‘Anchor’ was my first real attempt at creating an interactive fiction. As a child I’d written short choose-your-own adventures in the margins of my notebooks, yet I’d never attempted writing a branching narrative of this scale before. I’ve played games my whole life, racking up countless hours of narrative debt and living lives through eyes not my own. Many of my favorite games are interactive fictions: from the Life is Strange Franchise to the original Tell Tale’s Walking Dead Games and Detroit: Become Human. I’ve spent innumerable hours exploring every inch of these branching narratives. Playing. Replaying. Playing again. Yet, despite this, it wasn’t until this assignment that I truly began to taste the blood, sweat, and tears that indubitably soaks these games. Drenching them in the way arsenic soaks leather. Undetectable until scrutinized. After working on Anchor, I realized that working on a branching narrative is difficult. Not just writing it. But everything about it. From the ideation — drawing crazed flow charts like a schizophrenic detective drawing connections — to the implementation of learning how to use Twine (shoutout to ChatGPT for the UI assistance!) and the countless playtests. And the even more countless, woeful fixes that subsequently followed.
Writing a branching narrative requires that you have a mental fine-tooth comb — one that can find lice, bugs, and the smallest inconsistencies in your story. A single error can pull players from the carefully designed immersion, shattering the reality you spent hours — literal days and weeks — to build. But in the end, it’s worth it. The satisfaction of watching people play something you’ve created — their brows furrowing in confusion, eyebrows arching in surprise, and lips pursed in indecision — are what I live for. To steal Christina’s words, it feels as though you’ve become the midwife for a player and an experience. You help deliver something that, without you, would otherwise not exist. And that act of creation — of both a story and of an experience — is so deeply satisfying.
I happily — albeit wearily — traded my sleep for narrative gold. Over seven days straight of feverish creative frenzies that kept me up until 5am, I cast myself into a delirious Groundhog Day loop of creation and unmaking. Ideas were birthed in instants, and just as quickly wilted away in creative obsolescence.
I entered this project wanting to make a game that people felt attached to. Something that, like all my favorite media, leaves people wanting. Yearning.
Though my game is obviously not the same caliber as professional media, I believe it still provides the desired confusion-induced fun that accompanies all unreliable narrators and ambiguous narratives.
I’ve long been a sucker for unreliable narrators (particularly Ishiguro’s works — see: A Pale View of Hills, The Remains of the Day), so I wanted my game to also incorporate some of these elements. The writing and endings were left intentionally ambiguous. Experiences were called into doubt. The story’s ink remained wet in the way memories are.
I hope you enjoyed playing my game — and I can’t wait to continue iterating on Anchor. I’m eager to create more games, wielding the knowledge gleamed from this project to birth better and more emotionally captivating narratives.
