Issue 3: Space

[Update] Now editing the new prologue

I’ve drafted a new prologue, and I feel much better about it than the previous one. Now I think it just needs a good round of editing before pushing it live. I’ve also tied in the new prologue a little better with both adventures. The story was always meant to be episodic, but they were feeling a little too disconnected. I think I can find a happy medium where each story feels like a new start with its own environment and themes, but they all play into a larger whole.

I also kind of want to add a brief, simple exploration and puzzle element to the prologue to give players a better sense of the “gameplay loop” in addition to story. But it might end up being too much scope creep. We’ll see.

[Design Commentary] Why books need pages

Physical books have an underrated feature. They’re called pages. To appreciate them, imagine if, despite having the technology to produce books, we never embraced its form factor and just kept improving on good-old-fashioned scrolls. As paper production became cheaper and better, we could print a ridiculously long novel like Lord of the Rings on one gigantic scroll the size of a pair of paper towel rolls.

Setting aside the challenges of producing, storing and navigating the chapters of such an object, there’s another user experience (UX) reason novels aren’t like this. Imagine reading it for, say, an hour. You’d lack that satisfying moment where you get to the end of the page, turn it over, and begin at the top of the next. Pages provide pacing, a sense of progress, and therefore a feeling of accomplishment. Without them, you’d just scroll and scroll endlessly until you got tired of the thing. Sound familiar?

When I land on a web page, I have a tendency to scroll to the bottom as if I’m searching for the important part. On the internet, content feels endless and therefore worthless. It doesn’t help that most internet content, being quickly and constantly produced and then algorithmically delivered, adds little to our lives. So we train ourselves to approach the internet as if we’re sifting through a dumpster for our keys. Looking for the one thing we want (a lemon curd recipe) in a heap of trash (product ads and anecdotes about the recipe writer’s cat).

As a software designer who loves to write, I’ve been thinking for years about what a novel could look like if it were designed for the internet from the ground up, with no desire to ever be printed on paper. Why can’t a novel have a user interface?

An older project of mine involved an idea that a chapter could be one long scrolling web page, but it would be broken into numbered sections that provide a similar sense of space and progress as page numbers in a book.

But unlike paper, each “page” could be whatever length it needed to be to fully convey the thought, end a dialog, describe the scenery, or whatever that page was supposed to do. It could serve as its own kind of break, bigger than paragraph break but smaller than a chapter. Here’s what it looks like:

In Veiled Age, I’ve taken the idea further.

A “Continue” button often separates chunks of text. This is the equivalent of turning a page. Sometimes, there’s about a book-page worth of text between Continue buttons. But when I really want to slow down and emphasize something, I can make a certain “page” very short. We also added a function called clear() , which will clear the screen of the previous text, to emphasize some kind of shift, like a transition to another scene. Here’s an example of the two used together to emphasize the conclusion of the story so far.

{clear()}
The stranger did not live long.

+ [Continue]
-

But she died with hope in her heart. 

+ [Continue]
-

Of course, Veiled Age is full of narrative choices. Sometimes they have a big impact, sometimes they don’t. But either way, they slow down the pace even more. If a continue button asks you to pause, a choice asks you to reflect.

Lastly, dice rolls add a brief pause with some tension before returning to the story. If you’ve played D&D, you know that failing a dice roll can sometimes be as fun as succeeding. But either way, it contributes to the pacing and keeps you engaged.

Taken together, one reader (thanks Trevor) pointed out that all this adds a fun “slot machine” element in reading. When you click Continue, you might get a single sentence, or you might get a long string of paragraphs with an important choice to make. The screen might clear, the background might change, a character portrait may appear because they say something, and so on. Clicking the button just to see what appears next is kind of fun.

Returning to the main idea that a novel could have an interface, it’s not like I’m the first person to attempt it. Visual novels come to mind. By visual novel I mean games where you spend a lot of time reading like this:

I do enjoy this format. It’s pleasing to look at and easy to digest. The visual novel format feels like a natural, gamified evolution of graphic novels, which I also enjoy. So I’m not a hater. But please allow me a moment to dunk on all of these from a UX/UI perspective.

Visual novels are practically forbidden from writing full paragraphs or basically anything other than punchy dialog because they are married to the whole “two people standing still in front of a background jpeg with a small text box” thing. Every event in the story must be expressed by talking heads yapping about it one sentence at a time as you button mash through each line.

A paper novel can use long paragraphs to convey more complex and subtle ideas. But the writing in visual novels is almost forced to be stilted and basic. When the writer only has a hammer, every scene looks like a nail. The above screenshot reminds me less of a novel and more of those picture books for teaching little kids to read.

Comics have a lot of the same challenges. They tend to have more visual variety from moment to moment, but they are also forced to illustrate every beat, even if it isn’t all that interesting to look at. I like dialog-heavy comics, but they sometimes feel at odds with the medium. Fun to read, but when I see a page with a dozen quick drawings of the same head with an open mouth talking, I feel like the story would be 90% as enjoyable in plain text.

In short, I don’t like feeling boxed into these formats. I want to be able to show back-and-forth dialog in one scene and a detailed description of a room in the next. I want to use images when I feel they add something to the scene, not feel burdened to illustrate every little thing.

All this gets at one of the core concepts of Veiled Age: a novel-like work of fiction can be flexible enough to vary its presentation from one moment to the next. Just as pacing and tone can vary within the story, the UI can subtly vary at the author’s whim.

[Worldbuilding] On Cosmic Medieval Fantasy

How do you differentiate sci-fi and fantasy? There are many good answers, but a dumb one I’m fond of is fantasy is when money is called coin, sci-fi is when it’s called credits. By that measure, Veiled Age is definitely fantasy.

Here’s another dubious litmus test: if it involves outer space, it’s sci-fi. That might explain why things like Star Wars and Dune are considered sci-fi even with all their medieval fantasy tropes like swords, farmboys, nobles, religious orders, chosen ones, and quasi-magical powers.

I said in the last issue that I’m a Lovecraft fan. He wrote in a time when we knew a lot about outer space due to astronomy and physics but had no means to explore it at all. He died about 20 years before NASA was founded. Space was something actively studied yet absolutely external to the human experience. While his aliens were sometimes physically described with scientific precision, they were also called demonic, malevolent, impossibly ancient, neither living nor dead, beyond mortal comprehension. It isn’t enough that they’re simply weird. They evoke a spiritual, existential dread.

Long before Lovecraft’s time, the medieval model of the cosmos was that of concentric spheres. The sun, moon, other planets, and everything else all revolved around earth in their respective spheres. The stars were a feature of an outer sphere. God dwelled in the outermost sphere, the highest heaven, called the Empyrean. Remember, too, that the planets were named after roman gods even earlier. When outer space was as untouchable and unknowable as gods, religion and astronomy were not entirely separate.

These archaic takes on astronomy begin to hint at what I mean when I say the world setting of Veiled Age is “Cosmic Medieval Fantasy.” I don’t know if that’s a real genre, but you can see hints of it in certain D&D storylines (including Baldur’s Gate 3) and the Age of Stars storyline in Elden Ring.

Edil, the planet the Veiled Age story takes place on, is very much a planet in a universe like ours. But besides their medieval technology level, there’s some unusual things about their planet’s situation and history that make it difficult for them to understand the universe. The premise has become intentionally dense, with fantastical concepts layered over sci-fi concepts, full of religious themes that stem from that context. Rather than spoiling all the details here, I’ll just give you an in-world diagram of the universe, as understood by the greatest astronomers of Kaer Hond and philosophers of Zenith Royal Academy.

[Lore] What is the Nightmare?

According to distant scholars

In some far flung corner of Heth, there once lived a scholar named Goethe, who described the Nightmare quite well.

But there is another from that world who said it even more succinctly.