High Noon at Highgate

 I am finally over my discomfort and writing again.

Or, rather, revising. I just got done with revising the scene at Highgate Cemetery. That wasn't one of the big three, though. Just a bit I wanted to do better with.

Like a lot of notes, this has come not so much out of beta readers or even out of re-reading but out of being away from the book and thinking about random things and that ends up taking me back towards a moment in the book that no longer works for me.

The "bum" conversation is probably getting fixed, too. Funny. The big note I got was about what might be called objectifying the character, and I'd already been moving that way through round of revision. Threw out the original "pants" scene, gutted the second photo shoot scene, re-did the conversation after the Aladdin rehearsal. 

Which means really I have only a few bits and random lines to tweak. Plus reworking the pants scene in a completely different direction I just thought of last week that not only is stronger for this book, but sets up stuff that will pay off in the next book! But that means going through every single scene Graham is in and tweaking and adjusting.

Plus the same thing for every scene in which Geordie dialect shows up. Again funny; my latest version is that Geordie is friendly. When Tony is being insulting, he's not in dialect. When he is in dialect is when he is being nice. And that's pretty much how most of the lines were working out anyhow.

Sometimes writing -- especially revising -- is all about being smart enough to realize when you'd been making the right choices already, and just focusing in on those.

Still, considering how much (how little) I normally get done during the work week, I don't expect to get through the big revisions in less than a week. And I'm chomping to get this uploaded and in the store.

***

Finished Alien Isolation. Still really nice game, good design, incredibly respectful (but in a good way) towards the original material. There's a section where Marlowe, captain of the ship that found the Nostromo's flight recorder and decided to back-track it to LV 426, narrates to Ripley's daughter Amanda -- and you switch POV to play through their landing. Meaning you get to walk out into the crazy landscape, climb into the derelict, and check out the Space Jockey yourself. That POV doesn't have a close encounter with an egg, but no worries -- Amanda can and will get killed by face-huggers multiple times before you complete the game.

Anyhow, this is true fan service. And very playable. Although the stealth sort of went out the window in later parts when so much is happening, the settings are either too open or too constricted, and the Alien is stalking you full time, there's really no point in trying to use all those wonderful sneak mechanics. Just go straight for the objective and hope you don't get killed before the save point.

I had three minor bugs, none of them fatal. There are sometimes weapons left drifting in the air after an encounter. There is an annoying sloshing sound that happens when you save with the flamethrower equipped (the easy fix is just to reload the weapon). And I stumbled into open flames near the very end and my hands were visibly on fire even after I got into a space suit. Made it hard to read the motion tracker but other than that...

There's a few things I don't know whether to call poor design or sadistically clever design, though. I watched a play-through and it really brought home for me how the game misleads you into things that seem sensible, might even be sensible in the early game, but actually hamper you later.

Lockers. There are lockers all over that give you that "action possible on this object" glow when you are near them. You are meant to hide in them. Which works, but... getting in is noisy, getting out is worse, you can't craft or reload or even change load-out when inside them, you can't see what is going on very well...and you can still get found.

What does not glow or otherwise alert you is hiding under desks or surgical cots. Where you can do everything...including prepping a noise-maker to distract the Alien so you can escape, or preparing your flame thrower in case he looks the wrong way.

Second is the motion tracker. It is cool and all, but it takes up part of the screen and blurs the rest slightly. Meaning your attention is on the motion tracker -- which doesn't tell you if it is an Alien or a friendly or a Working Joe, if the Alien is on the ground or up in the vents, and doesn't show anything if the enemy is sitting still (which both the Alien and the Joes love to do).

Plus enemies can hear it.

Thing is? Once you've picked up the motion tracker, you get a beep when something is moving near you. Several beeps, in fact. You can't get direction, but you can certainly get a nice alert just by listening.

And listening is really the thing. The Alien makes different noises depending on if it is in the vents or on the ground. It makes distinctive sounds when transitioning. The Joes also make enough noise you can usually hear them coming. So you can get a pretty good sense of what is coming up on you and from where just by using your ears.

Related to both the others; crouching is cool because it automatically puts you under things if you can duck under them. It makes you less visible and there are several sections where there are counters or whatever and you can pretty much waltz through in a crouch position.

But it slows you down. It restricts your vision as much as it breaks the enemy sight lines. And it even blocks you from seeing pick-ups and other useful things that are on top of tables. It really is more sensible to play the game at a walk most of the time and crouch only when you are actively hiding from something nearby.

The instinct the game leads you to is to crouch all the time and hide in lockers frequently and hide behind the motion tracker until you figure out the Alien can hear it and is homing in on the sound. And I can't decide if this is a design flaw or sadistically good game design. It could even be argued that this is an immersive ludonarrative connect to Amanda starting out wary and over the course of events becoming daring and heroic.

I'm going for sadistic, though. Late in the game, it delivered the schematics for the EMP generator version 3.0  Which is the great tool for taking out (preferably groups of) Working Joes. (The biggest groups you find, alas, are either in the server room or the reactor core, and both of those are wearing electrostatic suits.)

Of course I didn't meet a single Working Joe for the rest of the game. Oh, no wait. I did meet one. Who was wearing the EMP-proof coveralls. Thanks, game. What I could have really used was more flame. Nothing else seemed fast enough to stop those damned face-huggers.

I am tempted to play again. Well, part way through. Just to finally use the Pipe Bomb and the EMP bomb properly. Dealing with the Reactor Joes was really damned annoying when I hadn't been prepared for them.

***

I'm more and more convinced Japan is too deep to do simply. I mean, I think I can write a book that looks simpler to the reader. But it is going to take six months at the least to write.