Perfectly Imperfect
My name is Yuki Takahashi and I am a senior Interactive Multimedia major at The College of New Jersey. I entered the IMM department my junior year after realizing I wanted to be involved in the video game industry. I’ve been a gamer my whole life and hope to one day be involved in professional game design and programming.
Summary:
How well can you convey your feelings in under a minute? Can you find the “perfect” words? When you say goodbye to someone you hold dearly, it can be difficult to make your best lasting impression. Perfectly Imperfect puts you in the shoes of this exact situation.
Perfectly Imperfect is a text-based work of interactive fiction that revolves around a person saying goodbye to someone he loves. As both the player and reader, you get to decide what to say and do with the minute you have left to say farewell.
Tools used:
- Twine 1.4.2 (Sugarcane format)
- HTML
- CSS
- JavaScript
Significant Challenges:
I think the hardest part about making any work of interactive fiction is having each story passage be three things: logical, entertaining, and meaningful. It’s easy to have two of the three things and make a mediocre story. But in order to make a great interactive fiction game, your story passages need to have all three of those things work together. It took a lot of trial and error to come up with a story idea that would help me incorporate those three things easily. And even with my final idea of Perfectly Imperfect, I had to play through the story routes in my head a countless number of times and edit every time I felt something was off.
Advice for Future Students:
Try to find what you want to do as early as possible. Time is too precious to keep changing ideas later on. Write all the ideas you can think of, pick out the one that seems best, and try to stick with it. See how far you can get with it. If you’re already deep in your project and feel like there’s a better project idea, just remember you can always come back to those ideas later. And, of course, don’t forget to ask for help when you need it. It’s your project to do, but professors are always there when you can’t figure something out yourself. It was definitely a mistake of mine not to reach out earlier on in the semester.
