P2 Final: Dr. Dinkins

NOTE: Hit restart 1-3 times on first screen to load the color scheme of the game.

Not sure what is up with that.

https://zclute.itch.io/dr-dinkins

OVERVIEW:

This game emerged from the boredom of the pandemic, when my partner and I were living in a small studio apartment in Ojai, CA. Our cat, Cricket, used to go outside all day and come home in the evening, paws dusty and always hungry. We always wondered what she got up to.

At the time, the COVID-19 pandemic had transformed the campus into a subdued, empty space – one that felt simultaneously serene, dangerous, wild, idyllic, cozy, and unfamiliar. We were trapped on the campus (since everything was closed AND far away AND it was 100 degrees) and also freer than we’d ever been (since Los Padres National Forest was on our doorstep, and we could roam the campus grounds with little else to do).

When it was time to generate this game, I thought about all the moods that time had contained, and about the unique blend of freedom, helplessness, and constraint that made up that period of COVID quarantine. I felt the mechanics of IF really lent themselves to that balance of emotions.

Cricket also died in April of this year, and I have really been missing her. She was an enormous personality, and I am so grateful for the kinds of joy cats bring into my life. Cats are constantly so free (you cannot direct them nor predict their behavior) and so constrained (they seem awfully upset to be in 8-pound bodies that can only meow).

VERSIONS:

This game went through many iterations.

First, I wanted to create 3 possible narratives for the game, and to make the game “loop” such that you could play through similar stories in different genres. I wanted to write a fantasy narrative, a medical mystery narrative, and a Western narrative.

I mapped out the mock campus I would use, vaguely based on the campus of the boarding school. I plotted where I thought each story would go/intersect, and which places would hold clues for each genre.

VERSION 1: INITIAL PLAYTEST

I started to build this story out in Slides, using different colors to keep track of which storylines were which.

Here, I figured out the initial apartment narrative, and some of the first events.

Khushi got to play with this prototype for a bit – I found Slides worked remarkably well for this, and you could likely create an entire IF in it, though it was challenging for the whole “bucket” of passages to just be on the side instead of moveable like in Twine.

My notes from the first playtest mostly included:

• Build out the storylines
• Finish the narrative
• Cute/enjoyable narrative

These would turn out to be repeated notes from playtesting…all the way up until the end!!

VERSION 2: STARTING IN TWINE

I actually played around in Inform7 for a bit, but became very frustrated by the errors/exact phrasing right away. I tried to get ChatGPT to help me with rephrasing to make Inform happy, just to see if it would work. It did not work. ChatGPT also does not speak Inform.

I switched over to Twine and began building passages. It took me a long time to figure out the variables!

I got to do some more playtests…

PLAYTEST NOTES: COLE:

• Felt there was lots of exposition, but not in a bad way
• Noted at some point that it “felt like a longer game in the making” (maybe because the narrative still wasn’t done)
• She appreciated the seriousness of the situation contrasted against the silliness of being a cat. 
• She wasn’t sure she WAS a cat at the start, and she was delighted to find out (felt that was part of the fun)
• She felt some aspects were calm and relaxing, and some were startling.
• I asked her if it felt challenging, and she said it felt like it wasn’t supposed to be that way. 
• She said she enjoyed just exploring and interacting.
• She said the text helped her build an image in her head of the scenes.

Throughout my playtesting, I asked my testers to predict what would happen next in the plot, as I had ideas but wanted to see what was emergent from the passages that were already there. Cole mentioned that there might be some kind of toxic science dump, or that something had gone wrong in a nearby community.

PLAYTEST NOTES: ARNAV:

• There were moments Arnav was unclear about links that were expository vs. links that would continue the game
• He didn’t feel like there was too much text
• He wanted a way to fail the game (I added this, but there’s only one way to do it! See if you can find it.)
• He also liked finding out that he was a cat (not knowing at the start).

After Arnav tested, I elected to cut two of the story lines (Western and Fantasy) since I knew I was pressed for time and had bitten off a much longer game than I intended. In the allotted time for game play, I wanted to focus on building out the one story, and making the writing and details delightful. From that point forward, the whole game was a medical mystery, with Cricket as the doctor.

some abandoned passages from the Western and Mystery storylines.

Big stage of edits and ideas: trying to figure out locations and loops, trying to identify emotions I’m aiming for at this point, iterating on maps…

PLAYTEST NOTES: CHRISTINA:

• Christina very helpfully laughed and gasped throughout playing.
• She appreciated the use of the reveal links as a form of mystery/exposition.
• She was delighted by the cat noises
• She wanted to knock things off the desk right before she got the opportunity to do just that, which is great!
• She got stuck a couple times navigating due to issues with the variables
• She said (as many have) that it just needs to be finished/written out, and that it felt like I had done roughly 1/6 of what I would eventually do.

Some things that did not make it as I cut down the narrative in this phase:

• A biologically appropriate bacterial zoonosis (sheep & goats peeing into water tower, leading to infected water on the campus for human consumption)
• A bear encounter
• A man being shot (!) and then throwing a rock at Cricket
• A secret science library under the campus observatory
• A pangolin who secretly lived in the woods and was in charge of all the wild animals
• Student v. student bloodshed
• All the horses (all 142 of them) being asleep/having the virus
• The chem teacher and his dog, Charlie
• A whole side tangent about vaccine development and viruses
• A whole lot of plotline around bats and bat zoonoses

VERSION 3: SOME EDITS, BUT STILL MORE STORY TO GO

Grace playtested for me in class this week, and was also wonderfully expressive (ex: “Oh no! I didn’t mean to kill the woodpecker!”)

I caught a lot of minor bugs this time, such as things that were capitalized or italicized differently than I intended. One good narrative catch that I made in this playtest is that Grace was confused how the boarding school campus and the initial apartment were connected. I realized that since I KNEW the landscape/apartment/school I was working in, some things felt obvious to me that were not in the actual story. So I had to add some clarity there!

Grace mentioned that most of the feelings she had during the game were curiosity, exploration, and silliness, which works for me. She clarified that she was fine with the woodpecker dying, it just surprised her!

The most core feedback I got through all these changes was to finish the story, which made sense.

VERSION 4: A SENDABLE GAME! 

Finally, I reached a point where I could send the game to friends and family to play, as it did have an ending.

PLAYTEST: SISTER (28, impatient)

• Fun but long
• Can’t you make it an AI generated cat that can run around
• Got stuck on mobile/couldn’t scroll (had to fix this bug)

While I love my sister, I was not going to make a graphic exploratory game at this stage. But I did cut down some of the passages.

PLAYTEST: MOM (63, very patient)

• This is an amazing amount of story! (Prior to me cutting some passages)
• “Whoops – I just got bitten by a rattlesnake” (I congratulated her on finding the only way to die)
• “The most important people were healed” “Sunglass smiley face”

PLAYTEST: SUSI (26, a friend)

• Noticed the words on the last screen were funky (a bug I fixed)
• “Overall it’s so lovely; Cricket’s personality really comes through”
  • This felt nice because Susi knew Cricket!

FINAL VERSION AND REFLECTION:

I really loved this process, and I am really happy about having been through it, even just as a form of grief for a pet. It’s strange and dystopian to think back on those first, dream-like, soupy months of COVID, which had such intensity and surreality in them, and for me which also came with some strange forms of peace.

In creating this game, I got to give Cricket so many more adventures. Some came to exist in the final version, and some were just stories in my mind, or half-built Twine sequences. It was delightful to spend so long playing in a narrative space and to build things out over and over. It reconnected me with the part of myself that loved devouring series when I was young (like Fablehaven or Warrior Cats).

While I was frustrated sometimes by variables that didn’t work, and certainly could have made neater vars sections at the beginning, I was ultimately always glad to be working on this story, because it felt like a kind of reflection in itself. While I was creating an exploration in the narrative, I was experiencing an exploration in the software/process. Sometimes, both would deadend together, and other times, an opening in one space would drive the next step in the other.

I have so many spin-off narratives that I kind of want to make more episodes of this story, though I would love to get better at the interactivity/technical side to put more stuff in them. I’m not sure I’ll have time to do that, but it’s nice to feel prepared if I want to!

Finally, it was a great delight to present the latest version of this story to my partner, who was living with me in Ojai at that time. It’s wonderful to create a memory experience for someone else. I didn’t tell him about it the whole time I was making it, so it was all a surprise. I was reminded of the “Zinesters” reading, as I really did make this game personally, as a message to one other person and to me, though hopefully it’s fun to play outside that context too.