This was another last minute job. My initial plans were to finally do the MGS vs Splinter Cell episode, but I feared more issues would arise, so I wanted a Plan B just in case. I had this episode title noted down and a bare bones gimmick. I had no story in place, no analysis penned, no jokes, nothing.
As soon as I realised MGS/SC was a no-go yet again, it was shockingly easy to write up. I feel like I’ve worked out this formula well enough that I know when an episode is going to work, either narratively or logistically, and how long I’ll need to do it. It took me half an afternoon to write up the analysis, it’s very simple stuff about two games that I played to an excessive degree.
Most of the skits came easily after that. These sort of jokes never come fully formed, they start out as something simple and then build from there. I wanted a joke where one of the locals was maliciously pranking me, I also wanted a joke about poop somewhere (naturally), so I combined the two. Initially I thought about having actual pigs be responsible – which would have been pretty funny to think about – but then I remembered how much I both hate the police and love puns, so the joke took shape from there. That’s always the most satisfying sort of joke for me, even if they’re not always the laugh out loud funny ones. There are jokes throughout the series that I’ve workshopped to death and got a positive response – a gentle chuckle maybe – but a joke that I just fired off, untested and half-formed, will get praised. It’s just the way it is, sometimes.
I’ll be honest, I don’t think I delivered the pigs joke in a way that did it justice, but it was satisfactory. Apparently I have the same directorial approach as Clint Eastwood, rather than someone like David Fincher – I don’t go for multiple takes and sift through them for the best one, I just do the line until I get it right and then I move on. It’s possible a better take existed out there but I did not have the patience to find it. I’m fine with that, to be honest.
The story was really lacking in incident in my first draft. I was working with a story where everything that happened was getting more and more stressful, but I was hitting a wall after round three. Nothing I was writing for rounds four, five and the final verdict felt like an appropriate escalation. It was largely just variations on the same theme. I couldn’t just keep doing this, I had three more chapters of story to tell and no real end point in sight.
Most of the time, when I start writing an episode, I’ve got an idea of how my character will die. Sometimes that changes as the story evolves – such as the RE2/RE4 episode was originally going to end with me becoming a zombie but that shifted to a nuclear explosion. Every other episode, I’ve had a basic idea of how the whole thing ends written down, even as a starting point. This episode I had nothing. And I needed something. The whole gimmick of this show is that things get out of hand and I inevitably die at the end, so I had to really think about how I might die on a farm. It turns out there are a lot of terrible ways to die on a farm but I needed it to be somewhat entertaining and not just sad and/or weird, so I decided on having my livestock attacking me would be funny.
I had to work out how to do that in a way that wouldn’t seem random, so I needed to have a sinister turn in the penultimate round. I initialy thought of doing another meteor shower to trigger the animal madness plot, since a meteor shower previously played into the Until Dawn vs The Quarry episode’s lore, but it didn’t really match up. The meteor shower sent one man insane and fucked with the radio signals everywhere. The effects were similar but different enough that it raised questions that honestly weren’t worth the effort it would take to untangle and make sense of. So it was decided this story needed to be a new inciting incident. I knew I wanted to slot in a seasonal event into the story, to be true to the two games being covered, so I went from a strange phenomenon in the sky to one closer to the ground. Eventually I settled on the dance of the jellyfish from Stardew Valley as my inspiration; it’s possibly my favourite event in the game and seemed like a fun thing to warp into evil.
At this point, a new piece of lore emerged. A future idea that I was struggling to crack finally had a missing piece fall into place, I found that special something the idea was lacking. I like when that happens. Anyone who tells you they planned everything from the start is either a liar or they’re intent on their story being very boring. You really need to be flexible enough to incorporate new ideas and let them change your original vision, if the results are better. Even for daft video game podcasts. On many occassions, I have let new lore ideas completely upend my original ideas for future story arcs. I think this experience has really helped me develop as a storyteller, funnily enough.
I really enjoyed how this episode builds towards the finale. It starts out pretty mundane, I keep things simple and don’t really sew in an awful lot of jokes initially. And then the frustrations and the psychotic behaviour starts creeping in. The house covered in shit, the unionised wildlife, the terrible fishing experience, and then we get to the finale that goes apocalyptic. Me kicking animals to death, a man being eaten alive, ending the whole thing shooting my own head off. I was initially hesitant to touch this subject because I didn’t think there was enough opportunity for comedy in the premise of me living in a cozy life sim. I clearly didn’t think highly enough of my capacity for derangement because it all started falling in to place very quickly.
I will just say the original draft of the script only had me throwing Scraps the dog clear and running away, but then I thought about the rules of what I was establishing for the cow attack. The cows keep coming for me until they can kill me, so following that rule, the dog would probably keep coming at me. I think following that logical throughline helped as the extra dash of gratuitous violence helped set up the remainder of the episode – that idea led to the apology letter joke and the replica scene with a raging squirrel, so it worked out well.
I finished the script on day one of having the idea, a Monday. I added a few bits here and there between then and the Friday, when I recorded it. Editing took place over that weekend and the following monday. I could have probably finished the edit over the weekend, if I committed to it. I did not, but that is still an incredible turnaround for me.
I really enjoyed the recording, I liked the energy, and felt things mostly landed the way I wanted. Editing was a lot of fun, big chunks of the episode were really easy and basic to put together, nothing too ambitious as far as sound design, but I had a lot of fun messing around with sounds to create the effects I wanted. I layered the festival ambience myself, rather than getting a single ambient track – and I created the jellyfish effect using assets taken from Godzilla movies.
This is the first episode where I killed myself at the end. I did this purely because I was thinking about how convincingly I could scream and I decided it wouldn’t sound remotely convincing if I tried and it would ruin the scene. I’m still a novice at this voice acting stuff, I have a somewhat detached tone that only breaks on occasion, and have not gained enough confidence to push myself like that. Plus my neighbour was home on the day of recording and I didn’t need anyone sending the police to my house.