The Whitechapel Project

As a side note, about half-way through the voting I heard a couple of concerns that the IP and cookie tracking I had implemented made it hard for businesses and multi-reader households to vote separately. So, I changed it to just cookie tracking, so multiple computers on the same IP can vote. This means that some of you might have had the chance to vote multiple times. If so… eh, I’m cool. If people are so passionate that they check back and vote as often as I can, I’m totally okay with it. I just don’t want people writing vote-bots or spamming the polls.

Author’s Commentary

This episode started off as one episode, and ended up becoming quite another.

I’ll be honest — I had a rough idea how this would go when I first started planning Whitechapel, although a lot of the details were solely dependent on the voting from episode one. I knew that he was going to escape into an empty corridor, and that VI would find another office in which there would be some information and supplies. Interestingly, this structure came about because I briefly considered making Whitechapel a text adventure game, and there were some game design reasons why that scene had to happen, but either way the core of the scene was in my head.

The bit with the flashback? Totally out of the blue. I have no idea where it came from, or even entirely what it means (though I get a sense it relates to the flashbacks at the beginning of episode one). I just know that I wanted to work in a bit I learned a long time ago about finding your way out of a maze, which also happened to be the same advice for finding your way out of a building when you can’t see where you’re going.

Dr. Tucci? Fucked if I know. I can’t even say where the last name came from, let alone what role he has to play.

Why Dr. Tucci’s workout clothes are all gray? Not entirely sure, but I have some ideas.

The picture on the wall? I actually have an idea for this, but I found a very similar picture in a random Google image search, and thought it was too cool not to use.

Whitechapel Project? Although it’s the name for the website, it wasn’t actually my original idea for the group that kept VI hostage. I wrote it down as a placeholder, and when I went through to revise, it seemed so natural that I kept it.

VI as an American was just prudence — since I’m recording the podcast in my normal speaking voice (in an American accent), it made sense to make VI American as well. However, finding a way to prove that in the story proved tricky. In an early draft I had VI speaking to himself, but that was hard to explain in the first person (and even harder to read), so I revised it to a written English word. I picked “honor” arbitrarily, but it ended up being a great little bit, so I kept it.

The alarm was part of my plan, but I didn’t know how to push that to a voting point, so that’s when I went with Raymond Chandler‘s advice and brought in a guy with a gun. Well, a guy and the gun are in different rooms, but the theory’s there.

I can certainly say that half of the episode I had pre-planned, but the other half came out from a combination of ideas from the conversation on episode one as well as random bits bouncing around in my head.

The recording was a bit trickier this time. I actually had to rewrite some bits because I had trouble speaking them (like the phrase “silently swings shut,” apparently — I gave up after a dozen tries and just rewrote the bitch), and a few times saying the lines out loud helped me find places where it was redundant or just badly phrased. When I finished recording and started editing, I found that the final few lines were just mysteriously gone from my recording, so I had to re-record those. It was really weird.

Voting and Discussion

Unless 15 people all vote in the next six hours and all vote exactly the same way, it looks like VI will bluff. What’s interesting is the rationale is all over the place — some readers are already emotional invested in VI and don’t want him to be a cold-blooded killer, while others think that VI might not actually be sane right now, so bluffing may help to show how much of his world is real and how much is fantasy. Like last episode, there’s a lot of insightful and diverse commentary on the choices, and it’s really helping me with lots of cool ideas for future episodes. This is an unexpected but really, really, really cool side benefit of the blog.

Voting seems a bit lower than last episode. I’d like to get some more people involved, so hopefully next week I’ll have a little “special mission” to increase reader size. Stay tuned.

Back to episode two