Fact and fiction

The rule

There shall be no confusion, ever, as to what is fiction and what is fact. That is Scott's rule for everything Whitney Design Labs makes, and it is written down in the note that ships with every release. Anything true is noted as true or can be found to be true. Anything invented is obviously invented. And we say what was made by a person, what by a machine, and what by both.

INDEPENDENCE: what is real

• The places. Oregon City, Willamette Falls, the municipal elevator on the bluff, the locks, The Dalles, the Columbia and its dam are real, where they are in the game, and worth a visit.
• The radio. Amateur radio works the way the game says: forty metres, a net at a set hour, callsigns, QSL cards on the wall, a fuse that is always the wrong size. 7.212 MHz is a real frequency in the 40-metre band. The operators are made up.
• The rigs. The handcart, the cargo trike, the power barrow and the golf cart are real CAD models, designed to be built from the parts the game names. Scott has built the trike. The 3D pictures in the video are those models.
• The boat. Dustyfoot is named for a business Scott ran for RVers twenty years ago. The boat is invented; the name is not.
• The tip of the hat. In 1971 three student teachers in Minnesota, Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger, wrote a trail game for a classroom teletype. Every trail game since owes them, and this one says so.
• The net. The wall in The Dalles, the departures board and the logbooks are real text typed by real players, through a real server, which anyone can run. The server's code is open: github.com/WhitneyDesignLabs/trail-net.
• LINK. Some things in the game point at documented, real things outside it. When the game offers a link, what is on the other end is true.

INDEPENDENCE: what is invented

The Red Meteor, the year 2031, the co-op and its Hall, every person in the game, the six trades' fortunes, the VALLEY callsigns, and the idea that Missouri's lights would call anyone east. The future in this game is a story, not a forecast.

HOME.BASE: what is real and what is not

Nestwell Meadows, its HOA, the Rest Assured subscription and everyone asleep under it are invented, and the story is satire. The kinds of things in it are real: the locks, speakers, sensors, cameras and vacuum that a house like this has, and the way a system that "keeps you safe" can keep you. Nothing in it is a real product or a real company.

Made by a person, by a machine, or both

• Both games' pictures are drawn as lines and fills by hand-tuned procedures, a few hundred bytes each: no photograph, scan or image generator is in them. HOME.BASE's were the first pass at the method; INDEPENDENCE refined the palette, the textures, the sprites and the detail. [SCOTT: HOME.BASE's octopus splash - if it was a generated image dithered to the screen, one line here saying so; if drawn, delete this note.]
• The code was written by Scott with Claude, Anthropic's AI model, in a two-session workflow: one session designs and reviews, the other writes 6502 and tests it on an emulated and a real IIe. Scott plays every build on the hardware.
• The cover art and the release thumbnails are AI-generated images, made to a brief and labelled as such wherever they appear. They are the only generated pictures in the project.
• The promo video contains no generated imagery: real CAD renders, the game's own pixels, and public-domain photographs credited by name in its credits and below.
• The music was made in Suno; the lyrics are Whitney Design Labs'.

Photographs in the video

[SCOTT: paste the table from 09-archive-PD\CREDITS.md after fetch-archive.py has run; title, author, licence, link.]