I brought a lemon to... a postmortem of Bull in a Gun Fight

Now that SPILL YOUR GUT is done (and—at time of writing—still open for voting!), I think it's about time I did a bit of navel-gazing before moving on to whatever will be the next phase of my life. As you might be able to tell from that piece, I've been feeling pretty lost lately, so I'm thinking that maybe looking back at what I've done up to now will help me to figure out what I want to do with the next stretch of my life. The plan is that once I've gone through the nine pieces I care about, I'll reissue them all in a pretty compilation, then nuke my itch page for a fresh start. So if SPILL was a four-hour crash, then this series of postmortems will be (as Halsey would say) a record of the wreckage. Hey, it's November: a time of liminality where anything will change, for better or worse...

Bull in a Gun Fight was made by me and three-to-four internet friends in November 2017, when I was just starting my penultimate year of school. Why start here? It's not the first interactive fiction piece I wrote. It's actually not even interactive fiction. This wasn't the first thing I made that could be called a game, nor the first comp entry. But I've kept it up on my itch page all these years, so there must be a reason. Probably because it's the only external collaboration I've accomplished, and it looks good on my CV to say I directed a game for a competition. And because I actually don't hate this thing. It's cute and silly and fun.

There isn't much to say about the game itself. It was made for the Xkcd Game Jam, which involved making games based on Randall Munroe's webcomic. The comic we chose uses the simple format of taking common phrases to absurd extrapolations, in this case which object should be used to tackle a particular situation. (More recently, Munroe has reused this format a few times—ought we make our own sequel?) The premise of the game is simple: we turn this into a 1v1 multiplayer duel, and massively expand the amount of selectable objects.

In practice, it's pretty much the world's simplest card game. Each round, you are shown a random selection of cards, or rather names of cards. You pick one, you pick whether you'd like to attack or defend, then your opponent does the same thing from another random selection, and then you find out which one has a higher strength value. (Okay, there are actually three values: attack, defence, and "style". A couple objects have special features too, like the nuke where no-one wins, or the mirror which copies the opponent's stats.) It's not that engaging as a game, so maybe it really is interactive fiction, because the fun comes from the text: each combination and outcome will mad-libs a truism explaining the moral of the story, such as "Don't bring a tree to a knife fight." or "Don't try to impose communism on a bingo hall."

It worked. We placed 45th (out of 85) overall, and 30th for "fun", which I'd say is not bad.  One reviewer "had a blast" playing it with their daughters, while another didn't have a second player and "ended up deleting a folder containing irreplaceable photos, passwords, and several hundred images of cats" while moving the mouse randomly to simulate an opponent. (To apologise, we then patched in a singeplayer mode.) My first real game and it had already led to both joy and destruction! (Maybe I got a taste for blood...)

What this game represents, if it represents anything—if we try to impose a narrative onto this assortment—is a time in my life when I wasn't afraid to do stuff like this, and also the first time when it actually worked. I came across a game jam opportunity, I saw a discord server full of friends with various skills, I decided to put together a team. It's almost a card game in itself: I could write and do game design and basic programming in Python, Darien and Dito could do… better programming and game design, Tay could draw, and Ethan could compose music. Really who joined the team was more about who had the time and will to take part, and that kind of sums up the whole package. We didn't have an endless supply of objects, just whatever we could think of in the time, but you can get a bit of insight into our worlds by which nonsensical injokes we added. Tay only had the chance to do a few drawings and animations, so most of the objects are just text, but the ones that are there add a little bit of life that makes the whole thing work. And it's a complete game. There's no reason to expand it. This was a moment in time. Like our submission form states, "This is what we brought." It's not really punk because we weren't exactly responding to or resisting anything as such, but it's still very much an embodiment of that DIY attitude I'd end up capturing in GUT THE MOVIE. They've got a game jam, we've got a weekend, let's combine things and see what happens.

I remember commenting at the time that it was a refreshing change from previous attempts at collaboration because I was able to ask the others (in various time zones) to write particular bits of code, and by the time I woke up the next day they'd actually have done their task. I only felt a little sheepish at the time about declaring myself director of our little team, and it's kind of silly that I'd hesitate to take that role now, given that basically everything went well with this project. But November 2017 was also a time when I was going through maybe the most dramatic shift in my life, as I was meeting new people and beginning to realise this whole gender thing wasn't going to go away if I just repressed myself. The server I sourced my collaborators from was also the first place where I came out as queer (to people who knew me, at least).

I don't really talk to those people anymore, though. Time passes, people get weird or busy, things fall apart, new things grow. There's a funny story about the next person I'd attempt to collaborate with: according to legend, our friendship began because I was skimming through her best-of-2017 playlist and spotted a song by the Wombats which I recognised. This game must have a weird way of weaving through my life, because the chorus goes "I'm not getting out of here this time/I brought a lemon to a knife fight." Though while the song released a couple of weeks before our game, a lemon isn't actually one of the objects implemented in the game, so I guess I hadn't heard it yet.

What's the moral of this story? What goes around comes around, or maybe it is just a coincidence after all. At best you could say it pokes fun at the idea of fables, prefiguring my later obsession with self-help narratives. But do you really want to?

Well, this was also the last game I'd release that was written in Python, so it kinda represents the ending of one possible path for my life. At the time, I was taking part in these yearly hackweek things and hanging out with other young nerds who'd self-taught themselves programming and were bound to end up in a job doing things with software or whatever. I mean, it's kind of a cliché that there's lots of trans women in tech, so it's not like that's the reason I quit that path—but I think the cliché also exposes the real reason. I didn't care about programming; I just wanted to tell stories. But when you're seen as a boy who spends most of his time doing inscrutable things on the computer, it makes the people who think they're raising you feel good about themselves if it's all leading towards a high-paying series of swish jobs at various tech firms. Now I'm seen as a girl and people seem to assume I might need help figuring out how to use a computer, so that's interesting. (Eventually I will find the right situation to explain I've been partitioning hard-drives since the age of twelve.) So I guess this is both the only one of these projects that isn't about being trans, and also the only one that is about my transition. This was the very beginning of when I started questioning the narrative that was placed on me, a concept that's now inarguably become my Thing. And you can see a little bit of that in this game.

- November Nulla, November 2024

Next: The Coral Labyrinth.