At the end of the fellowship at UCSC in which I made Judge my Vow, I gave a brief presentation about it, including previous forms that it took before it became this odd combination of book, website, and video game. I wanna talk about those here because I think it's cool and because no one would really know otherwise.

This is the cover I made. It was broadcasted on several TV screens, so it was this weird long shape. Here, you can see Jack, Dot Com, Xanax, Arrows, Eve, !@#$, %^&*, and Deified.

Dot Com 3367 doesn't appear until chapter four, but she was the first character I wrote and designed. I wanted to make all the humans look like her (Arrows’ creation followed a similar template), but I found the art style to be difficult and time consuming. That's a part of the reason I wanted to do something more eclectic and simplistic for other humans, like Strawberry and Cucumber.

Of Black Quartz the Flatgame

The first version of Judge my Vow was a flatgame called Of Black Quartz. Flatgames are a video game micro genre that try to make the game development process as easy and straightforward as possible. Think primitive movement, no collisions, and dialogue appearing as loose text on the screen. They tend to use photographs of hand drawn graphics and sparse mechanics. They borrow a camera perspective and suggestion of game mechanics from classic top-down RPGs. My biggest flatgame inspirations are 10 Beautiful Postcards and 50 Short Games by thecatamites.

Left to right: Xanax, Wizard, Dwarf

In Of Black Quartz, you played as Xanax, an ugly, empty ghost. The game opened with Xanax getting out of bed, her body censored by a black rectangle. Wagner's Bridal Chorus played as she floated down an impossibly long hallway before finding an open dresser with a shining, but plain, wedding dress. The scene transitioned to a title sequence which included the acquisition of her wedding ring. Queue bus SFX and she's dropped off on the side of a road in a barren suburban setting.

Left to right: boxer, chump, cupid, fox

Each area reflected a specific pangram. The first included several dwarves talking down on foxes: "Public junk dwarves quiz the mighty fox." The second, a forest that included many stock images of fog with the word "vex" written on them, reflected "A wizard's job is to quickly vex chumps in fog." Sound familiar?

I sort of lost steam on the project and ended up retiring it, but Xanax's image and the absurd “pangram world” stuck with me. 

Of Black Quartz the RPG Maker game

The next major iteration was in the form of a top-down RPG. I wanted to learn RPG Maker 2003 for a few reasons, including how cool I thought games like Off and Yume Nikki are, the fact that I got it for like eight dollars, and because I was interested in RPG Maker as a medium. 

The sprite sheet for Xanax, Jack, !@#$, and %^&*

RPG Maker 2003 ended up being really hard to use, partially because of its austerity and partially because of a lack of good documentation. I ended up making some sprite sheets and locations, going through several different possible styles, before giving up. In particular, the background tiles were difficult for me to make. I couldn't imagine doing all that for the whole game.

The first room: Xanax and Jack's bedroom

An approximation of how Xanax’s design changed over time. Note her ring in the first one, hovering next to her

Of Black Quartz the RPG

Afterwards, I made a prototype and a few mock ups of another version of Of Black Quartz the RPG. The prototype was a short sequence of visual novel-style dialogue, including different styles of dialogue boxes. I wanted to develop Of Black Quartz in the capstone series of the game design bachelor's program at UCSC. I wanted to be a UI designer on the project, so it made sense to create some of the UI. You can see the demo in action here.

The prototype for the dialogue

A mock-up of the pause menu

Art of Xanax, Eve, Arrows, and JSON that I used in a zine pitching the idea

Of course, I never did work on Of Black Quartz for my senior capstone project. I ended up making Turnstyle instead, another queer RPG. 

Judge my Vow the Webzine

At one point, I wrote a short story called Magical Math Machine that followed Dot Com 3367, a student who attempts to invent a quartz computer. Originally, I wanted to include a one-off line in the RPG about how computers are only useful for video games, a potentially irrelevant piece of flavor text. Then, I started thinking more about this, and expanded on the idea, writing Dot Com and the rituals around education in Babble. After writing this, I realized the whole story would be better realized as long-form fiction, which led me to the project's current form. I was also hugely inspired by Until You Continue to Behave by Carter Amelia Davis. I had already conceived of the idea of an interactive long-form fiction webzine when I came across UYCTB on Twitter. The site was proof that what I imagined was possible and served as a loose guide of what kinds of things work for this niche form. The web was clearly the best place for this kind of thing.

I also changed the name to Judge my Vow because it's the more interesting part of the pangram.

And here we are! Afterwards, I made the stat blocks, then the collection. From this point, after I publish the map, I want to finish writing/editing each of the chapters and making the portraits and statblocks for them. I have no new "interactive elements," as I've been calling them, planned, but we'll see what I want to do when the time comes.

Thank you for reading! The map update should be ready to be published within the next week or so. In the meantime, I am looking for playtesters and/or readers for that part of the zine. Please let me know if you are interested.

:-)