Overview:
You Wake Up in Your Cabin is a game about a survivor that is guilty for causing a climate disaster that submerged most of the world.
The story revolves around a nameless protagonist that has been stranded for thirteen days. With only a diary, a radio that doesn’t seem to work, a fishing rod that can’t catch fish, and their dog, the protagonist doesn’t have much to look forward to. At the same time, they show reflections surrounding their guilt and perhaps even their complicitness regarding the world’s current situation.
During the day, while attempting to fish, the protagonist comes across a message in a bottle signaling the existence of a working transmission radio frequency… What ensues are a series of interactions and choices that reveal the protagonist’s constant struggles with what they have done in the past. While they can make several choices regarding how they interact with the world, ultimately, they must struggle with the notion of whether they are capable, or even deserving, of living.
History Versions
Version 1 – In Class Paper Prototype – Houston Playtest:
The idea for this game actually popped in my head during our very first P2 exercise. During Christina’s lecture, I had written a more simple story about a man who was looking for his dog after the world had flooded. This was extremely rudimentary, however, Houston’s feedback was mainly centered around expanding the mystery I had set up. I decided to lean more heavily on this part of my story during future iterations.
Version 2 – Sisyphus Paper Prototype – Jose Playtest:
After my first iteration, I briefly considered completely pivoting to a different story. I made a very small paper prototype around the Myth of Sisyphus to explore how I could make a loop structure. During this prototype, the main feedback I got from Jose and Amy was that I had to make choices that felt like they mattered. Furthermore, I was focused too much on the story, that making people care about my game’s meaning had completely been overlooked. This experience made me go back to my initial flood idea.
Version 3 – Final Story Part 1 – Jacque Playtest:
Jacque was the first person to play my game on Twine. When she played it, I only had the very first scene written out and I didn’t have variables storing her decisions. Regardless, the playtest provided several insights. By observing her behavior, I started to realize that she was just clicking through my entire scene, often skipping optional choices, and perhaps not even reading everything. She didn’t make a single game noise, as she played the game in complete silence.
With these observations in mind, I researched how I could make certain options only appear after others had been explored. I wanted to make the experience more interesting, and implementing this meant that the player had to actually explore all of their surroundings before going through the initial door or other scenarios. It helped a lot with creating the mood that I spent so much time working in before allowing any player to proceed with the rest of the story.
Here is a snippet of code that I added which gave me my desired effect!
Version 4 – Part 1 Polished – Asher Playtest:
Asher’s in class playtest was the first time that I showed my game while having a little bit more experience with Twine. At this point, I had incorporated animations into some of my passages to show the protagonist’s inner thoughts. My main observations involved seeing just how excited Asher got with the animations. It really made him more engaged with the text, especially when there wasn’t an option to go to the next scene until the end of the current one.
This simple observation determined a huge part of how I would structure my game: Instead of displaying my entire text at each scene, I made the decision of revealing each line one by one. I felt that not only would this enable my players to keep their attention on the story, but I could also control the pacing and the feeling of the story in a way more granular form. For example, a memory could have a long, blurry transition, or, dialogue with an excited person could be quick and flashy! I couldn’t wait to see how people would react to these changes.
Here’s an image of how I created the delay of text. Tweaking with the time was an essential part of establishing mood, and even ways different characters talk!
Below is also the structure of the beginning of my game at this point. At each scene, text would appear with different effects and the scene itself would react to player input! (For example, players could physically write the protagonist’s next entry to increase their feeling of embodiment).
Version 5 – Part 2 Development – Edwin Playtest:
The main insight from Edwin’s playtest came from my conversation with him after he was done playing. I vividly remember him saying that some things “just seemed to fall from the sky”. And that he needed something to anchor him more. With that in mind, I decided to incorporate a couple more clues, such as giving access to the radio before finding the bottle. At the same time, I also enjoyed how he struggled with the ambiguity of my story. Not knowing exactly what was going on was a driving force for him to keep going, so, I decided to double down on that by removing some background information I had about my main character.
Version 6 – Full Story Developed – Jack Playtest:
Jack was the first person to play my story when it was fully developed. His playtest was critical in giving me feedback regarding my ending. Initially, I had created a situation where choosing to confess or not for having caused the accident determined the ending to my story. Jack, however, told me something that Christina had already mentioned to me in class: less is more. I decided to really embrace this idea and accept that my story perhaps doesn’t have a definitive correct choice. By giving less information and clear cut choices, the players themselves could have more room to reach their own conclusions regarding my endings.
Here’s my entire story’s structure. While many of the paths must be crossed with all choices, I created variables that make each event within the same paths react differently based on previous choices!
Version 7 – Bells and Whistles + Choices – Cole Playtest:
With the story set, I chose to focus my last playtest by greatly improving my Twine skills! While playtesting with Cole, I could quickly observe that she was very intrigued with all the interesting mechanics that I was implementing in my game. She made many game noises and even exclaimed that she “had no clue what was going on” but that she wanted to keep going to “gather all the clues”. In the end, Cole said that my story felt a bit too rushed, however she enjoyed just how much some of her decisions were brought back and the fact that the choices, although sometimes easy to make, “really made her think” about guilt. With Cole, I really wanted to polish my story and this notion of my story making her think. I was proud to see her say that, and continued to tweak some of the feelings of guilt that the main character has in order to appeal even more to her comment.
Here I was exploring Twine’s more ‘advanced features’ this involved tagging certain scenes and writing css code to change how they looked!
Game Design
I did focus a lot of my project on the tactile experience within Twine. The timing of each line, the way that thoughts appeared through the fade animation, while dialogue mostly appeared instantly, or the changing of colors: They were all there to set the tone for my story! While I’m very proud of what I was able to achieve, I do think that I should’ve spent less time on the details, and some more time on the macro part of the project. At the same time, these details greatly helped evoke the feelings that I was striving for during this project. I really wanted to focus on maybe exemplifying (even though through certain exaggeration) this idea of feeling guilty about things we could’ve done differently to avoid climate disaster. I think that recently I’ve been thinking a lot about that in general, and I don’t know, it’s just a bit scary… In some ways, we are all making choices that benefit us individually, and I was wondering how I could take that to the extreme in a post apocalyptic world. The idea of not making the protagonist’s part in the story clear came from this attempt to make it more universal. By having the player wonder what happened before the disaster, and why this protagonist feels so extremely guilty about the actions they have done, to the point of considering illogical decisions due to their guilt that could lead to their death, I wanted to make this point abundantly clear.
I didn’t want to create much of a moral compass regarding the player’s choices: Should their actions be questionable? Can they redeem themselves? What determines if they are a bad person? Through playtests, I started developing the idea that perhaps these answers are best left unanswered. The final choice is presented even though it shouldn’t: not getting help in a life and death situation shouldn’t be on someone’s mind, but by making that a choice, I was trying to really show the depths that this character has gone to within his own mind. I feel most people will always choose to receive help, but I wanted my second choice to be more of a subconscious thought. An idea that people’s guilt can live with them forever.
