whatpumpkin:

Today we’re talking to Cohen Edenfield, that is to say, me. Hi. We’re all pretty busy at the moment, with the release in <22 hours and everything, but I managed to get this handled.

What is your specific role on the Hiveswap team?

I have two full-time jobs on HIVESWAP: Creative Director and Lead Writer/Scripter. As Creative Director, I’ve worked with my team leads Angela, Rah, James and Tauhid and with our programmers to, well, “realize a creative vision.” I give notes, feedback, and broad-strokes direction on pretty much everything on the project, which I’m able to do because I can count on the expertise of the team leads doing an amazing job. I can bring them a rough, sketchy description of the overall “feel” that a piece of music or animation or art needs, and be confident that they’ll spin my straw into gold and make something beautiful. I’ll ask Tauhid for a new UI specific to Alternia, with the vague direction that it use hexagons instead of circles, or I’ll ask Angela for moving clouds, or I’ll ask Rah for a new close-up of a sexy lamp, and I know they’ll get it done. And I’ll ask James for an “8-bit college football fight song,” because he does great work, and because I want to hurt him on a spiritual level.

There are tweaks, of course, and sometimes I’m a minutiae-obsessed, frustrating, tedious perfectionist, but they’re usually stuff like “this sword needs to be over here, instead of over there, because seven games from now something crashes through this particular window and impales itself” or “this specific piece of text needs to be white courier on a green background.” For non-story/lore/character related calls, I tend to defer to the expertise of my leads.

Which brings us, I guess, to my other full-time job, Lead Writer/Scripter, which includes narration, dialogue, item descriptions, etc…I wrote about 150,000 words, all together, if you’re really taking your time, trying different dialogue paths, and actually trying to use everything on everything else. If you’re not, it’s considerably less, but it’s in there.

As for the story, the broad narrative strokes of Act 1 and some specific plot beats were mapped out before I came on board, but in 2+ years of development there’s naturally been some substantial reworking and rearranging to refine things from both a gameplay and a narrative perspective. The characters have changed a fair bit, both to suit a different overall tone and because things change over the course of two years. Andrew looks the finished stuff over, and gives feedback on it, and we make changes as needed. I’ve relied a lot on his storytelling and characterization expertise. I may have penned the current script, but we wrote this game together.

I’m also often the person who does miscellaneous writing like the game descriptions for Steam, or the lyrics for the Grubbels songs, or sometimes the product descriptions for Grubbles merch, etc.

When and how did you get your start on the Hiveswap project?

In May 2015 I got an email from Andrew asking if I’d be interested in doing some freelance writing on what I then thought of as the “Homestuck Adventure Game.” I’ve been reading Andrew’s various stuff since like…2003? We used to post on the same forum, so it was this kind of “oh right, hey, I think I know you, actually” moment. I’d finished my Masters in English Lit three days before, and I was looking for freelance work, so the timing couldn’t have been better.

I was originally brought on to write like…200 jokes, I think, with a couple of others who had the same assignment. Just specific pieces of text or dialogue that needed writing or punch-up.

When I finished those, I asked for more, and before long I was going through the script, looking for more stuff to punch up, new places to add jokes or characterization or connections to Homestuck lore. After a few months, Andrew hired me full-time as Head Writer, which was great, because then I could just write as much as I wanted, all the time, without having to keep track of hours.

From there I gradually took on more and more responsibility for the creative direction of the project, but I think that’s covered in the next question.

How did you get your start in creative direction?

As we restructured the studio to our current remote-working situation, Andrew and I had a lot of talks about what HIVESWAP should actually look like. We kept going back to the gorgeous concept art by Gina and Mallory, and we realized that while the 3D development work that had been done was good, it really didn’t feel like Homestuck. The concept art, the 2D assets…those felt like Homestuck.

The shift from 3D to 2D was substantial, and while we definitely had artists and animators who were up to the task, they needed some direction on what that task would entail. Andrew was hip-deep in finishing Homestuck, so I became the center of that network–building new file architecture, figuring out pipelines, etc. I was the person who knew the script and knew the new direction, so I was able to give assignments and direction, a structure that became formalized over time until I was made Creative Director and we established the team leads for each department.

What’s your favorite game? Are you playing any games right now?

Aside from constantly playtesting Act 1, which is taking all of my time, I guess I’m sort of playing Dark Cloud 2? It’s a weird, huge PS2 dungeon-crawler I’ve gotten to 100% a couple of times since my teens. It requires basically nothing from me in terms of attention investment, so it’s a good meditative cool-down for an hour or two every couple of weeks.

Are there any games that you’ve drawn from for Hiveswap?

Transistor and SOMA, both for writing and creative direction. Both have great unified aesthetics, and both also have you talk to people through machines a lot. Firewatch, same reasons. Obduction, which has the same once-deferred communication and also has a really powerful theme that I guess you could call the trust earned through mutual vulnerability, which is something I wanted to have in Act 1 as well.

When you’re not dealing with the challenges of production/management/creative direction, what do you do in your spare time?

I don’t really have a lot of that. I’m looking forward to rediscovering the concept. I have a big stack of games I want to play after we launch Act 1. Persona 5, that Breath of the Wild DLC, Pyre, Ladykiller in a Bind, Night in the Woods, Life is Strange…the pile builds up over 2.5 years I guess. I want to play games where you talk to lots of different characters, because there’s going to be a lot of that in Act 2.

What’s your workstation like? Do you like to listen to any particular kinds of music while you work? If so, tell us about it!

My workstation is this corner of my bedroom. I have a lot to keep track of, so I also have the whiteboard. I didn’t do a great job hanging it, but it seems to have resisted falling off the wall and onto my sleeping face so far.

I listen to the music of the for the scene/location I’m writing in, initially for inspiration, eventually because I want to make sure I’m as close as possible to the player’s frame of mind.

Favorite Homestuck character?

I said somewhere that Caliborn was my favorite character, purely for his work ethic. Specifically, as Aranea describes it, “while such trials might discourage most players from even trying, our villain’s response was quite the contrary. He was only em8oldened 8y the mind num8ing chores. He took to them with gusto, as if performing them out of spite.” There have been times, deep in the pog joke trenches, that I took a certain bitter comfort in those words. And we’re both terrible artists who murdered Andrew and took over his story.

Favorite Homestuck ship?

(looks directly at camera) Dave/Rose.

Favorite Homestuck flash?

I have three favorite flash-pairs:

Jack: Ascend & WV?: Rise Up. Until Jack: Ascend, Homestuck hadn’t really had a primary antagonist, just the general need to get the kids in the game before meteors destroyed everything. Jack raised the stakes and brought the narrative into a sharper focus–here’s the threat, so here’s the motivation.

Begin intermission 2 & Caliborn: Enter. INTERMISSION II was such a creepy, unexpected digestif to the feast of Cascade. And Caliborn: Enter, would be great already, since it’s all about the worst, most awful boy, but it became my favorite when Andrew described it as “it’s great because it’s like woah watch out for THIS guy and then he does nothing but sit around and make bad art for the rest of the story.”

Dirk: Synchronize & Dirk: Unite. The animation and music are really great, and haven’t we all been there? Haven’t we all decapitated ourselves rather than just telling a boy we like him?

Do you have a personal message you’d like to relay to all the Homestuck and Hiveswap fans out there?

I hope you enjoy it. We made this together, all of us, you included. None of us is free from sin.

Where can people find more of your work?

My twitter, although it’s not really very funny anymore. It used to be the main creative outlet I had but now I am creative in such a way that nobody gets to see it for a while. You can still follow, though, because I will probably talk about Hiveswap a lot now, and also because sometimes I still make jokes like this:

That’s all for this week. Next week you can see a cool video that James put together.

im literally burning alive for this game oh my god