IF wasn’t a term I was familiar with before starting this project, and I think at the beginning I was having trouble conceptualizing what the difference between IF and games I was familiar with was. I then realized that a lot of games I’ve played before fall under the umbrella of IF, and felt a lot less restricted by the medium of IF. I decided I really wanted the player agency to come from what the player is choosing to explore in the game world, because I really wanted the decisions to be something the player had to seek out and engage with, as opposed to more explicitly putting the players at a crossroads. I originally envisioned using RPG maker for this project, but after some (rough) play-testing, I decided to pivot to Unity, an engine I am more familiar with. I had an old Unity project from a summer camp which had top down movement and a dialogue system, and I figured it wouldn’t be too hard to build this new game on top of the old one. I think that, looking back, this was the single worst decision I made regarding the project (along with making all my sprites and assets myself and adhering to the colors per sprite limit from the Gameboy Color).
It turns out, I’ve gotten a lot better at Unity since back then, and that most of what I started with was unusable, or required a lot of technical work to fix up and make usable. I thought I was being clever by using an old system I built and understood the implementation of, but in retrospect, I would have been much better off building off of some kind of Unity RPG plugin. I ended up needing to use the majority of my time working on the game to just build the baseline functionality needed to tell any story, as opposed to really being able to flesh out the narrative of my story. I had gotten some narrative feedback after each play-test, but it wasn’t until the last couple days of the project that I felt like technical aspects of the game were polished enough (emphasis on enough) to start getting valuable narrative feedback. Despite having a lot of the narrative in mind, it wasn’t until like Wednesday of this past week, that I was able to fully represent this first draft of the narrative, entirely in the prototypes. In the last few days of the project I did a bunch of late night play-tests, and I think I was able to add a lot to the narrative, considering the time I had. Since Wednesday, the number of interactions possible more than doubled, and the game went from having 1 normal day, to having 3. The biggest regret I’m left with is not having been able to create the proper ending that this game should have had. At the same time though, I think that Day 3 does more for the narrative that any ending could have, so I don’t regret prioritizing it over the ending. The aimless wandering that players fall into on the final day, looking for the next step before giving up and quitting the game, honestly lines up with my original vision pretty well. All in all, I’m really proud of the amount of narrative improvement I was able to make over this last week (and honestly the last two days), my only real regret on this assignment is that it took me so long to build out the technical side of the game. Next time I have to make a top down game in Unity, I’ll actually have a project with working movement and dialogue to base it off of, so that’s something at least!
