A Day In The Life Of A Grave Digger
(…introduction…)
A grave digger’s lot is not a happy one. There's the rain for a start, and the snow, and
the sleet, and the mud, and the people who aren’t quite as dead as they ought to be,
and the mourners, and the body snatchers, and the local police who come snooping
from time to time to make sure you're not burying hidden treasure, and the packs of
wild dogs, and the…
But it’s an easy enough job. Sure, you don’t get much in the way of conversation
what with the only people you meet being somewhat on the dead side, and the
chances of you scoring with any hot chicks aren’t helped by the fact that you always
smell of death and decay (for some reason, the hot chicks find it a bit off putting), and
the pay – 50p per corpse buried, 75p per really fat corpse buried – isn't great. Still,
it’s a job and you do get your very own grave digger’s hut and as many personal
belongings as you can steal from the corpses that their loved ones have missed. It’s
not a bad life…
But now everything seems to be changing. As explained by Smigg, the head of the
Graveyard Division at the last Annual Grave Diggers’ Association Meeting: “the
government’s getting computerised, lads. And that means bad news for us honest
grave diggers. They're bringing in computer-operated spades and coffins that crawl
into the graves and they might even splash out on soil that digs itself.”
”What we gonna do then?” someone asked. It might have been you but you can’t
remember.
”We’re gonna work harder is what we’re gonna do,” said Smigg, slamming his fists
down on the table. “No three hour coffee breaks, no leaving corpses out in the sun to
dry, no chucking several of ‘em in the same hole so as you don’t need to dig another
hole, and no swiping headstones to sell on the black market.” His beady eye fixed on
you as he said that and you felt something – probably your bank balance – wince at
the prospect. “We’re gonna show them computers what we’re made of, lads. We’re
gonna show ‘em who digs the graves around here.”
It was quite an inspiring speech. Afterwards, several of you got drunk and went for a
swim in the local river. Then, after being fished out by the river police and charged
with polluting the river with your bodies, you got down to the business at hand.
Today, it seems, is the day when the graveyard inspector is going to come and pay
your graveyard a visit. Today, you’ve got to be sharper than sharp. Today, for
perhaps the first time in recorded history, you're going to have to do a full day’s
week.
And, by God, you're going to enjoy it as well…
________________________
Yes, this was a silly game. A downright silly one. I'm not sure where the idea came
from but I started it not long after I’d written another comedy game – A Day In
The Life Of A Superhero – and I felt like doing another game with “A Day In The
Life…” in the title. Several discarded ideas later (one of them – A Day In The Life
Of A Pirate – I actually made quite a bit of progress with before losing interest) and
I came up with A Day In The Life Of A Grave Digger. It was the silliest of them all.
In tone, this game would be similar to Paint!!! Lots of bizarre things happening, but
this time spread out over five locations instead of just one. It was also intended as
a big game (or as big a game as it’s possible to get in five rooms anyway), with
locations changing depending on what had happened in other locations. There
would also be random elements to the game – characters showing up in one game
that didn’t in another, puzzles solved in different ways each time you play it –
lending to lots of replay value…
…and lots of trouble to write it.
Grave Digger went quite well at first. I wrote the locations out in one afternoon –
the grave digger’s hut (the “centre of operations”) and then the four ‘rooms’ which
comprised the graveyard itself. I made a few NPCs – a zombie who would wander
about the graveyard at random, a little girl looking for her doll which she’d lost, a
man who had been buried alive and wasn’t happy about it – and spend some time
thinking up puzzles. The random side of things I would leave, I decided, until the
rest of the game had been written, and then once all the easy stuff (i.e. all the
non-random elements) were done, I’d go and randomise everything to my heart’s
content.
All went well until I found myself liking the idea less and less the more I tried to
write it. At first I thought the five room limit I'd imposed was too restrictive – when
you’ve got as few locations as that, and 80% of them are composed of rooms full
of gravestones in them, you're inevitably going to end up with some similarity
between the locations. But at the same time, I wasn’t really sure that adding extra
rooms was the answer. Aside from anything, Grave Digger was intended as a game
that takes place in a small number of locations. Making the graveyard itself larger
was an option, but then how many locations do you really need in a graveyard?
Once you’ve described one grave, you’ve described ‘em all.
Stuck for ways to make any further progress, I pushed the game to one side with
the intention of taking a short break from it and returning to it at some later stage,
hopefully when I’d found fresh inspiration and knew how to proceed, but I guess it
wasn’t to be. Nearly two years after I originally came up with the idea, A Day In
The Life Of A Grave Digger holds no more appeal for me now than it did when I
gave up working on it.