HISTORY OF SECRETS AND LIES IN A TOWN OF SINNERS

I want to talk about Secrets and Lies in a Town of Sinners cuz I’m having so much fun writing and making it

3 years ago, as a character design exercise, I tried to invent a bunch of different families. I had so much fun drawing them and coming up with their backstories and their respective family drama, and I thought it would be fun to make a point and click game where you click on different houses on a map and it would take you inside each of the family houses and you could click on the characters and the items in their houses and find out more about them. I called the game idea “Secrets and Lies in a Town of Sinners”, one, because it sounded punchy and funny, and because I was really fascinated with family secrets. Here’s all the original drawings:

This was an idea for how I wanted the game to work:

Here’s a map of the town I made back then (very similar to Wasteland):

One of my favorite ideas was THE GOSSIP HOLE:

The gossip hole was a little structure on the outskirts of the city, where a little pink man lived inside. Here’s what would happen if you visited him:

Depending on who you clicked on, he would give you dirty juicy gossip about that family.

At the time I was working on Goodbye Forever Party, so I wasn’t really able to commit to the idea at the time, because I was really busy. So, I decided to put it away and come back to it later when I had time. 

A year later, my friend Haein Michelle Heo (AKA the voice of Celisse, she also helped write Ascensia, and animated Ascensia’s dream sequence) and I decided we wanted to make a VR game together for the digital arts expo at our school. I brought Secrets and Lies up again because I was still really excited about it. We went for it, and tried our very best to make a VR game centered around the idea. We needed there to be an objective for the game, so we changed it to being about a college recruiter trying to get people to go to his new school.

Here’s the intro cutscene from the game. I did the animation, Haein and I did the music, and our friend Isabel Higgins (AKA the voice of Janis & the bug from Goodbye Forever Party) sang the song. 

In the game, the idea was that the characters would be looping gifs inside of the VR world, and would rotate in perspective to wherever you are in the space.

Here’s some of my gifs from the game. Countil, the cat, and the muppet mom all found their way into the series eventually.

We worked really hard on it, but in the end the game was really hard to play. Neither of us had experience making games, and especially VR was really hard to get to work, even with the help of a teacher. 

The game mechanics were like this: You played as the college recruiter from the intro cutscene, and you’d go up to each of these characters and press a button to interact with them. A multiple choice question would appear over their head, and it would be the crux on which the character would decide to go to your college or not. If you picked the right answer, the character would jump into the box that represented the college. If you picked the wrong answer, a hole would open up under the character and they would fall into hell. 

If you’ve played a VR game before, you probably know that in place of the two controllers you’re holding, in the VR world they’re usually represented by something that fits in with the rest of the world. For our game, I haphazardly drew the hands of the college recruiter with a mouse a few hours before the digital arts expo: 

(I think this is really funny. They were just static images that would float and not change perspective at all, so you would see just transparent pngs floating around where your hands were. when you reached out to interact with something or select something, the arms would just be detached and floating in front of you) 

Essentially the game was a failure, but we had fun making it! I still want to figure out a way to get it playable online.

I had been writing The Final Exit of the Disciples of Ascensia with Haein and Jenna Caravello at the same time as we were working on this project, and it was my primary focus. The next year, I started animation on Ascensia and I spent almost every waking moment of my life working on it for about a year. 

When I graduated from college, I got a job at Buzzfeed working on WeirdHelga. I enjoyed my time there, but I was wasting away, because I really wanted to work on my own projects, and felt unfulfilled not being able to work on them as much as I wanted to. While I was there, in my spare time, I was working on Barber Westchester, my new feature film, and at the same time, my mind kept going back to Secrets and Lies in a Town of Sinners. 

I was having some trouble writing Barber, and I realized that it was because I hadn’t really fleshed out the world or the backstory for how Barber got to the point where they were. Usually when I write, I like to figure out the details of the characters I’m writing, where they came from, what they’ve been through, and etc. That helps me figure out how to make the characters act in the part of their life I’m writing them for. For Ascensia, Jenna, Haein and I figured out the backstories of every character, and that really helped me write the characters more realistically. 

I had the idea to use Secrets and Lies as the introduction to Barber’s world. A big part of Barber Westchester is the progression of the deterioration of reality from Barber’s perspective. I thought an interesting way to work with that would be to make Barber’s world feel very real. I started writing more grounded stories about each of the characters that I originally drew for Secrets and Lies. I want the Secrets and Lies episodes to feel very concrete in reality, for the most part. Even when it gets more surreal, or the animation gets more wonky, I want it to feel like everything is driven by character motivation and their feelings. For each of the characters in Secrets and Lies, the design came first, and then I write around the design. 

The way I’ve been approaching writing the stories is keeping the “secrets and lies” of each character in mind, and trying to plant enough information in the scenes I’m writing to imply the histories. Without saying anything too direct, for the most part, I want the audience to be able to figure out what is going on with the characters, through the visuals and character acting.

Barber Westchester is definitely the most plot-driven, traditional thing I’ve ever worked on, while still being an abstracted strange narrative that focuses more on emotion than the plot. I’ve been trying to challenge myself as a writer more, both with Barber and SALIATOS. I’m excited for you all to see where it’s going! 

You can watch episode one here. Episode 2 is currently available on my Patreon, but will be up publicly on Monday Jan 13th. The rest of the episodes will be up early on my Patreon, episode 3 going up tomorrow (Jan 10), and the rest being put on there as I finish them. I have an episode going up publicly on YouTube every Monday, until we reach the finale. 

Thanks for reading! 

(Originally written in December of 2019, when I had only written the first 4 episodes. The show, and Barber Westchester, went through many changes and became a completely different beast than what I was envisioning at this point in time, but that’s another thing to write!)