It’s December. And you know that means!

… Oh, you don’t?

Gingerbread men!

But also…

It just so happens that November was National Novel Writing Month. You can still check it out at http://nanowrimo.org/ if you want.

For the past couple of years I’ve wanted to get involved with NaNoWriMo, but I just never had a lot of time (with work and private matters). Not having a good enough of an idea to write a novel didn’t help either.

Because of my perpetual froggy writer’s block, I didn’t get to do anything for NaNoWriMo. So, belatedly, I’m going to do something for December to make up for it.

Instead of writing a conventional novel, I’ve decided to make a choose-your-own-adventure game instead. I mean, that counts, right? A CYOA is pretty much a novel, just… More interactive.

The game will be called Lucidity. It’s a horror game involving a girl named Samantha who has been afflicted with “Hyper Catatonic Disorder” that was brought on by an extremely traumatic experience involving her father. She’s now mostly a vegetable, able only to perform basic human functions. The story also involves a young Latvian doctor named Dr. Valdis Visaras as he scours the Earth for two years, looking for a cure for Samantha. He believes that he finally finds it after going to New Delhi, India. A special computer system, known as the LUCIDITY machine, seems to be just what will bring Samantha out of her catatonia. He puts his entire career on the line for the day when Samantha will be hooked up to it.

The game involves Samantha entering a deep sleep, and dreaming. In her dream, she must seek out the traumatic memory and destroy it once and for all. However, traumatic experiences erase memories and the brain tries to replace them with pieces of other memories. As a result, things that shouldn’t be there in the mind come alive, and Samantha will have to stand face-to-face with all of them. It’s a dangerous affair, because even though what she’ll encounter in her own mind can’t actually harm her, if she perishes in the dream world then there will be no going back. This affair is now or never.

I’ll be posting a demo very soon, possibly today or tomorrow, so that anybody interested can get a feel for where the story is going.

If you’d like to find out more, feel free to leave a comment or send me a private message with any questions you may have about the game. And as always, be sure to leave a comment, add me as a friend, and follow the game to keep up to date on the development progress.

• Microfrog