If you don’t know the editors of this magazine, I can tell you that they are a cabal of frightening tyrants*. Do they care that I have visions of Caribbean beaches gleaming behind my eyes? No, they only care that I hand in my column before the magazine goes to print. Do they enjoy my favourite game to play with them, that of cramming as much unprintable profanity and obscure American slang into my writing as possible to see how they’ll choose to replace it? No, they derive no amusement from this creativity. Their only concern is that everyone follow their marching orders, and today over Skype they are especially livid. “Smith,” they bark, “enough naval-gazing futurism abstractions. Our readership demands hard facts, which means reporting on events that have already happened.” I plead with them, pointing out that my Spider post-mortem was basically thinly veiled advertising, but my arguments about journalistic integrity go nowhere. “Write about your work in progress,” they demand, “or you’re fired.”

So, although it’s extremely fornicating animal waste products, I’ll describe the process we used to craft Spider’s story. Perhaps that’s old news to the Edge cabal, but all I’m doing right now is promotion. You know, Apple writes to offer an App Store banner, but first we have to put up a ‘real’ website. What’s so unreal about an endless sequence of random tiger images? Maybe by ‘real’ they meant ‘less awesome’.

A couple of columns ago I described how we arrived at the decision to tell Spider’s story entirely through set dressing in the abandoned house. No original ideas there, but to help align the team I came up with this metaphor: imagine reading a book with no words, where each page is a detailed image of a different room. As you flip through the book, you notice connections: a name or photo that shows up in a couple different spots, some footprints you can trace from one place to another, an object missing from a shelf and where it winds up, that kind of thing. Such a book could be a puzzle, and by studying it you could eventually piece together the story of that location. Since we’re a game not a book, we could even let the player take action to validate that they’ve cracked the code.

We had a few ideas for emotionally compelling props, like the wedding ring in the drain or the locket thrown down the well. (Oh, spoiler warning, by the way.) It was a fun opportunity to use objects far too tiny for most game interfaces. Also, I had wanted to base a game on the novels of John Bellairs, especially The House With The Clock In Its Walls, full of secret passages and cryptic puzzles left behind by deceased ancestors. Also, my friend Melisa and I once spent an entire day researching the name and date of death written on a gravestone found in her backyard, trying to determine the identity of this person, and I loved how inconclusive that story was, how much imagination and faith it required. Lastly, we wanted it to have two narrative threads and two endings. We threw all that inspiration into a pot and cooked up a story. We constructed clues that could be pieced together as clearly as the two halves of Daddy Warbucks’ locket, such as a red X on some blueprints and a red X on the wall of the linen closet, a medal depicted in a portrait and that same medal hidden in a secret drawer, a hair ribbon calling card, and so forth.

Unfortunately, lots of things went wrong. Playing Spider is nothing like flipping through a book. When you notice a potential connection, you can’t turn the page to re-examine the first clue. You might reconstruct the narrative sequence if you study each room, but when you’re zipping around, zoomed-in, and fixated on web-building gameplay, you’re a lot less likely to notice the details. Since the game wound up longer than expected, by the time you see the second half of the locket, you may not even remember there was a first half. Furthermore, we decided to add lots of secret areas and make sure each held a really juicy story element. We hoped an average player might find about half of them on a given playthrough, which meant that by design the rest of those crucial clues weren’t seen. Finally, testing the story required near-final art, so it came late. For example, players reasonably assume an unused train ticket indicates that the people involved tried to leave but were thwarted. We actually meant for it to be a receipt, not a ticket, indicating that they did leave. This dubious concept could have been improved if we’d collected feedback earlier.

Fortunately, it didn’t matter all that much. Much like Melisa’s mysterious gravestone, Spider’s story is meant to require faith and imagination, and that makes it fault-tolerant. We have one interpretation, but, if not interactive, Spider’s story is at least participatory, in that players can come up with their own interpretations as well.

*Although you should question everything I say in general, this first paragraph is particularly rife with falsehood.

Randy Smith is the co-owner of Tiger Style, whose first game, Spider, is available now for iPhone and iPod Touch.