A science fiction game, set in the far off corners of space. An archivist, struggling to categorize a stranger’s experience. Over the past three weeks, Chronos has flexed muscles that I haven’t used in years—namely, creative writing and narrative design. An avid writer (and reader) growing up, writing has shifted from a creative pursuit to a graded-necessity over my time in college. Project 2, however, rewound the clock, allowing me to dive back into character sketches, rough timelines, and the satisfaction of uncovering a particularly satisfying distortion of words into emotion.
Typically, the first thing I decide on in writing is a setting. As an Earth Systems major in my undergrad, it shouldn’t be surprising that some of my best writing is spatial: describing the sounds, smells, and lighting of an environment. However, that wasn’t at all the case with this project. I fought myself on the setting repeatedly. The narrative unfolded from the idea of writing about historical bias—which, to me, necessitated an isolated environment, an unreliable narrator, and a built-out archive of information. I brainstormed a few possible plots, including family members reviewing old home tapes, but decided that I wanted a juxtaposition of sterile government bureaucracy with an emotional narrative. I also enjoyed the idea of categorizing a stranger—something that feels objective at first, creating buy-in for the underlying message. This kept leading me back to setting my story in space.
However, I don’t consume much science fiction, which made me hesitant. My initial idea—a society of climate refugees organized into a new class system on a spaceship circling Earth—felt too broad for my limited science-fiction world building experience. So, halfway through, I pivoted to something more personal. Chronos became a cry for help from an isolated scientist, written primarily from inside of the mind of Dr. Kira Osei.
Designing the game from a mechanics-first perspective, which is how my process ended up, forced me to think differently about the storytelling process. Typically, I start with a narrative thread and build it out, but this time, my earliest ideas had to do with interaction. What does it mean to “choose” in a story primarily set in the past? I had a million ideas to explore themes of the story erasing itself as the player narrowed themself into a smaller and smaller version of the truth—audio files getting overwritten with static, choices literally destroying information. Those mechanics didn’t make it into the final version, but they helped me define what I wanted the experience to feel like: fragmented but intimate.
Watching others play Chronos was one of my favorite parts of this project. Players interpreted the story in ways I hadn’t predicted and always read their own perspectives and experiences into the story. It was encouraging to see others treat Chronos as an invitation to be creative. Overall, Project 2 left me with a huge development itch—I want to go back through old stories, learn more about Twine, and explore more existing interactive fiction to learn more about the genre as a whole!
