The Remaking of Descent

When I made Descent for the second project of the class, I wanted to convey the story of inequality, and give my audience a glimpse at what inequality looks like. I wanted to make my audience feel it and understand it, to know what it feels like to be someone far less fortunate than themselves. But the making of Descent was, as the instructors had warned, very time consuming. To tell the story well required a well thought-out plot that brought out the struggles of the migrants being depicted in the story.

Time would be my biggest enemy in making Descent, round 1. There was a lot of content to make, and as such, never enough time to really understand the experiences of my readers. (And I do mean readers, not players.) This time around, I wanted to undo that. I would take my story to where I had originally intended to and round out the rough edges. I wanted to refine my work, to make the whole story feel not like a game or a story, but a whole experience from beginning to end. I wanted to make sure the medium conveyed the stark realities of Yuan and his family. In short, I wanted to finish my story, and focus on building it as an experience.

Before reading further, I invite you experience Descent: https://tareyza.itch.io/cs377gp2

The Story

The first set of changes would be to the story. The initial experience was only about half of what I had wanted. It conveyed much of the difficulties that Yuan faces, but (depending on which of the endings you’ve reached), stopped fairly prematurely. There was more of a story that I wanted to tell, and parts that ended far too abruptly. When Yuan begins working at the hotel now, his story is now only half-finished, instead of mostly so. There are more endings now to reflect the consequences of the reader’s choice, 11 to be exact, and some of these endings can be reached in more than one way.

My Readers

Of course, much of my changes were driven by my vision, and not entirely by playtesting. As a writer, I firmly believe that works should not be written by committee, and I made sure those who read my draft this time reflected that. My intention, then, with those who read my work was to get a sense of their experience and what they felt after having read it. If they experienced what I wanted them to, then I was going in the right direction.

The first set was easy and came from my peer reviews. They gave constructive feedback technical details, like how sometimes there was a lot of text on the page and how fast endings could make the point I’m conveying less clear. What I took away from this was that my experience wasn’t thoughtful enough yet. I had stuck mostly to the existing template of SugarCube 2.0, with its blue-underlined links and white-on-black text.

The Experience

I liked the white-on-black. It gives a darkness to the page and the experience, and the bareness of just words on a page felt right to me. I kept too, the pages of long text, despite one person critiquing it. It felt to me right that the format was unapologetic to the reader — that if you want to experience this story, then you have to do so at the pacing I deliberately chose.

But not so much the blue links. That made the whole thing the seem too much like a webpage, even if it was one. A story comes from each line of text that comprises it, and so I wanted to make this the central feeling of the experience — readers should feel like they’re simply chosing the next line of the story. That’s why now, when the reader choses what Yuan will do next, they write the next line of white text on the page from the set of gray possibilities, revealing the next part of the story.

The font, too, is now Georgia, to make the whole experience more like that of reading a book.

Another draft

I asked three friends to experience Descent for me by sending them its link, and asked how they experienced it. I simply asked them what they felt like I was saying and listened as they answered. In describing the experience, they used words like “depressing,” “haunting,” “dark,” “empty,” “angry,” and “emotional.” (And I also found out other things, like how the gray text was a little too hard to read against the background.)

A link to the a remote playtesting session in which the reader recorded themselves can be found in the Canvas submission to protect the privacy of the playtester.