#originally i think it was all a placeholder until i found stuff to switch it out to?

[horse-shit]

finally changed my theme. hallelujah 🎉

[gfdatingsim]

So…

@robinthegreenbird submitted:

I’ve played both routes ((haven’t perfected any yet lol)) and I just wanted to say, That this is easily one of my favorite games. Also I have a question what parts did you make? Once again I love this game so much!

rosie: thank you so much!! making the game was a lot of fun so i’m glad you’ve enjoyed it :)  my parts of the game were ford’s last two dates – mabel’s dinner date of dreams and sunset confessions. writing those two was super fun!! 

i knew i wanted a special mabel-ified date (as she is my favorite character) so i incorporated her into the dinner date i planned for the player and ford– with her extra bits of pizazz on top, of course. when i wrote the meteor shower part at the end, i was in a rough patch and wanted some love and that good good validation, so i let ford give it to me, lmao. as the second-last date of ford’s route, i wanted it to be special and sweet, with ford’s affection toward the player really evident and confirmed, in a way, so it wasn’t just longing glances and blushing for the entire route lmao. it was originally the mabel-match date, but sovo swapped the schedules around and i think it works even better!

the pool date was more of a challenge. the last date of the route, the team and i agreed it had to be more of a serious one– one for ford to feel comfortable opening up to the player about everything that’s happened to him, not just what he told them on the dinner date, yanno? all about weirdmageddon and that business. writing angst isn’t really my forte – so thank you phoe for helping me write that nonsense– but we needed it to be important and kinda heavy on ford’s end, with the end of the game almost relying on how the player reacted to his story. all the seriousness got to me though so the option to jump in the pool was my executive decision eyyy 

i also wrote the two between-y bits with mabel and dipper – pancakes and interrogations and the fine summer’s wedding! i wrote those just before the game came out, but since i was still in the middle of my college semester, it took me a bit longer… which is why poor sovo had to do a large chunk of the editing themselves, which i do apologize for;; but even with all the mad stress and load on their shoulders, they did a phenomenal job with everything they had to take on, and this project wouldn’t be the same– well, it wouldn’t even exist– without them!

i hope this answered your question, if not a bit wordy. i am a writer after all. thank you for playing! <3 

sovo: I worked on all the programming, a bunch of background art, the GUI, Stan’s driving sprites, playtesting, writing, editing, managing, you name it. As you can imagine, at times this project really stressed me out! 

The worst of it was probably the editing/rearranging/rewriting, which was a way bigger task than I anticipated. When we were organizing in Discord at the beginning of the project, we had so many writers that we split the whole game’s story up into nine pieces, one for each writer, and each with the same deadlines. At that point it was just the Ford and Stan events themselves– no in-between events with the kids, no transitions, no introduction or end. Writers handed in first drafts, then second drafts, and then those drafts went straight into editing. 

The idea was that Isa, Rosie, and I could do all the editing to bring about a more unified voice, since we essentially had nine voices in there, but in hindsight it was… not the best plan I could’ve gone with. Not asking the writers to polish their dates further meant that way more had to be done in the editing stage– plus we still had to write a remaining third of the game from scratch (transitions/intro/ending). When I think back to it I can still feel my dread from those times lol, because there was so much work to do and as the school year loomed, there were three– and then two– and then one– people available to do it. Isa (below) is right, the discord went dead for a long time after the writers handed in the last of their drafts about a month into the project. 

Also, almost everyone in the group was into Dream Daddy, so many of our writers followed DD’s suit and wrote mini-games into their dates (mini-games that I still don’t know how to implement). So I had to cut all those out and patch it over with writing. Then in some drafts there was still placeholder text left, like “[insert wall of text here],” which I had to figure out or just patch over with new writing. Then sometimes there was still wonky dialogue, or odd behavior, and I’d try and nudge Ford or whoever into character again. Then the introduction and ending were still partially done or just plain missing, so I grafted Rosie’s intro draft onto another intro draft and led it into Ford’s cryptid hunt event, and drafted an ending for the sim, and then Isa really fleshed it out after.

And while this wasn’t strictly necessary, I ended up rearranging Ford’s route just a tad. Ford’s route originally went cryptid -> ddamd -> dinner date -> pool -> baking, so the dinner date was originally Mabel’s matchmaking scheme– which Rosie pulled off super well! In fact, she pulled it off so well that something felt off to me about Ford’s route progression, because while each date stood fine alone, it’s like things peaked a little too soon. After a lot of puzzling over what exactly felt off, I finally switched it up to go baking -> dinner date -> pool instead, rewriting the context of the baking date so that it would fit in.

Honestly, I don’t think the three of us really know the extent of the work we did during editing, even now? Like, to add to the above, Rosie also altered/added stuff & wrote much-needed transitions across the game including the two in-between events with the kids, which I think really tied the game together by giving it a bit of non-dating-centric story! And Isa did a bunch of editing/rewriting all across the game, especially on Stan’s route. While they worked I got to settle into my drawing/programming/playtesting role, which was a whole other batch of tedium, but everything turned out great!

isa: *cracks knuckles* alright sooooo. to start off I was really in the deep of it all really early on, starting from the brainstorming stage! Like Sovo said, the base we started from was the dates- the chat came up with possible date scenarios for both characters and we voted on which ones we’d want to see in the game! Coincidentally, all the final dates that made it in were mostly proposed by me! But all the others we tried to incorporate somehow even if they weren’t top 5; for instance, a drive in movie was proposed but didn’t make it so it turned into watching a movie at home after the main boxing part of the date. I also arranged the date order before we started writing based on premise, and what was most believable for the progression + time to get to know Stan and have things get more intimate and hopefully natural feeling! The concept and writing for Stan’s final date was all mine! Although I had originally had it stop after the kiss in the diner to leave it open-ended with “you wanna get out of here?” so the player could decide whether they…. took a ride on the Stan O’ War or not lmao, but then Sovo encouraged me to make it more steamy ending which I’m forever grateful for mwuahah. Everything else about the date was a piece of cake honestly, I found it easy to write since I knew where I wanted Stan + player to be in terms of their relationship/flirt level. The hardest part was…. finding a way to cut the makeout short that would be in character! Which is why I used poor, poor Robbie as my plot convenience. Sorry m'dude.

I edited and fluffed the intro form what Sovo had and edited…. the whole game actually I think. In terms of fixing typos, grammar, adding little lines here and there, etc. both in Stan and Ford’s routes. A huge role was also communicating from Sovo to the other writers on what still needed to be done, organization, due dates, etc. So I was kind of like a manager/coordinator too. I also wrote transitions from one date to the next, like the nap reader takes in order to fit Stan’s boxing date cg in the game and wrote them cuddling Waddles as well as the first half or so of the final version intro to Stan’s final date (Sovo then took up the rest!). I wrote a couple general intros too but they didn’t make it in since Rosie did such a good job lol.After talking with Sovo and deciding it’d be okay to change Ford’s date order to feel like a more natural progression, I made changes accordingly to the intros and things that were now out of order within his dates, mostly the baking date since that was the main one affected along with the swimming date. I had fun writing for Ford on that one, I really like the small things with him, like having the idea that he can crack two eggs in one hand super easy.

The biggest thing for me was making sure everything was cohesive and in-character while editing the rest of Stan’s route. Each date was wonderful but with so many writers there were quite a few inconsistencies from one date to another, which is understandable since everyone just started writing on their own and didn’t know what others wrote until after. (And also I made some executive decisions on what I thought was and wasn’t out of character or what I thought didn’t fit with what we’ve seen in the source material or what would happen after the finale.) There were a lot of things that had to be removed as a result, which led to big gaps I had to fill and choices/possibilities I had to streamline. For instance, I completely rearranged and had to rewrite a lot of the movie part and the end of the date. Sometimes in the dates there were a lot of choices but none of them really had much of an impact on your approval rating in the game, which became more important later on, so I had to make bad choices worse and good choices better! So like for the films, the date ends differently depending on which film you pick, but if you’re doing well enough already and you pick an option that isn’t the best, you get an okay ending and aren’t completely out of luck lol (picking a horror film is neither the worst nor the best but if you have a high score already it’s more of an inconvenience than anything). Also, consistency was key. I had a unique challenge with Stan’s accent and how to write it in, so I’d find myself reading over his dialogue many times and keeping what felt natural and not forced to it wouldn’t be understood in context with other words lol. And simple things like punctuation- all the writers wrote things differently, so like TV vs tv vs t.v. etc or Stan O'War vs Stan-O-War, etc. That part’s more tedious than anything. OH, and I grabbed the voice clips from Gravity Falls as well as the sound effects for that version. It felt weird without an actual car horn to interrupt; I also found alternative tracks for the disco date until phoe pulled through! 

And then finally, I rewrote the general farewell at the end from the base that we there already, and embellished and added a bit more floof to Stan’s possible endings. For his bad ending I think if you got a low enough score that your dates got cut short, he’d be pretty cold because wow you just made him fix your car and you were kinda rude to him bye stranger. And if you got far enough that he set up the disco date for you but your score was low overall, he’d be kinda heartbroken but definitely wouldn’t let it show, he’s just be gruff and defensive. And if you did well, he’ll let his fondness show a bit more in his own way. You’re still only someone he just met, and he’s spent so long hiding that he’s still getting used to being himself so he won’t bear his entire heart just yet, but there’s definitely promise and he’s excited. I headcanon that he sends you weird trinkets in the mail and texts/video calls you pretty regularly until the Stan O'War II docks somewhere close and you two can visit and catch up.

This project was a lot of work….. it was pretty dead in some spaces, mostly after the writers finished their dates and it got passed on for the monstrous editing job lol. Some times I couldn’t stop editing, others I was slammed for weeks with classes and personal life, and Sovo was so kind and understanding! I really learned a lot about writing and am sad it’s over, but also. Not lol. I’m so amazed with how it turned out and I can’t believe the reception it’s gotten!!! ;u;

[arabellaflynn]

My response to extended periods of stress is to distract myself by cramming new things into my head. I had a terrible semester at college once and front-loaded the entirety of the sci.electronics.repair FAQ into my brain. It wasn't useful at the time, but I can repair the shit out of a VCR now, so I assume I'll use it someday. I am so overloaded I am about to claw my own face off, so naturally I am teaching myself Hebrew. I've been using Duolingo to do it, which is frankly a very bad idea. (I should really be using Ha'Ulpan, which is where you'd typically go for a crash course in Hebrew before emigrating to Israel, but that costs money, so no.) Duolingo is billed as a way to teach yourself a language, which it is not. It is a way to memorize a bunch of interactive flashcards. This might be effective for people who don't care how language works -- which is most people -- but it's awful for people like me, who hang all of their memorization off of a framework of base patterns. Duolingo explains nothing. The "lessons":

Do not teach the alphabet. Hebrew is written in this sort of half-assed abjad, where most but not all vowels are not marked in non-teaching texts, and some but not most unmarked vowels are actually represented by a placeholder Alef. 'Aba' is father and 'ima' is mother, but they are both written Alef-something else-Alef. Look at that and imagine how the vowel change looks totally mental to someone who spells things in a full alphabet. Alef comes out looking like it says about six different things, one of which is nothing.

Do not explain the orthography. There are several pairs of letters in Hebrew that do, or at least can, say the same thing. Tet and Tav both say /t/; Kaf and Qof both say /k/; Yod and Ayin are both sort of /j/ and sort of not; Vav and Bet can both say /v/, although both also have other readings; Samekh is /s/ and Shin can be read that way as well. Some other apparent character pairs are actually the same letter that has a 'sofit' form when it comes at the end of the word, which on the Hebrew keyboard is a different key (as opposed to the Arabic IME, which auto-corrects to the final form when it kerns all the cursive joining). I still have no idea if there is a rule behind Tet vs Tav; Yod vs Ayin and Kaf vs Qof are almost certainly because they once represented different sounds (Yaa vs 'Ayin and Kaa vs Qaf are still separated in Arabic), but I don't have enough context to guess which is likely to be which in Modern Hebrew.

Do not consistently read new vocabulary words out loud. If you're not going to explain the letters to me, the least you can do is read me the word so I can figure it out myself. Of course, it also never explicitly mentions that you read all this right-to-left, which seems like an important note to give when you're using a left-to-right language for instruction. You would think it would be obvious when everything is right-justified, but this is the kind of stuff you shouldn't take for granted when building beginning lessons in anything.

Do not use any nekkudot. A nikkud ("point") is a diacritical mark, mainly underneath the consonant but occasionally beside, inside, or above it, that explicitly indicates ('dagesh') a pronunciation change or ('nikkud') an unwritten vowel. This is how you teach people to read Hebrew, in Hebrew. You use it for small children. Or, if you have any sense, novice adult learners.

Do not explain any grammar. There is no explanation of why "you" is sometimes 'at' and sometimes 'atah'. No explanation of why sometimes the present-tense verb has an '-et' on the end and sometimes doesn't, even when the subject is 'ani' in both cases. (Answer: Hebrew inflects according to gender of both subject and speaker, which seems like a thing that should be noted for anglophones.) You are left to guess at wtf to do with prepositions and particles like Ha, V', Be, Le, and others. 

Do not consistently account for the direction switch of Hebrew input. Firstly, there's no warning that the thing expects you to type in Hebrew; I installed a Hebrew keyboard before I started, but I also have six other keyboard layouts on the phone, because I'm me. If it wants you to type a full sentence, it can get the text running consistently right to left, but there are exercises that want you to fill in just one word, and that breaks it horribly. The words run right-to-left as intended, but they are arranged left-to-right in English order.

Do not listen to its own internal dictionary of synonyms. I have run into this in other languages and it drives me crazy. There are exercises where it asks you to translate a sentence in the target language into English. If you tap 'derech', Duolingo tells you it means a way, a path, or a road. Translating 'derech' as anything other than "way" in the English sentence gets you marked off. If there is some reason why 'Ha'yeled roah derech' could not mean "The boy sees a road" isolated from context, Duolingo does not give it.

I am already cheating by being a linguist who has some idea of how Semitic languages work. My one attempt at an Arabic class was a disaster for non-Arabic-related reasons, but I do know basic things like the idea behind an abjad, handling regular transformations of letter shapes at the end of a word, and how words are constructed by adding vowels/prefixes/suffixes to a triconsonantal root. These would be completely alien to most English speakers. There is a systemic way to accomplish transformations like the one from "(male) child" ('yeled') to "(female) child" ('yaldah') or "children" ('yeldim'), or from the noun "food" ('okel') to the verb for "to eat" ('le'kol'), but it is never actually pointed out.

I also have a living resource who grew up speaking Hebrew and enjoys teaching people things, usually at great length. I can ask the Eccentric all the weird stuff and he'll give me a long, detailed answer, fully 60% of which will have something to do with the original question. Technical grammar questions can be Googled to good effect, but the answers to cultural questions are, at best, unreliable. (Example: "Does Modern Hebrew have regional accents?" Google answer: "Modern Hebrew is very young and spoken in a contained geographic area. While there are some tiny variations in pronunciation and vocabulary, these are so slight it is unlikely a non-native speaker would ever notice them." Answer from actual Israeli person: "Absolutely, remind me next time I see you and I'll do imitations, some of them are hilarious.") [The question of accents is especially pertinent; I am never comfortable in a language until I sound like myself, and since I don't sound like a textbook all the time, this usually means picking a dialect to drop into. My informal Japanese tends to stay Tokyo-standard in grammar but in tone is rather bokukko, for instance. It's marked in speech (although often the actual pronoun boku is used in internet Japanese by female blog authors who don't want to be explicitly female in text), but I am clearly a non-native speaker, and I feel it conveys a proper warning that I am not going to do well by Japanese standards of femininity. There are a few potential accents I could wind up with in Hebrew. American is fairly far down on the list; I'm usually pretty good at not sounding like a Yank. The letter Resh is most universally difficult for non-native speakers. I could probably use the French or German R and be understood (both voiced uvular fricative /ʁ/, the French one higher and more nasalized), but the Resh as given in the only explicit explanation I've found is actually supposed to be a uvular trill /ʀ/, which occurs more towards the hard palate than either of those, and with a rounder sounding chamber behind it. It comes so far forward that it is the closest thing I have ever seen to the theoretically-impossible velar trill. Wikipedia says this is an Ashkenazim thing, which explains why you hear it so much in Yiddish. I would definitely be understood if I used the Arabic alveolar trill /r/, which is noted as a variation common among the Sephardim, but it's also associated with Arabic-speaking refugees, and I feel like that might not be the accent I want if I'm going to be practicing this on Israeli friends. I've no idea which one the Eccentric uses; I gather he has one parent from either tradition and they lived in Jerusalem, so who the fuck knows. It's impossible to pick up from his English. He's made no effort to zero out his accent, but he has had three decades to nail the English retroflex alveolar approximant /ɻ/, and more or less does. Chet is voiced /χ/, and undotted-Khaf is unvoiced /x/, both of which I have.]

An irksome aspect of learning Hebrew is the transliteration system. There isn't one. You notice that my Japanese is italicized and the attempts at Hebrew are in single quotes? This is because the Japanese is brought straight across using a standard Japanese-to-Latin alphabet system used in some textbooks and on the internet. (There are other, more precise systems, but they involve diacritical marks that can't be typed on a pure-ASCII keyboard.) The Hebrew is... uh, approximate. There is no way to unambiguously transcribe Hebrew text in Latin letters that is immediately readable to people whose languages use the Latin alphabet. Duolingo doesn't even try. I type things using the Hebrew IME whenever possible, because I'm trying to learn to spell, but when the Eccentric explains things to me he does it with the regular QWERTY keyboard. It has quirks. Words whose transliteration ends in '-ah', as in the new year's greeting 'shanah tovah', are words that end in He, a letter which normally says /h/ but when word-final represents /a:/ for grammatical reasons. He also consistently writes his Vav as "U'" when it's used as a conjunction, even though it's pronounced /v/. My guess is that this is how it is taught in Israeli schools. There seems to be a system behind it, but it does not make sense unless you also read the original Hebrew.

This is all somehow working anyway, probably because I'm me. I made it to Day 18 of my first ever stab at learning Hebrew before I started scaring up podcasts. It only took me that long because I had to figure out how to search for the word for "Hebrew (language)" in Hebrew, because searching in transliteration gets you nothing. Day 20 I picked up a series of linguistic interviews put out by Leshoniada (לשוניאדה, a word which gave Google Translate shitfits, but which the Eccentric informs me is a portmanteau that comes out something like "Grammar-lympics"). The details escape me completely, because I lack vocabulary, but because Hebrew has a very regular stress pattern (word-final, almost always) individual terms are easy to pick out. Between that and a lot of straight-up imports from Greek, the topic of the first episode was easy to get.

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