For my IF game, I created a game that afforded fun through narrative structure. In my game, the player experiences a strong narrative above all, and gets immersed in the story. The game’s primary mechanic of manipulating the player’s emotions via the words, up until the player needs to make a choice. The player gets torn between what they think they know and value, and the difficult decisions they must make that might conflict with their knowledge, or lack of values.
I found that my game’s narrative structure afforded most players the opportunity to fully engage and immersive themselves with the world, including many wishing there was more content come the end of their playtesting time. I took that as high praise, and am generally proud of my ability to do such.
At the same time, my game holds mechanics of granting the player the opportunity to gain optional information if they explore. As such, players invested in the world are able to make better-educated decisions/choices, and have more insight onto the possible consequences of their choices. For those that choose not to explore further, they will get through the process faster, and may experience some element of surprise. In doing so, I’ve created a dynamic where the player always feels strong emotion with relation to the paths that they chose, even if the path is inconsequential in the grand scheme of the final choices the player can make.
From this experience, I learned a lot about small narrative techniques that really upset certain readers, particularly those outside my target audience. From getting a wide variety of playtesters, I learned a lot about the balance of explicit and implicit narrative storytelling, including the extent to which embedded narration is effective for those reading Interaction Fiction, or text-based fiction in general.
I also learned a lot about Unity implementations; though I have experience with Ink Integration into Unity, I was able to make a lot more unique choices, and add custom background music, visual overlays, and visual effects, akin to Ren’py, but with arguable more freedom.
Looking at IF as a whole, my final project is nothing like what I imagined going in. As someone who general dislikes generative IF, I leaned towards a visual novel-esque project, and can say I created something that I can look back at and be proud of my accomplishments given such limited time. While I had to make some fidelity sacrifices, they are things that I intentionally left behind with the intent to improve upon them for P4.
In the grand scheme of things, I feel that this project wasn’t a complete disaster given the circumstances that occurred during the course—and was arguably a good product regardless. That is to say, I have no complaints at all!
