A retelling of a short story written by myself for an old Horror fanzine. That story focuses on a particularly eventful evening in the life of freelance photographer Pamela Grey in the world of the Dark Conspiracy RPG. In this story game you take the place of Pamela. 

The world you live in is much like today's, only a little worse.  The rich are richer, the poor are poorer, and the gap between is so much wider. So much is controlled by the mega-corporations and rich interests that large swatches of the ever expanding urban sprawl are marked as "Outlaw Territory, Enter At Own Risk" - where even the police don't go, either for fear or lack of resources.  The middle class has mostly disappeared except for the lowest echelon of corporate execs, and legislative changes have allowed many that would have previously been on the public dole to instead sell their vote to corporate interests in exchange for support. Crime is up, as are disappearances, theft, and violence. Even as bad as the world has become, there are persistent rumors that even worse things lurk in the shadows.  Many neighborhoods have abandoned houses that everyone knows better than to enter, and even in the outlaw where the police fear to tread there are rumors of entire blocks that no one but the mad or the most desperate are willing to risk going into after dark.

You and Susan, your significant other, are doing ok.  Her job with Aprico has afforded the two of you a small place in a small gated community owned by the company. A prized place in the vanishing middle class. Your home is close enough to the gates that you can still easily indulge in your favorite hobby, walking through Chicago with your trusty camera in hand, particularly at night.  The sale of these photos as art pieces to the ultrawealthy, facilitated by Susan's contacts, has helped with sporadic lump sums of money.  Susan pays the bills, but your money pays for luxuries and splurges.

In the twilight one often finds isolated moments of beauty and mystery that would never been seen in the daylight, and you work to capture these moments in the perfect clarity of your lens. You know the risks of being out alone at night outside the gates, but even Susan has had to admit that the last couple of pictures you sold would not have been possible if you hadn't been out there.  To help comfort her (and yourself to be completely honest), you recently bought a large knife to carry with you, just in case.

So, come explore the night and see what waits for you in the dark.

After talking about it with my wife, I've decided to change it up and go with a more story driven kind if thing.  I can repurpose some if what I was doing originally for the actual fishing elements, but with a better story framing than I had.

Both of your first points are doable here.  You could do something like the process described in this article to do the password setting.  A similar mechanic is demonstrated in "A Hunted and Haunted Halloween" by Mystic_Warrior.

As far as art goes, MadHattersDaughter was recently talking about looking to take on commissions. You might reach out to her.  I've also had good luck in finding artists via Facebook Art groups for the genre of art you are looking for.

Welcome to the site.

I thought it might be interesting to start a thread for people to talk about their plans and stories for the Spring/Summer contest. Maybe even encourage or help resolve roadblocks for each other in the effort.

I'm currently leaning toward a sci-fi oriented story built around a mechanic of going to different planets and trying to outfish the NPC hosts of the show.  Comparison results are based on total weight caught for each type of fish.  There is a broad selection of "fish" that will be randomly caught and weighed and tracked as an aggregate.  Currently still focused on generating the list of fish, weight and "pull chance" for each planet and how many planets I want to cover.  I'm still waffling on how much mobility in that regard I want to give to the story.  I've also been rereading the help articles on building ingame codexes and such.

Congratulations and Great job!

I was hoping to publish my current storygame as my first 'big' work on the site, but it may be this instead.  I'm in.

Having not done a contest before and only skimmed previous contest threads, is there much discussion about the kind of storygames people have in development for these contests?  Particularly for something with a prompt like this that seems to lend it self to a more mechanically complex storygame.

That's great to hear.

That looks pretty good.

If it helps I found it at one of the purple swirl markers around a Frozen star.

Welcome to the site.

It is a visual novel with minimal graphics (just slide ins and minor facial changes as the only animation).  There are a few choices which apparently can lead to 2 different endings.  I've only had time to go through it once (I have almost 600 hours in on Starbound and this is the first time I have ever seen it), but apparently it has a couple variables behind the scene that flip based on choices made in trying to romance the only other character in the story.