This was an absolute last minute job. I think this is easily the fastest turnaround I’ve had for an episode so far and it’s a miracle that it works as well as it does.
I was working on another idea for my Halloween episode – it was originally Little Nightmares vs Little Nightmares II – and it just wasn’t working on the page. The criticism was feeling too vague as both games are too close to call in a satisfying way. The storytelling was also getting too reliant on me describing stuff, because I couldn’t find a way to build the scene I envisioned through sound even with suitable assets. I didn’t want another Super Mario World/Sonic 2 so soon, so I was banging my head against my keyboard trying to get the idea to work. It was intended to be a pivotal episode in the bigger VGDM lore, and Halloween was creeping closer and closer, so I was putting extra pressure on myself to get this right.
The second pressure starts to mount to do something right, that feels like the right time to stop. Something feeling like hard work is the last thing I want to happen from something that’s supposed to be fun! I have a lot of fun making these episodes, and they can be a challenge but the challenge is always part of the fun. The second it stops feeling like a challenge and more like a chore, I need to step away and do something else.
I decided to scrap the Little Nightmares idea and put a pin in it, maybe I could come back to it in the future and finally crack it but maybe not. Instead, I pulled up an idea that I’d noted down for future consideration but done absolutely zero work on beyond that. There wasn’t even a story gimmick written down. Usually when I jot down an episode idea, I also note down potential categories and the story hook for that episode. The ideas might change by the time I start writing them but it’s always a starting off point. For Until Dawn vs The Quarry, I just had the two game titles written down.
I knew both games like the back of my hand and there felt like enough differences in their execution to make criticism interesting for me. I wrote the analysis in a few hours, during a quiet patch of work, and then I worked on the script for the rest of the afternoon.
I came back to the script a little later in the day to add a few ideas from my Little Nightmares episode, as they were very important to the show’s ongoing story and there were no other episodes in the pipeline that I could comfortably slot them into and make it work. These came in the form of the cosmic interference that introduced the radio signals from other places – hinting at future episodes of the show. It just clicked together as the meteor shower idea was already in the script. I wanted a rare occurence that could be tied to a horrible tragedy and the two things return on the same night, the night that I’m up there all alone. A meteor shower felt right and, after that, all the cosmic weirdness that was naturally part of the Little Nightmare’s scripts story slotted into place, too.
I recorded it the next day while my toddler was playing in the background. I’m not thrilled about my voice work as the other characters but I was short on time and didn’t have anyone I could call on to knock out a few lines of dialogue for me. I did the best I could.
I was really taking a risk on this, given how poorly the Super Mario/Sonic episode came together with far more planning time dedicated to it. But this worked so much better. I think it comes down to me having a much better, more narratively driven idea. Once that locked into place, things just worked. Even the obligatory explanatory dialogue didn’t jar with me.
Overall, though, I was happy with how it all came together.