> Terminal as a Process

I tend to write too much on a first draft and write too extemporaneously. Invariably I then cut too much out of a second draft, to the point that my ideas don’t come through. My third drafts get closer to where they need to be, but it usually takes me several more drafts until I like everything that I’m reading. I wrote several drafts of Terminal before editing and re-editing until it finally emerged as the version that you see on the screen or the page.

Writing Terminal was the easy part.

For Chapter 4 of the game, titled Love, I integrated pictures I’d taken around Urbana, Illinois. Transforming those and other images into something almost skeletal with ASCII ones and zeroes took weeks.

The voices in Chapter 2 of the game, titled Family, took months. It was the longest part of the project. Each of the over 100 outputs took me at least a couple of hours to get right, as I was trying to present something both natural and unnatural at once, almost equally alive and dead.

The rest of the game’s basic design, like the colors that span Chapter 5 (Dreams), took days. Programming the game in Godot via Dialogic took several months, though building the sound still took longer, as those sessions each night were longer. Every moment was worth it. Eventually this formal logic to build a backward-looking giant decision tree with locked choices just worked every way that I tested it.

Getting the project ready for Steam was obnoxious but short, only taking several weeks. By this point, I was long ready to release, so every extra day of work felt like wasted time, even though it never was. This was my first developed piece of software (and maybe my last), but I can imagine how developers and producers feel waiting those weeks, months, or years between completion and product release, even if they’re always working.

But in March 2026, I released it. The players who engaged with the story seemed to deeply connect with it. With all that positive feedback, it was almost inevitable that I’d release it as a complete novel by adding prose to the inputs and outputs to flesh out the story. I’m just happy that readers like me can connect with it, too.