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When I recall playing an adventure game, I don't see myself in front of a monitor with a mouse in my right hand. Rather I see the environment as if I was there. Experiencing such immersion fueled my desire to create an adventure game. At first, I figured only production companies with vast resources and personnel could accomplish such an undertaking. But after playing Rhem and Dark Fall, two excellent games developed as one-person operations respectively by Knut Müller and Jonathan Boakes, I reconsidered. In early 2004 I decided to embark on my own project. Five years later, I've nearly completed Slip Space: The Burma-Shave Analogy.

2004 was spent buying software and exploring how it worked. One early accomplishment was learning what not to do. I created an intricate animation in the 3D program Bryce that took a month to render. My computer ran continually night and day. Since the animation was only 80 seconds long, I concluded there had to be a better way. Ultimately there was.

I switched my attention to creating interactive elements such as navigation and puzzle controls and figured I would work out these details in the multi-media program Director. I was having a hard time getting traction since I was trying to learn the program from the owner's manual. Regarding these mind-numbing wastes-of-paper, I say (quoting Phil Hendrie), "I hate them ever so deeply". However, things turned around when I bought and worked through a lengthy but good tutorial book on Director and Lingo (Lingo being the programming language of Director).

Finding and going through tutorial books on the various software turned out to be the successful action that got the project on track. Along with Director, I did this for Photoshop and Eon Vue, a very cool program for creating 3D environments. As a result, I bought a lot of books online. I probably shouldn't take credit for it, but that was about the time Amazon.com started showing a profit.

Originally, the title for the project was Highway 30 After Burma Shave and the story outline was quite different from what it is now. In the first iteration, the Burma Shave in the title referred to the decaying signs promoting a defunct product posted a considerable distance apart along an abandoned highway. The story was to revolve around an eccentric inventor who built an intricate hideaway in this rarely traveled location.

As the development got under way, I realized it was easier to create environments by following the inspiration inherent in the process of exploring the capabilities of the software rather than by fully envisioning the settings first. As such, I needed a flexible story device that would rationalize vastly different environments existing in the same story.

I focused on the cleverness of the original Burma-Shave marketing scheme of fragmenting a message on a series of signs posted at regular intervals. In a like manner, what if we perceive a single unit of now, let billions go by unperceived, and then perceive another? As a result our reality is analogous to pasting the fragments from the various Burma-Shave signs into one coherent message. In this iteration of the story, the eccentric inventor is a scientist who developed a method of altering the frequency in which units of now are perceived, resulting in a complete change in perceived reality.

Installment 2 | Installment 3