For much of my life, I’ve been a great lover of the IF game genre. I played all of the original Choice of Games installments on the iPod Touch, and to this day I prefer games with branching storylines (such as RPGs) to more linear, one-size-fits-all approaches. For these reasons, I was wildly excited to get to make one myself! I knew on an abstract level it would involve a lot of writing and that a lot of different possible game states would need to be considered and accounted for in order to make the choices feel truly meaningful. Few things, after all, can be more disappointing in an IF game than a real lack of true interaction. However, knowing this intellectually did not prepare me for the amount of branching paths and states truly involved in creating such a game.
Playtesting the game with others, however, revealed to me that not everyone plays interactive fiction games in the same way or enjoys the same aspects of them equally. While I should have known this given the highly individual experience of the format as a whole, it was another thing entirely to watch players mention impatience with, for example, long narrative sections without many choices. Other players, on the other hand, don’t enjoy the parser fiction genre or how long it can take to solve puzzles within these works. As someone who grew up on verbose interactive novels, webcomics, and text adventures in my computer terminal, I realized that I would have to, as in any genre, appeal to the specific demographic of players I hoped to attract. A wordy IF game must at the very least have a somewhat compelling writing style, for example, if it can’t rely on more frequent choice based gameplay or strategy.
This is something I was very nervous about in creating my game, as I knew I wanted it to be all dialogue and fairly sparse in terms of the worldbuilding outright provided to the player – I wanted them to have to dig deeper. In this regard, I sought to create a game that highlighted the fun of discovery and exploration, incentivizing multiple playthroughs to discover all the secrets. However, I wasn’t confident in my abilities to create a compelling and mysterious narrative with characters people would want to engage with. While I’m not sure I achieved this in the end, it was my main focus, and I think if I were to continue working on my game that I would expand the time we spend with the main characters, as well as the quantity of interactions the player can have with them in order to flesh them out more deeply.
Because of my love for the genre, I think I had grander visions for the game than could be realistically implemented within our timeframe, which led to a need to pare down much of my planned worldbuilding. Moving forward, I know this will likely be a common problem, and I would plan to nail down the absolute need-to-haves to paint the broad strokes of the setting first. Then, more details can be filled in as time and player desire permits. This also avoids the early impatience of a large exposition drop, which some play testers expressed reluctance to persevere through.
Overall, making this game was incredibly fun, and I could see myself continuing to work on it in the future in my spare time in order to bring it up to the level I had originally envisioned. I’m very pleased to have had the opportunity to learn and grow in this way with this format!
