Just Build A Really Bad Game and Work on That
If I need to pick one thing that I learned from building my first interactive fiction, it would be this. I’ve always been looking forward to becoming a writer, but the biggest challenge is to start writing even though I know I didn’t have a perfect plan. I feel the same thing for building this game. In the beginning, I thought about this great plan of two stories that are juxtaposed and intertwined — until I realized it was too much work and didn’t work well in the format of a game.
For the next whole week, I was stressed out trying to think of a brilliant story. I read the plot summary of many movies and books that I thought could inspire me to come up with my own story — in the end, it turned out to be helpful because I indeed generate ideas from these stories, but reflecting on this thinking process, I would rather start early to build something and work on that instead of driving myself crazy to make something perfect with the first try.
While making the game, I found it hard to write the story and design the choices at the same time. In the end, I just outlined the whole story and made extra branches based on this “skeleton.” After doing readings and watching videos about interactive fiction, I decided that I would prefer a game that doesn’t involve too much difficult decisions but instead, uses the different options to let the player empathize with the protagonist and devote his/her own feelings into the game.
In particular, I chose to write the game from a first-person perspective so that the narrative would make it easier for players to follow. Though often the time it was tricky to tell the player background information with “I …,” I tried to make it sound like Mrs. Carlos is talking to herself because she was facing difficult situations.
What I hope to improve is that I should make more choices possible, especially in the latter half of the story. Having spent too much time polishing the first half — picking the right tone, figuring out how the story should start, and adding the sense of solving mysteries — I found it hard to be as careful with word choice and storytelling because I was running out of time. If I had more time, I would add more interesting options, just like what I did in the more polished parts of the story. Moreover, I would explore interesting features of Twine — click and show hidden text and many others — to pace the story. Since right now it did feel more like pacing the progression of a story with options, I would also focus more on the fun and interactive side of the game. I would consider making choices more difficult, though I’m not sure whether I can allow the player to skip certain parts of the plot because Mrs. Carlos does need all the clues and evidences to figure out what happened. It would be challenging, so I need to check how other mystery games do it.
