

Bury Your Past - LITERALLY the same scenario as the one you read in this game. Like literally the same thing, I'd do the same thing for this.

Never Gonna Give You Up - Kind of between Something Bitter, Something Sweet and Beneath the Mask? Elizabeth (or you) got drowned and that leads to one of you having an obsessive attachment to the lake and the person that's dead. I know it was probably meant as a funny meme theme but I'm naturally angst-inclined. You need to forgive me that.

take me to the game where- oh my gods, I need to write

Listen. Opening up Ren'py gives me psychic damage. I just couldn't do this. Therefore, I turned to Decker. See, I've been making things in Decker for a while now and I always appreciated that if I don't want to, I don't have to make a single line of code and I'll still make everything work. If you're planning to do some basic stuff, Decker is just a matter of "yeah, click that thing here and you're all set". Just to show you the "hardest" thing I had to do, here's the button that did the first photo tear transition, when the photo is torn into three pieces.

It was literally just this. Click to tell what the button does. Importing sound was a tiny bit rougher because I had to actually find sounds and cut them up. Decker only supports around 10 seconds of audio and it was just better to have a shorter sound play when you press a button to progress. It was the first time I was working with audio in Decker and I know that it has to be annoying as fuck to hear the same two cricket noises on a loop... but come on, the tear and the big water splash were satisfying.

I come to Velox with one expectation: to do well in writing categories, which are Narrative and Theme Incorporation. Everything else, I'll be honest, I don't care about. I hate dealing with sounds and I'm not an artist. Therefore, this Velox I just decided to fuck it and ball. Due to Decker's 10 second audio limitation, I couldn't put music in anyway, so I didn't particularly care about that and just used sound effects instead. And for visuals? Well, of course I did them myself, in case you can't tell from the quality. Using achromatic (apparently, shades of black, white and gray count as "achromatic" and not "monochromatic") color palette also seemed like a good idea. Why? Because gray is my favorite color, that's why. Also because it allowed me to establish some crude depth with the shade variety.

I got asked how I made the visuals themselves so let me show you.

Sorry, dirty screen. I promise I'll clean it. But yes, this is my finger touching the screen. My laptop is equipped with a touchscreen and Decker neatly supplies me with a touchscreen mode that I can use. Every visual in ...the lakes... was drawn (or written, as is the case of the logo/title screen) with my own right index finger on my own laptop. I could've used some public domain images and throw them into Decker to get the cool dithered visuals but... eh. I mean. Would be cool. Wouldn't be fun. I did "cheat" (lol) once, with the illustration of the hand coming out of the lake. Decker has something called Tracing Mode. I took a picture of my own hand and then used the Tracing Mode to... you know. Trace it. Outrageous, I know. Though it wasn't really tracing, I broke it down into shapes and then filled the whole thing, which is why the shapes don't really match that well. That and the fact that my favorite brush is confined to just one size and I have my finger covering the screen and preventing me from precise maneuvers.

I hear a lot about how my text is composing itself so well with the visuals. The secret? I write all of my Decker works straight in Decker and I compose my visuals alongside it. There's no separation. Normally in case of my Ren'py or Twine stuff, it's text first, visuals/styling second. When I work in Decker, I write and draw along the way, so both "layers" grow together and intertwine neatly. And it's always fun to me to figure out how to present text. In some ways, ...the lakes... combine ways from my previous works: the "black text for the past, white text for now" system from Black Coffee, VN-like dialogue boxes of ROGUE, buttons as a part of the script like in salting wounds, text invading the drawings like in te/ra/to/ma... and even the left/right alignment of the text like in do not let your left hand know (I chuckled a little to myself when I was tracing my left hand for ...the lakes..., heh). It's really fun to think about the text placement, I mean, VNs and IFs both rely on text. We should have some fun with how we present it, it can add so much character. Guess this is also another reason why I choose Decker for some projects: it just lets me have fun with the text.

take me to the lakes where all the poets went to die- oh shit this is the title

Listen, I stole this quote from Taylor Swift. I have no reason not to do that because it's a quote that absolutely slaps and I'm not going to be sorry for it. I'm sorry that it's so fucking long but it was really inspiring. The vibe of it, y'know. But that's not what I'm going to talk about in this section: this section is for plot and some writing decisions I've made.

I wrote about it already but I put the suicide warning not because I wrote the story as a story about suicide, but rather because it can be interpreted as a suicide. If I intended that to be the main reading, I would just warn against it straight up, no "can be interpreted as". Personally, I see it as a story of transformation. Shedding your old self and becoming something new. Water is life. Water is means of ritual purification - of making not only your body but also your soul clean. In the text, I specifically refer to baptism by full immersion which is an alien concept to someone who was raised Catholic, like me. When I wrote ...the lakes..., I didn't think of Elizabeth as literally dying, rather, I thought that there's something in the lake itself that allowed her to be reborn, in a way (which is why the glitched out hand visual exists!). I'm a Florence and the Machine fan, the imagery of drowning is seared into my very brain. I almost drowned when I was a kid (and I still can't swim to this day) but I can still see the appeal of it, the strange tension between you and a much stronger body of water. I think this was what was on Elizabeth's mind: not a desire to die but a desire to be transformed, reborn, remade without the burden of her name and form.

Art is all up to interpretation. I'm aware that once my work is out there, it's out there for people to interact with, and when they interact with it, they'll hopefully think about it a little and look at it through the lens of their own experiences. This is where the "why is this in second person" question comes in.

I talked about it multiple times already but I like to talk about it, so, let's talk about it. I don't see "you" in my works as an "insert yourself here". I use it to make an undefined character - there's no history to them, no name, no ethnicity/race/orientation/gender/whatever you may think. When I use "you", I know that the reader will fill the gap themselves anyway. Maybe they'll self-insert. Maybe they'll make up a guy. Either way, this is how I ensure that everyone has a different person in mind, and that's really great for me because this is how I get you! You don't think they're the same person - or that they used to be the same person - from the get go because you have a vision of what You is meant to be.

That, of course, adds another layer of interpretation, which is the incredible lake that makes you trans, or the interpretation that assumes Elizabeth is the deadname of You (I'll just refer to this person as that), an old version of them that had to be killed in order for You to thrive. Did I intend that? I'll be honest, I didn't think of that this way. But it resonated like that! And it's completely rational to interpret it like that specifically because You is this vague, ungendered, unnamed person. And I'm happy about it. You is, in the end, whoever you imagine them to be. Maybe they're still a girl. Maybe they're not. They've been reborn. Nameless, faceless and free. And I guess that when you're queer, people will be more eager to seek queer interpretations of your works. I'm fine with that.

Additionally, You was specifically designed to not hint at much. They're wearing this long coat and a hat, and their face is covered with static. Of course, on the technical level it's because I'm drawing the damn image with my finger on my screen and I'm not an artist, but on the narrative level, this is furthering the "You can be anything you want them to be" line. Elizabeth is no longer this person and this person is no longer Elizabeth. The facelessness, the lack of identifying features, it's all on purpose. 

Some rapid fire stuff. The lake is called Lake Dioscuri after the Dioscuri. Who are the Dioscuri? Castor and Pollux. Or, you know, the guys that got turned into the Gemini constellation. We love the duality theme. Also, if you look at the Elizabeth picture, you can see that she's also got a "static'd out" face and is also wearing a hat. Yeah that's on purpose too.

Well, anyway. I've yapped for long enough. If you've got any questions about the process or whatever, feel free to ask in the comments. It was a really fun project to make. I'll see you soon, wherever the wind takes me this time.

xx, Naarel