An average wednesday
An average wednesday
What did you do last Wednesday?
I made a game!
I was bored this Saturday night, so at 2 am, I decided to make a game. It was an idea I had sketched out on some Wednesday.
It takes about 5 minutes to play-through. It is a choose your own adventure game where you play as me, on a random Wednesday, as I navigate life at CMI.
This part has spoilers for the game. Do not read it till you are done with the game.
The structure of the game is quite linear.
You sleep → You do something in the morning → You decide to have lunch or not → You decide to go to class or not → You do the assignment → You either have or order dinner → The day ends with friends
Then how is it a choose tour own adventure game? Because you get to make some decisions on the way there. A truly non-linear choose your path is quite a herculean task to make.
There is a reason why a lot of choose your own adventure books are around 127 pages long. The actual story is 6 pages long, just the number of choices cause this number to increase.
Let’s say I want to make a 14 decision story(which is the longest route in my game), with every decision having 2 choices. If I try to write a perfect choose your path game, that would require me to write write over 32 thousand scenes. That is a lot of work.
I only wrote 45 scenes.
So what is the solution?
Delayed branching!
Choices change your movement between the linear ‘cannonical’ nodes.
This is a trick used by video games to make you feel in control while also making sure their writers don’t have to write a hell lot more than required. Also, you get a guaranteed satisfactory story out of it.
I also could change the endings slightly based on the route the player took, but that is much more work, from a coding persepective. Maybe, I’ll do it for the next such project.
The game essentially had three endings, which have all been legit ways I have ended a day at CMI. I’ll leave finding them up to you.
The game mentions a lot of IRL people whom I do interact regularly at CMI. None of them have any problems with their portrayal.
I also did mention a few irl textbooks. Principles of Mathematical Analysis by Walter Rudin is one of the most famous(notorious) textbooks. It is used in almost every real analysis course on the planet. A lot of people who have never taken a math course have heard of it.
I personally find it quite bland and dry. Like my opinions about it are rather clear if you reached the scene with Rudin in it.
I also mention Understanding Analysis by Stephen Abott which is my Analysis book of choice. It is somewhat less formal and more friendly than Rudin. The book genuinely tries to get you to be interested in the subject by having a interesting problem at the start of every chapter.
I highly, highly recommend it.
Another book I give a shout out to is Linear Algebra Done Wrong by Sergei Treil. It is my algebra book of choice. The title is a play on the renowned textbook Linear Algebra Done Right.
LADW is made for more interested students. It doesn’t act like a cookbook. Do this, then do that. It instead tells you. We add milk to make things smoother and richer. We use penne pasta as the ridges help holding sauce. Jack Cheese tastes like …
And then it tells you to make baked casserole yourself, with a better understanding of why you did what you did.
I also mention Game Theory by Solan, Maschler, and Zamir which is the game theory book I am currently studying. It is somewhat more dense than the typical undergraduate GT textbook, but then it is probably the most comprehensive undergraduate game theory text.
AOPS is a math forum where students can share and discuss problems. It is incredibly famous in Olympiad circles and many of the Olympiad kids use it past college for advanced courses, exams like Putnam and SMMC etc.
Zaitoon and Subway are actual restaurants in Sipcot I order from on a regualer basis. Zaitoon has incredible Middle Eastern and Mughlai food. The biryani is to die for.
Subway, is well Subway.
And I think that is all.
The game doesn’t really have much of a larger motive or message. It was just something I started one day and finsihed on another.
As one says, “sometimes, the curtains are blue”.
On Fiction: This game is in a strange place between fiction and reality. One of the paths is how a particular Wednesday played out for me. Yet some others are how some other days have turned out.
However, if I had gone to the library instead of CLAB, would I have not started making this game? I don’t know. It’s just a speculation. If you were in my place, maybe you would not head to any of the places I list, but go to a friends room.
So whose story does this game tell? Mine? Yours? or a fictional character who happens to have some similarties to both you and me?