A New Beginning and No Ending

Hello, again! 👋 It’s been a few months since I’ve been in your inbox. Love what you’ve done with the place! Those “time sensitive” political donation emails are so you.

I think maybe a re-introduction is in order.

Equip Story is the newsletter formerly known as Adventure Snack. To be clear, Equip Story is gonna be a departure from what I was writing before. It’s more like Equip Story is the legacy sequel to Adventure Snack. If Adventure Snack was Ocarina of Time, then Equip Story is Breath of the Wild. (Wow, that Zelda comparison is gonna be super hard to live up to!)

I’m the author of Adventure Snack. Yup, it’s lovable ol’ me, Geoffrey Golden! You know me from publishing 100 text adventure games via my Adventure Snack newsletter over the past 4.5 years. I’m a 15 year veteran narrative designer and game developer. I’ve worked with Ubisoft, Capcom, Square Enix, and indie studios around the world. My independently produced games have been featured by IndieCade, Narrascope, WordHack NYC, San Diego Comic-Con, and other fine folks. It’s been a good run so far. Lots of career achievements unlocked.

This is a newsletter about how to make game development as fun as playing games. Every week, I’ll be writing to you about about the strange and exciting new games I’m developing and how I’m making my creative process more fulfilling. Adventure Snack was a show, but now I’m taking you behind the curtain. I hope what I learn will be useful to you, whether you’re a game designer, a writer, a visual artist, or some other type of degenerate weirdo. (As a degenerate weirdo myself, I’m reclaiming the term.)

If the new direction of my newsletter doesn’t appeal to you, feel free to unsubscribe at any time. The link is at the bottom of the email. No hard feelings, I promise. Only soft weeping. Kidding! I’ll be fine! Maybe!!!

For those of you brave enough to take this journey with me, thank you for your support. It’s been a longer, weirder road to get to this launch than I thought it would be at the end of last year, when there was all this dumb drama with my old email service provider. I never thought I’d write “drama” and “email service provider” in the same sentence, by the way. I’ll talk more about Substack and why I left next week. Today, I want to write to you about endings. In this case, the lack of one.

Honestly, I’m very excited and a little anxious about this project. Why anxious? It all goes back to my teen years in the late 90s. Back then, before video game writer was a profession, I wanted to be a comedy writer and performer like my hero Steve Martin. I was a total comedy nerd. I might be the only teen at the time who bought Limp Bizkit’s “Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water” specifically to hear Ben Stiller’s outro.

So, I was an awkward teen, and I couldn’t figure out how to write a screenplay. I reverse engineered adjusting the tabs in my pirated copy of Microsoft Word to imitate the way a professional screenplay looks (sloppily). I could write the opening pages, no problem. Openings are great! Beginning a new project is the best! I’ve got so much energy and excitement let’s-a gooooooo! But inevitably I’d get stuck in the middle, usually on how to resolve a tricky plot point that came up as I was writing. This thorny plot point would then derail the vague idea in my head of how the story would end. That’s how my Powerpuff Girls spec script broke down. It was like I had the sugar, spice, and everything nice, but I was missing the binding agent of Chemical X to turn the script into three superpowered preschoolers.

Eventually, I figured out “Chemical X” is a well-crafted outline. As a writer, I needed to know where the story was headed, so I could plan the route to get there. Now, whenever I begin a game story I write with an outline or a visual diagram. They give my stories a proper backbone. If I get stuck, I can always turn to those docs to remind myself of what I’m doing. Of course, I still run into plot detours as I write. I’ll even change the ending in the middle of writing, or add two new endings in the case of interactive fiction. Sometimes you discover a miraculous new direction in the middle of the process. But when I do, I rewrite the original outline or change the diagram, so the new destination is clear to me.

But with Equip Story, the destination is not clear to me. For the first time in decades, I’m writing without an outline. It’s invigorating. It’s dangerous. It’s a more accurate reflection of my life. The anecdote above illustrates how I’ve thought of my creative career. When I was a teen, I wrote TV spec scripts – not fan fiction, like most young writers do, inspired by love for a fandom – because I wanted to get a job in Hollywood. The motivation behind my childhood creative pursuits was generally to (1) make money now or (2) make money later. This continued into my… uh, now. That’s basically where I am now, and what I’m hoping to change.

This newsletter will chronicle my trials, and crucially, my tribulations, as I create art for myself for the very first time in a concentrated way. I have no intention of making money, raising my profile, receiving glowing reviews, earning awards, or licensing characters for the creation of poorly manufactured consumer garbage with these projects. If I happen to receive outside validation, I won’t swat it away like the fly that landed on my keyboard right now hold on a second faesfsadc got it. The point is that the creation of the work is the reward. By design, they won’t be stepping stones to something else. I want to create art in the same way a monk rakes sand in a zen garden, only my “zen garden” will be designing a Street Sharks VCR board game, or something equally meditative.

I’ve never done this before, and thus, I have no idea how this story ends. I told the basic premise of Equip Story to my longtime friend and collaborator Patrick at a party recently. He suggested I might find commercial success accidentally, when I’m not looking for it. Could be. Maybe this newsletter ends with me being a wealthy, highly successful, bitter middle aged white guy writing frustrated essays about how unfair it is that I’m not quite as wealthy and successful as another wealthy, highly successful, bitter middle aged white guy. Or maybe I will eschew capitalism altogether and go live in an artist colony where I sew my own Samurai Pizza Cat graphic tees and trade copies of my handwritten “pick your path” gamebooks for fresh eggs. I’ll tell you what won’t happen: any outcome between those two extremes. It will be one or the other. Wealth or Eggs. There’s not enough scope on this project for more than two endings.

No, joking aside, that’s the thing. I’m giving myself infinite scope. Well, semi-infinite. I’m allowing myself to make anything I myself can afford to produce. I feel like a kid again. Actually, in a way, I feel like a kid for the first time.

🎲 Your Turn: Do you have questions about narrative design and telling stories in games? I want to hear from you! Reply to this email with your questions and I’ll answer them in a future email. Or hit the comment button below and let others know how crazy insightful you are.

🗓️ Next Week: How I learned to stop worrying and leave Substack.

Image Credit: Freepik