In class, I realized I needed to make the choices more interesting and more as dilemmas instead of a choice with a clear “interesting” outcome. I since made a lot of progress making more interesting choices which both lead to different outcomes for the game. Also more generally for less significant choices, the way the question is prompted goes a long way; Amy helped me understand some better ways to give questions to the player.
I also rehashed the story to make it more interesting and engaging to the player. I also hope to get some better mileage/interest with the story by using unique writing style/vocabulary – less is more, as described in class. Perhaps slow and somewhat vague exposition will leave more to the player’s imagination. This is something I really have liked about the IF format: it outsources rendering and a lot of other detail to the player.
I initially wanted the game to be a top-down game, but realized I don’t have the time to worldbuild that. Instead I will use a text-based interactive system. I would really like to build something similar to the tutorial which had a CLI-like system, but a more simple Twine implementation may be what I end up doing.
Thankfully I have gotten several people interested in playtesting (somehow they are interested in the story…?)
