Refining “Unplugged”
Play here: http://philome.la/fcolomboart/unplugged
Original Reflection Here: https://medium.com/serious-games-377g/unplugged-an-if-dystopian-adventure-in-progress-655ebc42e899
For my final project, I decided to refine my IF game “Unplugged”. To recap from my last update, my story takes place in a virtual reality world called the Net where anyone who shows signs of disability is “unplugged” from the Net and left to survive in the dystopian remains of the real world.
For the rest of this article, I’ll focus on the changes I made to the game in the last sprint of 377G.
Continuing from my initial version, I was eager to get on with the story, but I considered a few strategies for refinement first.
- Add media integration- music, images, cool Twine things
2. Polish Chapter 1 and existing mechanics
3. Extend the story
With feedback from “Chapter 1”, I decided to extend the story, but also focus on clarifying the environment and background that was lacking in my first attempt.
I added to the introduction to make sure that players understood the basic rules of the Net: everyone is happy and healthy, everyone is born in the Net, and everyone has Inspections up until their 18th birthday when they are free to travel anywhere in the Net.
The First Playtest
Although I’d begun “Chapter 2” of Unplugged and had plenty of ideas of where to go next, I presented Chapter 1 for the Expo, where professionals from the game industry played and gave me feedback.
Bugs:
With IF, it’s difficult to test every possible combination of choices, so I understood that bugs were probably going to come up, but it was helpful to identify as many as possible, especially anything glaring (like switching the best friend’s name from Emma to Emily, whoops). As I continued game development, I checked for any “traps” where a player go stuck in a passage and adjusted the footer to prevent any contradictions that would lead to this.
Feedback:
My favorite piece of feedback was that “You can tell that the story has a heart to it” because this meant that at least some part of my work had actually affected the player. Coming from a professional, this was an incredible compliment and it made me more confident moving on with my story that there was really something there to work with.
A writer from Pixelberry Studios liked my cliffhanger ending for Chapter 1, which was great, but I was worried because I hadn’t decided how Chapter 2 would end yet. Another tester said “I fear for Emma” sadly at the end, which I responded to by smiling and clapping because YAY they cared!
Throughout the night I continued to get good feedback from people and enjoyed seeing the different ways players went about Luna’s journey.
Fixes
Before moving deeper into my storyline, I decided to make some adjustments to Chapter 1. This included bug fixes primarily and lots of testing to try to see if things would break, but I also added a few nifty Twine things. When you call someone from Luna’s room, you’ll now see new text over time to simulate a real conversation. Although this took awhile to put together, I thought the effect was nice and would also make sure players paid attention to the conversation and didn’t just click the button at the bottom. I had already made some CSS changes, but I added a nice title screen to make it feel more like a game and set players up with that expectation.
I also got rid of most passages that included basically two pieces of text: the first paragraph would be a link that when clicked would be replaced by the second. It was a helpful way to minimize the number of passages I created, but especially for people new to Twine, it was not intuitive to click the whole passage of text to continue.
The Next Part
Onto the part I was most excited about… the story! I knew some key points I wanted to get to, but hadn’t made some of the smaller connections to get the player there smoothly. I also struggled with branching meaningfully: I wanted the player’s choices to more clearly impact the outcome. This next chapter still only has 2 main endings (with various branches in between that flare and focus), but they are wildly different and I had to let go of something I really wanted to happen in order to emphasize this freedom.
When I gave myself permission to go off my original path, I actually ended up with a really interesting turn in the story. My main worry was that this new side to the story wouldn’t match my characters, but the way I came up with it was actually based on certain limitations thinking “what would Luna do?”. In this next slice, Luna decides how much she trusts her dad, how far she’s willing to go for her friend, and how much to accept from her world before rebelling against it.
Please try it out and let me know what you think!
