Cursed Swipes (Wildebyte Diary)

Welcome to the writing diary for my book Cursed Swipes. In this article, I keep track of the general process for writing this book, and hopefully share some interesting or fun elements along the way.

As always, SPOILERS for this book (and very light spoilers for other books before it).

What’s the idea?

This game takes place in something similar to (or a parody of) Angry Birds.

It was initially planned a bit later, but after some reshuffling of the plans this became the sixth book. It fit nicely with this first “group” of books, because this game is also one that Wildebyte briefly visits in the very first book of the series.

It also has a lesson that I wanted to do quite early: “good games are easy to learn, hard to master. Low floor, high ceiling.”

In other words, good games rely on fuzziness. They should have a large space in which you can improve your skill or try new strategies. Trying to control the options or outcomes too much just leads to a stale game that’s hard to get into and doesn’t leave room to improve once you are into it.

Angry Birds exemplifies this, in my eyes. It has only one action—shoot that bird—but that action is fuzzy. There are literally millions of ways to shoot. Slightly to the left, slightly to the right, slightly more power, slightly less power. Even moving your finger a pixel leads to a different shot and a better/worse score.

In these Wildebyte books, I generally …

• Search for a way to turn that lesson into something that applies to real life.
• And take these rules to their extreme, creating a world that is the game.

Fuzziness in real life is about letting go and relinquishing control. Let things be messy. Accept you won’t do things perfectly the first time, or at all. Accept things will never be comfortable or easy. So I wanted a story centered around that.

Taking the rules to their extreme mostly meant a world in which you only move by being shot (with a catapult or cannon or whatever), and in which characters are always angry and want to destroy wooden blocks and stuff :p

This turned into the following set of ideas.

• Wildebyte actually fails. So far, we’ve seen them slowly fix a game or slowly work towards a goal, always reaching it. This time, their first instincts actually ruin the game further and lead to a proper uninstall.
  • This is at roughly 1/3 of the story. They spend the next 1/3 trying to get the game reinstalled. And the final 1/3 learning from mistakes and doing it right this time.
• In the first chapter, we are introduced to a mysterious character who claims to “know the future”. Which is obviously enticing, knowing exactly what will happen and what you need to do. => As expected, this ultimately turns out to be not so great after all.
  • This character asks Wildebyte to pay for this skill by giving up their Lost Memories. Which WB obviously doesn’t want to do at first.
  • Only at the second go around, do they let go of them.
• A large plot point revolves around Sweettooth, who now travels with them.
  • He has different goals that WB doesn’t understand. He is far more ambitious and freeflowing than them, and WB just can’t see that same vision (or doesn’t dare to do so).
  • He seems to have been erased with the uninstall because of that.
  • Now WB truly realizes what it means that life is messy. He must now rely on something vague like trust and hope for Sweettooth. He must accept some things are out of his control.
  • To make this “concrete”, Wildebyte has to keep open some portal or connection. This drains resources, drains memories, etcetera. But closing it means shutting Sweettooth out. (Haha, and all the others are obviously ANGRY and want to DESTROY that one portal all the time!)
  • But in the end, he comes back, and his own messy plan saves their asses. (With help from Wildebyte who kept that trust and messiness all that time.)

What’s up with the mysterious character? They simply have access to a lot of computing resources, so predicting the future mostly means they can calculate a lot and are therefore often right. But not always.

• Perhaps there’s a plot point about them being right 99.99% of the time and having the courage to shoot for that 0.01% that it falls the other way.)
• Paying using their memories isn’t necessary. They just want that for personal gain.

And how to connect this to the real world? In that middle 1/3, Wildebyte roams around the device. The other parts, outside of the game. This isn’t just a chance to show off some other elements and computer parts, it’s also a chance to see something of the real Player using this device.

• Wildebyte visits a messaging app, or perhaps a school app, where they get to know the Player better.
• The Player has just experienced something messy and stupid: their dad (the President) is making some huge decisions and criticized by their classmates. They don’t know whether to agree or not, but disagreeing would surely create tension at home, and they don’t know what to do.
• So, Wildebyte experiences the Player’s wishes for safety and a comfortable life, for things to just be perfect and clear.
• With effort, they end up sending a message back. Telling them to just let it be messy and try their best. To not stop their life—removing all games they played juts for fun—just because of this.
• Which obviously leads to it being reinstalled.

This felt like a plan to me.

Its thematic. Its fresh. It has a strong dilemma at the start. It feels like enough plot/weight to carry an entire book.

Sure, some things still need to be fleshed out. (What’s wrong with the game and how does WB try to fix it? What’s Sweettooth’s ambitious side quest? What are the specific rules of this game world?)

But we’ll figure that out as we write.

For now, all we need to know is the first chapter: Wildebyte lands, finds the game unfun and unplayable, Sweettooth dreams bigger than them, and then the mysterious character gives their interesting offer.

Chapters 1–6

That dilemma of “do you want to see the future?” is really the interesting part here. It gives the book a very strong opening—in my view—which makes it a bit disappointing that this quality doesn’t continue.

Chapters 3, 4, 5 are fine, as we add new (mysterious) members to the team and jump to a new planet. But I can’t help but feel that the story lowers gears as opposed to chapters 1 and 2, which you don’t want.

(If this happens, chapter 3 is by far the most common place for readers to stop reading entirely. That’s my experience, at least, from writing a lot of books and asking others to proofread. You’ve given the book a fair chance, and that first chapter was interesting, but now the story moves more and more slowly … with less interesting events … and so you decided to quit.)

I already have some changes planned for the rewrite. Major changes that enhance the worldbuilding, which means each chapter (3,4,5) is able to introduce one or two nuggets of information. By continuing to give the reader a sense of progress and interesting developments—even if none of it is action or mindblowing—this part should flow better.

One such change, for example, is removing the limbs from both cats and mice :p Angry Brids removed the limbs. There’s actually good reasons to do so. But it’s also a very unique thing to surprise the reader with, which leads to more unique writing.

I do think this “chunk” ends in a good way. Wildebyte finally appears on the planet of the cats + finds Sweettooth there. This is a great cliffhanger to help readers roll into the next chunk.

(Even if this means that the mystery of “where did Sweettooth go!?” and “what was he doing!?” is resolved rather quickly. I considered sustaining it over the entire novel—only having him come back at the very end—but then I realized this would be silly. Why introduce a sidekick for Wildebyte to literally sideline him for 200 pages?)

All in all, this was done rather quickly.

Chapters 7–12

Okay, so, at this time two things happened.

• I became extremely sick. (As in, some virus going around that kept everyone numb on their couch for at least a week. Not some life-threatening disease.)
• I wanted to do more research, as I felt my current notes and ideas just weren’t cutting it.

The research brought so many new things to light that I had to pause and reorient myself. Sort my thoughts and pick out the facts or mechanics from Angry Birds that I wanted to include.

At the same time, this entire phase is more like a fever dream of which I don’t remember the details because my head was exploding :p I’ll try to reconstruct the process as best I can. (The sickness actually came in around chapter 3 already, but I was in denial then and kept working at full speed.)

I noticed the storyline following a structure of “we need to achieve X, so let’s do that step by step”. In this case, they need to find The Manager. So we see Wildebyte jumping from planet to planet, asking around and getting one more bit of information each time.

It’s fine. It keeps a story going with clear goals and forward momentum. It’s also very basic and predictable.

And so I sought ways to shake it up.

• Once Wildebyte and Sweettooth reunite, they learn the final information needed to make the last jump.
• But this is a difficult jump, so they calculate it and prepare (and change some of the game’s code), then do it.
  • This is the bit in every Wildebyte book that is slightly more technical and shows simple ways in which code/numbers create mechanics in games.
• Once there, they need to break into this sacred place, but it’s extremely well-guarded. So they plan step by step and execute, which fails.

The last part was the hardest to get right. The story thread of “try to get into a place, but keep getting thrown out” is a common one, and I know from experience that it’s also very common to feel stale and stuttering. Because, well, as a reader you keep hoping something is going to happen each chapter and it just doesn’t. The place is too well guarded. The bank vault stays ultralocked.

Initially, I just put a big gap or river between the characters and the supposed location of The Manager. But then I was like: “can’t they just launch themselves to that place now?”

So I changed the planet to be absolutely swarmed with objects in the air, like satellites but very close to the floor. But in my case, it felt fitting to make them tiny (but solid) stars. You can’t really move around on the planet, because you’ll run into those things all the time.

But this still wasn’t great. I was straying too far from the game I’m trying to parody. I really wanted multiple challenges here, because these 3 things are the main threads or concepts of this story:

• A building-based one (so they need to build a bridge from the familiar wooden blocks, for example, to cross that river.)
• A slingshot-based one (so they need to dodge obstacles and launch themselves into a specific position)
• A physics-based one (like hitting a shield, or being forced to NOT hit some security mechanism)

Which is how we ended up with the final version.

• They need to cross a wide gap indeed.
• It constantly rains stars from the sky. This hampers movement + feels fitting (with the whole slingshot-game theme)
• The final part contains a stretch of tiles. Most are false and will break on impact. Only some are true, but even they will slowly break (depending on how hard you hit them).

It feels a little like setting up an Indiana Jones story suddenly. But I already worked towards this from the start by “assembling a team” this time (of entities with different powers), so I knew that if I wrote this well, it would be great.

My only remaining (though quite big) criticism of this part is that I didn’t get to actually explain how physics work or how touches are registered. It all stays vague and in “fantasy magic we need for this story”-land. So in the revision, I’ll see how much more technical detail chapters like these need.

(Also, this ended up one chapter longer than planned. That always happens, ironically. Whenever I am very uncertain about a part of the story, I start to overplan and overthink it, filling it with slightly too many ideas and it grows in size. It’s fine for now. Might be shortened later.)

Finally, this chunk was always going to end with the game being uninstalled. But while I originally wanted the player to uninstall it because they were bored or hated the game now, after my research I wanted to do something else: a game abandoned by the developers.

Or, rather, actively pulled from existence, forcing itself to uninstall everywhere. (Because that’s what Angry Birds did: suddenly remove all the games that made them famous and rich, because they decided it hurt the profits of their newer games.)

This also allowed a more interesting way to start this. (Instead of just “uhm okay so I guess we’re being erased now”) The game itself sends this threatening, red signal surrounded by skulls to the device. Which is a clear signal to WB (and the gang) to race back to the cats planet and see what that’s about, which allows me to keep the tension of uninstall over two chapters.

Chapters 13–18

This is the actual meat of the story. And yes, that is a weird structure (wrap an entirely different story inside 100+ pages of more action-focused game-story). But I try to keep each Wildebyte book fresh and experiment with new ideas.

These chapters were supposed to be revelation, after revelation, after revelation, until this helps Wildebyte find a way to get the game back.

At the same time, I wanted to introduce as many other (non-game) parts and entities here as possible. Because it’s different and this is the perfect place to do it. (You’ll notice most of my arguments for doing something is just “it’s different than the last thing I did” :p)

This is a good example of how a very vague idea like “Wildebyte roams around device to get game installed again, by messaging with the Player” sounds like a great plan that will fill 1/4 of a novel … until you have to actually do it. Then you realize how vague it is. And how hard it might be to actually fill the space I left for it.

And how weird that shift from “play the game” to “completely out of the game” can feel if you don’t write it well. (Yes, we’re still in Ludra, still the same device, but all the rules I established for this entire novel will be gone. Which does, as expected, feel like a second novel inside a novel.)

So in the end,

• This chunk became a bit shorter than I originally planned.
• I split the “Wildebyte reads player messages” into two chapters (spread apart).
  • In the first one, they just get hints about what’s happening in the real world, but no answers and no way to talk back.
  • In the second one, they actually manage to get answers and send one message back.
• This means Wildebyte has to go on a short quest to learn how to send that message, which is why we take a detour to some other parts of Ludra (such as the Symbolsingers).
• It felt unrealistic for the game to be immediately installed again, as well as boring if we have a chapter of Wildebyte just … waiting and doing nothing.
  • So, I decided to properly introduce something like the App Store.
  • Give it its own quirky rules and setup, which—surprise, surprise—mimic the game we’ve been playing this entire novel. So it all actually ties together.

This was a specific plan for how to get from A to B, while taking fun and interesting steps for every chapter. Nothing comes too easy, nothing is so hard for WB that the reader just feels exhausted reading it.

One thing, however, was lacking. Urgency. Once the game is uninstalled, and WB believes Sweettooth to be erased … there’s no reason to hurry up and get it back. Timing really doesn’t matter. Gone is gone. The game wasn’t uninstalled for reasons related to time.

And when urgency lacks, the story has no momentum going forward, because why do anything at all?

So I thought about anything I might have missed. Any other fun tidbits to add. Then I realized WB would still like their Lost Memory of course! It should’ve been in that previous installation. So when talking to the Memory Police,

• WB could be like “please don’t reuse the memory for anything else yet, so the Lost Memory is still there when it’s installed again”
• And the Memory Police (MP?) is like “I won’t touch it for three days max, but that’s all I can promise you—then I need my memory back.”

In some ways, this felt a bit like reaching too far to find plot. But it’s just logical and simple enough, and it really helps prop up the middle of the novel, so I went with it.

Chapters 19–24

I … completely forgot to write the diary section for this part. And now it’s been almost a year and I just don’t remember anything about this part of the writing process.

Whoopsie!

That happens sometimes. It’s so natural for me to write down my thoughts and process that these diaries are written almost “automatically”. If anything breaks that habit for some reason, such as illness or an urgent matter in real life, then I’m likely to forget that I have to finish a diary still.

Anyway, let’s move on then.

Conclusion

It’s interesting, though, to write the conclusion for this diary now—when I’m already halfway book #10 of Wildebyte Arcades.

I didn’t intend to, but that mysterious character giving Wildebyte the offer … returns later! Some things I invented just for this story, actually wormed its way into my brain and made me change the rest of the plan.

I can also clearly see now that I was still struggling to find the right way to “use” Sweettooth. In later stories, his role is much clearer and more interesting, as he also gets his own arc or subplots. But in this story, he is basically just working against Wildebyte, until he has to save Sweettooth for the entire back half.

Oh well. The story is still fine and stands on its own. With each Wildebyte book, I simply get a little better at writing in general, but especially at writing Wildebyte books. Reading back my notes in this diary, I can clearly see how I would’ve done things slightly differently now, but I also know that I needed to write this book to figure that out.

Until the next diary, keep reading and writing,

Tiamo