IF for caring and relationship + Reflection
Play the game first:
https://kijung720.itch.io/care
Intentions
My game is about a relationship.
Specifically, my game is trying to tell the players how important it is for us to *give more care to people around us who are isolated*.
The setting of the game mainly happens in an apartment in San Francisco. Another setting happens in a farmer’s market.
The protagonist Amy, the character that the players play, revisits San Francisco in 5 years after graduation. There, she unites with her best friend Alex, but also hears about and encounters a weird old lady living downstairs.
Throughout a short period of a day, the player gets to decide Amy’s decision on the interaction with the old lady.
Interesting choices and consequences
I intentionally did not put many choices at the beginning of the game for two reasons:
* Choices at the beginning does not give any context and thus the player will not have a good rationale of choosing one choice over another
* Choices at the beginning makes the overall storyline too complicated, shifts the focus.
Therefore, most choices happen towards the end and depending on the choices player make, the player gets one of the three endings :
Ending 1 — “Looks like a happy ending but not really”
This ending occurs when the player *decides not to care about the old lady* at all. This happens when the player makes this decision for Amy:
When the old lady visits for the third time, Amy decides to kick her out.
From this decision, Amy loses her chance to start a relationship with the lady. Therefore, the remaining story happens as if Amy does not know the lady at all:
*At the market, Amy does not even notice the old lady.
*When coming back home, Amy does not even notice/care about the flower in front of the old lady’s house.
* At the end, Amy does not care about the withered flower, ambulance sound, and the radio broadcasting about the old lady’s death.
This ending is to portrait the reality the most. Every day, someone out there dies alone, but we do not know, we do not care. This scenario is just like that. Therefore, it ends with a piece of happy, uncaring music. If faced with this scenario, even if the happy music is being played, I wanted the players to feel a bit uncomfortable, so that if ended here, the player replays the game to face ending 2 or ending 3.
Ending 2 — “Bad ending”
This ending occurs when the player *judges the old lady without trying to know her more.* This happens when the player makes one of these sets of decisions for Amy:
* Amy visits the old lady’s house but does not take her coffee offering.
* Amy visits the old lady’s house and takes her coffee offering, but after talking with Alex, decides not to go downstairs and have coffee.
From these decisions, Amy becomes more judgmental towards the old lady. The player went down to the lady’s apartment, saw how messy it is, and even realized that she was lying about Amy being noisy. However, by not trying to understand why, Amy only becomes more judgmental towards her — she truly ends up believing that she is a crazy old lady.
Therefore, the remaining story happens in this way:
* At the market, Amy and Alex notice the old lady, but they avoid her and say bad things about her.
* When coming back home, Amy and Alex notices the flower in front of the lady’s house, but leave negative comment about the flower.
* At the end, Amy does not care about the withered flower, but when she hears the ambulance sound, she starts thinking about the old lady. When she finally hears the radio news about an old lady’s death, she is certain that the new is about the old lady downstairs. She regrets her past decisions.
The game, instead of ending here, gives players one more chance to go back and make new decisions. In reality, this cannot happen, however, this “try again” chance was made to tell people that you can always learn from your mistake and that there is another person around you who you can now start giving more care.
Ending 3 — “Happy ending”
The best ending occurs when the player *builds a relationship with the old lady.* This happens when the player makes these set of decisions for Amy:
* Amy visits the old lady’s house, takes her coffee offering, and even after talking with Alex, decides to go downstairs and have coffee with her.
From these decisions, Amy gets to know more about the old lady. She gets to understand why the old lady has been visiting her even when she did not hear anything and also understands why she has been living alone in her house for such a long time.
Therefore, the remaining story happens in this way:
* Amy and Alex build a relationship with the old lady by exchanging gifts and food.
* On the last day, Amy tells the lady she is going back home and the lady looks at the fresh, unwithered flower.
* Amy arrives at the airport and before leaving, writes a card to the lady, and she started calling the crazy old lady “granny.”
This ending is the ending that I aim for the players to arrive at. How reaching out to an isolated person and truly understanding them can form a new friendship and priceless relationship.
Strategies and Extending the honor
In order to make my story more effective, I used various mediums.
Sound
I added various ambiance sound (plane landing, door sounds, knocking sound, ambulance sound, etc.) to make things more realistic. Moreover, I made sure the sound gets played at the right time at the right moment… and that was hard…
Text appearance
To make the reading less overwhelming and keep the player more engaged, I made sure the text appear one at a time.
Background
For some of the pages, I made the background dart to put more ambiance.
Images
I drew images myself and added them in some of the important scenes.
Features other than “boxes and arrow”
To keep the choices interesting, I keep many variables that depend on the player’s decisions in the story that affects the outcome. I also used other complicated features that add to the game experience.
Playtesting and Effectiveness
My final work was tested with I tested a total of 3 testers
Play tester 1
Playtester 1 gave many small, valuable feedbacks that turned into actual changes:
* She wanted more sounds in some pages as they started to disappear as the game progressed -> added more detailed sounds towards the end
* She found a bunch of typos ;)
* She wanted some different effect for the radio message -> added fader font effect
* Changing font to something like bookerly would be better -> originally the font was a sans-serif, changed to a serif font
* Maybe words appearing like a typewriter would be interesting -> I wanted to do this, but due to technical issues, was unable to do so
Here are some quotes she gave:
* At the end, I really liked how she was able to restart the game, as many other games do not let you do so and especially for these kinds of games, the player wants to see all possible endings.
* Love the cute drawings
* The black background and text appearing slowly kept me engaged.
* I think overall this can be a very heartbreaking story or heartwarming story. I myself got a bad ending first but having a chance to go back and reach different ending was very nice. I eventually reached what I think is a happy ending, Amy wrote a letter to the lady, and I also reached another ending with a piece of music. I don’t know if these three are all. But anyways, I think it’s interesting how my small choices lead to a different ending.
Play tester 2
Playtester 2 gave qualitative feedbacks for the game. H first got /Ending 1 — “Looks like a happy ending but not really.”/ When the playtester faced this ending, he said /“It’s very dark…”/ And as I wanted, he played the game again, expecting that there should be another ending. On his second turn, he got ending 2. When asked later, he said /“I knew I wasn’t making the choices for the best ending, but I wanted to try all so I intentionally chose not to get coffee with the lady.”/ After experiencing ending 2, the player finally reached ending 3.
Play tester 3
Playtester 3 played the game at the very last moment so I was not able to apply lots of her feedback, however, I’m planning on doing that later.
* Did not know there was sound until middle -> added instruction at the beginning
* When a moment of waking up it will be better if it returns to a white background -> requires much technical effort, I would have to look into this
* Sound was good and the amount of text was well moderated
* Black background for darkroom or dream was good
* The sad ending is so sad and weird and uncomfortable.
* Maybe it will be sadder if there was more hint of her actually being kind or warm-hearted lol -> This may be a good detail to be developed in a future version.
Overall, all of my playtesters seemed like they enjoyed the game and shows emotions that I hoped them to feel — Eerie and sad when they reached to a sad ending, heart warmed when reached to a happy ending.
Reflection
I started creating the interactive fiction “Care” from one source of inspiration: a witch-like looking old lady that lived downstairs of our family’s apartment when we lived in France 20 years ago. I don’t remember anything about her, but I do know one thing which was told from my mother: that I was scared of her when I first met her but after 2 years, I ended up calling her “granny.”
I don’t know or wasn’t told how this old lady and I grew a relationship like a grandmother and a granddaughter, but I was pretty sure one of us must have reached out first, and I wanted to build a story about this — how people build a precious relationship, overcoming biases and reaching out.
As I started writing the story, I had a hard time developing the choices and the ending. I knew that I definitely wanted a positive ending, and I also knew how that would look like — the main character and the old lady would form a good relationship. However, I also wanted neutral and negative endings and coming up with these was difficult. Moreover, in order to make the players reach these negative endings, I had to give a rationale for the players to choose “bad” choices whenever they face one. For example, when faced with the choices of “go down to the lady’s house” vs. “do not go down to the lady’s house,” most players will choose to go down if I do not provide them with a good reason to not go down, since going down is definitely a more interesting choice when playing a game as it seems like it would open up more story. While I was struggling with these, one of the TAs for the class, Matthew, recommended me a short film called Evan (https://youtu.be/A8syQeFtBKc), a story about gun violence in schools, how knowing the signs and giving care can prevent violence from happening. What struck me the most in the film was how the film distracts us from noticing these signs and giving care. The film takes away our attention from noticing and caring about the student showing these signs of planning a shooting by making us focus on a more positive relationship. While not as gloomy as this film, I thought I could apply a similar methodology and to my interactive film — by introducing a character that the main character is already in a good relationship with and putting her in between the main character and the old lady. Building up the previous example, by introducing this new character, the player may choose not to go down to the old lady’s house if the player was having a good time with this new character. Moreover, I decided my neutral ending to be about the main character and the old lady not being in a relationship at all and negative ending about the main character and the old lady being in a bad relationship.
Once I decided the endings and the main choices, I started writing down the story. In order to make the choices at the end more engaging, I decided not to involve many choices at the beginning but rather build more context to the story.
Once finally done with story writing, I used various Twine features to make the game more engaging — I added sound effects, images, and text effects. Using Twine itself was not that challenging but did require some time. Once done, I tested with various players, and thankfully, I learned that people really enjoyed the story itself. However, I also got several feedbacks of how the players wanted to have more choices at the beginning as, after all, this is an IF. I learned that there can be choices added that do not necessarily affect the overall story but do give players a sense of control.
Currently, I do not have any plans for developing this game further or using it as P4. However, I am interested in building another IF or making a Korean version of this IF with some improvements. Honestly, this project was very challenging to me because English happens to be my second language, and writing story and building a strong narrative in English is something that I just cannot do well. Coming up with choices, consequences, and different endings, and using Twine was very enjoyable. Next time when I make IF, I would try to think about all the choices first, before writing the story. I realized that what is most interesting about IF is the fact that it is interactive and players can choose their own path. Having interesting choices make the game more interesting and deciding on the choices first can take the story in various ways.
Thanks for playing and thanks for reading the document!
