Wild Space: A Reflection

Before starting Wild Space, I thought the idea of designing an interactive fiction game was relatively simple.

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I was wrong.

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Creating an interactive fiction game that is mechanically AND narratively interested created several challenges. How do I keep the player engaged? How do I push my narrative without it being too on-the-nose? How do I make the player actually read my text, and not skip until they get to a branching choice? How do I make my writing not seem “cringy”?

Because I initially thought that designing an IF game would be relatively easy on the development side, I challenged myself by picking up the Unity Engine with Yarnspinner, to attempt learning a new technology along the way. This created a lot of technical roadblocks, however, since I found that I needed to implement my own (1) history system, (2) skipping system, (3) character placement code, (4) character emotion-switching code, (5) state visualization code, and much more. After spending around a week making a very rough story of the game and developing the technical foundation to get going, I found myself spending the last few days of the assignment speedrunning the dialogue of my IF. Playtesting helped me a lot with identifying plotholes, finding out what options felt meaningful/meaningless, and locating areas where text was unnecessary and/or cringy.

This game made me a lot more cognizant of the things that go into a good story. I spent a lot of time thinking about conflict, and what the main character’s motivations were. I also had to think about whether I wanted the player to embody the main character, or act as themselves throughout the story. Eventually, I ended up having the player choose their own name, and skew them towards a specific way of thinking by giving them small areas of the main character’s backstory. It was difficult to achieve this balance in a way that wasn’t extremely awkward, or in a way that takes the player out of the magic circle. I am unsure if I will make more IF games in the future, however, since this felt pretty tedious. I might outsource the dialogue-writing aspect to other people. :’)

Overall, this game made me more appreciative of the power of narrative games! After this experience, I plan to spend much more time thinking about the narrative that I want my future games to push, in addition to the mechanics I want to add. In the past, I’ve found myself wanting to develop long RPG story games, but always found it too intimidating to start writing the physical story. This assignment gave me the confidence I needed to start thinking more in-depth about the worldbuilding and player experience.