‘Concordia’: a post-mortem

I started writing ‘Concordia’ on the 13th of January. It was my second attempt at interactive fiction, and my first time using inklewriter. My first game was a jokey, circular riff on a Bob Dylan song, written in Twine a week earlier over the course of a couple of hours. At that stage Twine was pretty much the only vaguely accessible tool for writing games and interactive stories I even knew about. Since then I had been to an Interactive Fiction meet-up and been given a list of other sites, and decided to give inklewriter a try.

One thing that struck we was just how much of the work was completely invisible. Take this, for example:

This was probably the part of the game that took the longest — I was still getting used to the logic system, so there was a lot of trial and error, and some of the choices made here lead you back to the beginning of the section, which forms a loop, which inklewriter ominously asks if you’re sure about (I… think so?).

Initially, it was even more complicated, because you only saw the Andreas storyline if an earlier choice had given you poor morale. I decided that it was frustrating to have the Andreas storyline suddenly dropped unless you made very specific choices, so I changed it, which meant I had to change everything again.

But when you’re playing the game, you shouldn’t ever see more than two of these choices at any one time, and it should feel fairly seamless. For example (n.b. wording in final version has been tweaked slightly since screenshot was taken):

And then, shortly afterwards in the same playthrough, you come back to the same screen, but it looks like this:

Completely different! And there’s yet a third way that screen can look, depending on earlier choices.

The ending works in a similar way:

If everything’s working right, you should only ever see one of the three possible endings.

Of course, technically, there are actually five possible endings — two are available if you don’t accept the refugees. Since Hualing is the heart of the story, I wanted these endings to be fairly abrupt, to encourage people to go back and change their answer. For a long time, if you got one of these endings, you went straight to the credits. It was very late in the process when I decided to add the prompt to go back to a checkpoint, as I thought that perhaps some players would just think that it was a very short, frustrating game.

Speaking of refugees, most of the game was written before the controversial executive order many are referring to as a Muslim Ban (with good reason). When I started the game, the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe was forefront in my mind; I had no idea that by the time I finished it, its themes would be reflected in international headlines.

The learning curve in writing the game has been steep. I hope it’s just the beginning, and that I continue to learn and to make better and better games. This one isn’t perfect by a long shot, but I’m proud of it nonetheless.

‘Concordia’ isn’t a subtle game; it rewards the player for altruistic and compassionate choices (‘compassion’ is actually one of the counters which unlocks various choices), and punishes her for self-serving ones. As Oscar Wilde once wrote, “ The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.” So maybe it’s a little bit didactic; maybe it’s a little bit simplistic. But maybe, in January 2017, that’s the story I needed.