if/beproductive/meta.txt

BE PRODUCTIVE

--

phrases floated in my head right before i fell asleep one night, and i choked on my breath as
i struggled to pull them out.

'no,' i told myself. 'do not lose these. you will not remember them in the
morning.'

i rolled over and thumbsmeared on my phone screen and then dropped deeper into
sleep.

when i woke up, these were the words i found:

	factory sim
	random nonsense parts
	regular drove collection
	seat contoured to support noon critical limbs
	scream and destroy drone to escape
	monitor tracking productivity
	DO NOT ENGAGE IN UNPRODUCTIVE BEHAVIORS

--

i started sketching this out in inform6. i haven't written a lot of IF; i
haven't written a lot of inform. there's a sense of frustration that never
quite resolves as i slowly build up from an empty room into a mostly empty
room with a richly-described environment. i don't know the best practices for
anything. i just want to create an experience that mirrors a thought i had.

--

i like making games that have no clear win state, leaving the player to decide
upon conclusion whether or not that was enough. sometimes it feels like a
cop-out on my behalf, but usually it's because i do not think i have the right
or the capability to decide for someone else whether or not they've 'won'.

--

originally, i wanted to give the option of escape from this room by having the
player destroy a drone that periodically appears to collect completed
products. my interest and energy flagged a little in putting this together,
just because i've had to get over the initial activation energy hump to even
start writing inform to begin with, so i focused more on creating a setting
that reflects the dreamstate that started this project to begin with. in
retrospect, i wonder if having that possibility would give more agency to the
protagonist than the setting would dictate. 

--

i want the flavortext to convey a combination of accepted helplessness and
unflagging dedication to a task and a system that is ultimately unfair; parts
do not always show up regularly, and the parts that do aren't always the right
ones. you never know why you're making them, only that you should, because
there's nothing else to do. you can always start over and hope you get luckier
if you want to make more. or, if you want to spend all your time just
examining every minutia of the room, you will lose all of your time and fail
to produce anything.

the moral of the story should be self-apparent here.