Yesterday, for no particular reason, I started playing Myst again. My one video game of choice lately (La Mulana) causes my computer to randomly shut down without warning, I had a hankering for a video game to play, and I wanted to reacquaint myself with adventure game tropes (and to that end, I’ve also started Syberia II).

So since I was thinking about Myst, I went looking to see what one of the developers, Robyn Miller was up to.

And I was reminded that he has a web site named Tinselman.

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My stupidly-long-in-development game project Tinselfly is the combination of two different things I was working on a couple years ago.

The name Tinselfly and the game mechanics come from a fairy-tale-themed follow-up I was doing to a game I made for a contest put on every year by Jennifer Ann’s Group. There was a damsel in not-so-much distress, and flying insects that emitted razor-wire-like strings from their bodies, like spiders emit spiderwebs. Hence the name Tinselfly; an earlier potential title was Damselfly.

The other project was Basil Street Bridge, an outer-space adventure starring a girl named Robin, who may have been consciously named after Robyn Miller.

Mash these two projects together, and you get an outer-space adventure named Tinselfly with a lead named Robin.

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Am I getting into creepy copycatting territory here? Probably not.

Is this just a massive coincidence? Probably not that, either.

When an idea ‘just pops’ into my head, I like to trace it to its source. To the extent that I’m going to put a lot of effort into tracking this stuff down, I’m more likely than others to look at my work and find it depressingly derivative.

When I first played Myst, I really wanted to be the next Robyn Miller when I grew up. Which would make my brother Rand Miller, the other lead developer of Myst. I thought, in my own naive highschooler way, we might be the next Millers and make the next Myst or something. You know, and do a Gap ad.

The Robin character in Tinselfly is sort of an exaggerated version of myself. Her homeworld is based on my home town.

So in its own way, there’s this weird convoluted logic behind why Robin is named Robin, since I’ll conflate Robin and Robyn and myself.

* * *

I’ll probably stick with the name Robin and the title Tinselfly, but it’s something to think about I guess.