Lonely Oak Chapter 116 - Senet is finally posted! Well, I say that, and with the use of the word finally some of you long-time watchers are maybe scratching your heads. After all, I've never mentioned anything special about this chapter before.
Well, it's not really all that special. Definitely not as special to me as The Woods or Meet Eeyor Shower, but this chapter does have a bit of history, and a lot of interesting work that went behind it that will make me sound like an idiot that overcomplicates things.
But, hopefully you at least find it interesting.
Anyway, this chapter's history boils down to this being the start of planning the end of Lonely Oak... Which happened way the hell back in early 2013. Yeah, you read that right... It's easier to plan things than it is to execute on them xD
But, seriously, this chapter has been in my head, more-or-less, for that long. I had written pieces of it, but the problem was it involved playing Senet, and if you read the chapter (which you should have before reading this journal!) then you got a taste of how dense it was.
Senet isn't a hard game to play... But it is difficult to describe, and the research for all the Egyptian aspects was a lot of work that I put off until recently, when I got closer to writing the chapter... Years later...
In order to write this chapter, I actually took advantage of my coding and scripting skills. I've mentioned this in some previous journals, like when I talked about Zipf's Law and the scripts that I have to get my own word-count statistics.
I had done this once before for my writing, namely for the Archery Tournament that happened in Lonely Oak Part 2. I have since lost that little script, but all it did was generate some numbers for me to use as scores and other arrows for all the competitors. That was also a rather guided chapter, as I tailored scores for some of the characters (namely Lyza).
But, in the last few weeks, as it came closer to the time to write this chapter, and I finished up my notes and research on the game itself, I realized it would be a lot of work to plan out how the game would be played move-for-move.
So I decided, despite being big on planning (especially when it comes to this chapter), to let that all fall by the wayside, and embrace the script I was going to write.
Or, scripts, rather.
So, I wrote two scripts. Nothing complicated. One is a slightly-more-elaborate-than-but-basically random-number-generator script to serve as the paddle tossing. The other is a script that kept track of the results of the board at each move.
The second script proved the be invaluable, actually, as when it came to writing the story the descriptions got very confusing... Probably not ideal. But, this second script was what I used to generate the way the board looked at each step, and I decided to later use it to create the visual-aide, because why not?
So, the moves that happen in the chapter, and that are visualized by the second script in Appendix A, were each done just-in-time. What I mean is, the process went like this:
1. Run the tossing script 2. Look at the state of the board 3. Decide on a move to make 4. Write out what took place narratively
This means that, as I wrote the chapter, I just let the RNG script basically dictate the direction of the writing. I had the opportunity to sort-of help guide what I wanted to happen based on the moves I decided to make with Ket and Emmy, but I really didn't give it that much intention.
What happened in the chapter was mostly just based off of the rolls. Anything could have really happened, but I also didn't want the game description to last too long, once I started writing it and realized how dense it was.
But I had a lot of fun, writing this chapter the way that I did. It's not often I allow something external influence my writing process.
So, that's really it. Actually writing the script itself delayed writing the chapter, since I went through a couple iterations of it since I went down a couple rabbit-holes of optimizing, as one does.
But, I like the results, and hopefully you do, too. So begins the final few days of Lonely Oak. My goal is still to finish it by the end of the year... we'll see how close I get. If not, oh well, it will be done... The goal is more just to try and keep chapters coming out.
Anyway, try playing a game of Senet yourself! I honestly spent so much time researching and such, I didn't even look to see if there was an online version of it you could play.
'Till next time, stay safe and be respectful of others
well, the first "online" version of it I saw was in one of the earlier "tomb raider" games where to get through one room you had to make Lara win a game of Senet... and she got squished if she lost...
well, the first "online" version of it I saw was in one of the earlier "tomb raider" games where to
