Overview
My game is called Dead Dogs. I was trying Twine out to prototype narrative for my original pitch, but got totally carried away. While having fun I accidentally wrote 1.5k words of exposition for an entirely different story, and that’s what you are about to play. It’s a dystopian story ft. my dog girl OC from middle school. Setting out, I aimed to create a convincing, engaging, and fun exposition to a story whose plot may or may not reveal itself to me in the span of three weeks. My goals for this project were to use the medium of Twine to:
- Establish characters
- Create the illusion of world, and space for the player; Transport them to my imagined setting.
- Explore interactivity’s relationship with exposition, place-making, world building.
- Explore relationships between words and artwork in the visual novel format.
Link
Password and itch link are included here:
https://art-of-dead-dogs.carrd.co
History versions of game:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1zMQrJ_XYMO6aspsI5_aPdPR_mzngIbwc?usp=share_link
Reflection
IF lends itself well to exposition
Something that I found enjoyable was using the visual novel’s affordances to accomplish exposition, which is usually very difficult in a linear format. In visual novels however, a player can be motivated by curiosity, and explore and learn of their own volition, especially if what they are exploring is a space — one they can affect that space, or actively participate in it.
Words and images combine in many interesting ways.
Another thing I noticed about using both words and images to tell a story, is that the two elements can complement each other, compete, or be totally independent. Artworks are more immediately accessible than words, so they draw the eye first, outcompeting words for attention. However, the power of prose is to tap into the reader’s imagination, to create sensations and paint relationships that a picture alone can’t —sound, smell, motion, space, thoughts, concepts. In order for a player to imagine, they must not be distracted by pictures.
But together, words can change the meaning of an image, and an image can change the meaning of words. I think that is my favorite kind of word-picture combination. I was inspired by Making Comics, a book I’m reading for SGNP right now.
Artworks must not detract from imaginative mood
If I’m going to have both prose and art, art must complement, not detract from, the player’s imagination. I go through several iterations on some of the paintings to match the mood I’ve set for my reader through words. I end up desaturating and cooling down colors, so my reader can imagine a somber place, under a blue sky. One of the biggest challenges that I encountered when making art is color matching between different artworks, portraying multiple objects with the same lighting scheme to establish a sense of place. Left is older iterations, right is newer.
Illustration is fun!
Here I do a paint-over of 3d renders to get accurate yet painterly chains. I definitely got carried away with making visuals.
Playtest iterations
- Playtest 1
- Who: Sister, aero ace, writer, she/her, 20’s
- Feedback: Enjoyed artworks and text effects. Interesting vibe and imagery, raises many questions: how old is Aster? Is she squatting? Does she have a job? Does capitalism exist? Is there a concept of private property? Are we even on Earth? An imbalanced concoction of knowns and unknowns leaves my sister’s mind reeling.
- What I changed as a result: This initial version was a collection of vibes and images and a few, cryptic lines of dialogue. So, I wrote day-in-the-life scenes for my main character Aster, to show that indeed capitalism exists (booo), we are on Earth, and Aster is in love.
- Playtest 2
- Who: Amy, she/her, 20’s, TA.
- Feedback: Enjoyed imagery, found prose chunks to be a bit much, enjoyed the humor and got a grasp of the characters. Wondered what Aster’s motivation was. Did not discover that images were scrollable. Made note of the background images, or lack thereof. Enjoyed text effects and animations.
- What I changed as a result: I created a scroll tutorial. I started working on giving Aster a dilemma, or at least a shadow of one — becoming human at Kira’s expense. I also started writing a motivation for that. Created a background texture. Staggered long texts by making the user click through it.
- Playtest 3
- Who: three friends, all queer. she/her, he/him, any/all. Stanford students, 2 STEM, 1 Art Practice. All artists/writers. 20’s.
- Feedback: Clicking to reveal more text was not obvious. Notable moments: “OMG we killed our girlfriend!” “Why do we hate ourself?” “I’m digging the vibes.” Read my scroll tutorial without learning how to scroll. They seemed to be having fun exploring spaces in particular, and understood the characters — that we are a dog girl and we love an alien.
- What I changed as a result: I staggered long texts by timed fade-ins instead of clicks. I started work on answering “Why do we hate ourself?” By adding a discoverable secret. Cropped long artworks so antiscrollers don’t miss out. Story edits, as always.
- Playtest 4
- Who: Ana. To my limited knowledge: Haikyuu fan. Enjoys cooking. she/her, Stanford student.
- What I learned: Enjoyed text effects and it helped them make sense of dialogue, like staggered tex, and characters. Woah at flashing hearts. Thought actions didn’t matter enough.
- What I changed as a result: Continued to work on implementing discoverable secret. Added visual cues to make user interested: buzzing text.
- The fith playtest:
- Who: Gordon, he/him, LDT.
- What I learned: Gordon laughed at “did you eat a rock?” And enjoyed / got a grasp of the characters. Described the images, especially the first-person ones, as “powerful.”
- What did I change as a result: Playtest happened the same day as Ana’s.
- Other reactions, online.
- Who: 3x(she/her, Stanford alumn, artist, 20’s, East Asian)
- Some quotes from friends: “Wowow imagine having a finished vn” “whoooooaaa i really like it, cool effects!!! and i like the characters personalities a lot lol” “WHOAH it’s so cool… how versatile would u say twine is?”
- What I changed: Found out that Discord wasn’t reliable for hosting images. I switched to hosting images on Carrd.
