Giant Steps, Chapter 1: Autumn in New York

Game: Giant Steps, Chapter 1: Autumn in New York
Engine: Godot + Popochiu (Inform 7 prototype)
Playtime: ~20-30 minutes
Theme: Empathy for a musician managing performance anxiety and creative self-doubt in NYC

Giant Steps is a small, moody story game about a young saxophone player who is on the edge of…well, lots of things. Play it here. He’s on edge—his anxiety that he inherited at jazz school, given to him by abusive professors and the trauma that a place like that can give someone. He’s unable to play for anyone but himself, and as a new New Yorker, he’s frozen to his seat when he’s given the opportunity to go to a jam session.

The chapter asks a simple question: Do you go to the jam? The answer (hopefully) lands harder than you expect because of everything that leads up to it—bills, pride, an old professor’s letter, and a body that won’t cooperate. The player’s not really given any choice in the matter at all, the only choices that are made are simply how the information is felt.

The game definitely runs as an embedded narrative. The only way forward is through carefully looking around your apartment, piecing together fragments of past, present, and potential future. You learn who Desmond is by examining what surrounds him: the empty pill bottle, his father’s saxophone, the professor’s mean letter, the jazz magazine that holds both promise and intimidation.

The structure follows a single narrative line with choices that affect tone rather than outcome. You can approach conversations with different attitudes—defensive, vulnerable, pragmatic—but they all lead to the same subway, the same old man’s wisdom, the same red door. The width exists in how deeply you understand Desmond’s situation, not in changing his destination.

Map: 

The story follows one line, with choices that impact very little, if anything at all. The only way to go forward is to explore. So in some ways, it’s pretty wide in terms of choice, but the choices only lead to the player learning more information.

Overview:

I created this game from a place of personal experience. Recently, I was invited to a traditional jazz jam session. This was the kind of thing that used to be my favorite activity since I was twelve or thirteen. I felt excitement at the idea of coming back to something I hadn’t done in years. What I didn’t expect was the physical reaction: driving there, I was overwhelmed with nausea and anxiety I hadn’t felt in a long time. That disconnect between what I wanted to do and what my body would allow became the emotional core of Giant Steps.

The game aims to translate that specific feeling—the desire to create, warring with the fear of being seen creating—into an interactive experience. It’s not about overcoming anxiety but about sitting with it, understanding its roots, and recognizing how it shapes artistic identity.

Game versions: 

Version 1:

I started this game with the concept: a game about a struggling jazz musician was on my mind for a long time. I began by prototyping by hand (on sheet music paper, not because it was thematic, but because it was the only kind of paper I had). I wanted to explore the idea of how to create the feeling of anxiety in an immersive experience. As a theater-maker, I think about this a lot—how can you make an audience feel what is being shown on-stage, without just being prescriptive? The same question applies here, and you’re able to increase that level of empathy even more, as the character is embodied by the player, and vice versa.

Version 2:

I made an in-depth Inform game [you can play it here!]: (www.sebastianblue.github.io/giantsteps) and tried to branch out as many different props and details as possible. I used ChatGPT at first to build it out code-wise (I’ve never written a line of code in my life), but I realized that DeepSeek was much better at helping me debug code and think of creative solutions to code problems. So, ethically questionable, but results are results in this case.

I playtested a lot. I had lots of my friends play it—unfortunately, I didn’t log everything that was said, but I can share some of the details I learned and the changes I made.

Playtest 1 (ish): 

Amaru played my game in class, and I took a bunch of notes on what he said. Content-wise, he was pretty satisfied with what my writing and the storytelling had to offer—most of the qualms were due to the functionality of the parser system, something that I wasn’t really worried about as I knew I would be porting it over to Godot soon enough. Some highlights were, “What if I don’t pick up the phone?” Which led me to implement the phone ringing off the hook forever until it picked up—and an annoying sound so you couldn’t just ignore it. Amaru’s also a saxophone player, which is a pretty prime demographic for my game, so he laughed at a lot of my saxophone jokes. He also struggled to find the name of the jazz club and suggested clearer signposting and memory systems for critical information. That one moment made me ensure that the name of the club was emboldened and in a different color for the final game.

It was around this time that I started on the Godot prototype.

I made a sample scene in Godot (with the Popochiu point-and-click plugin) just to practice getting familiar with GScript, with lots of help from the documentation—but I totally figured it out, with a lot of ChatGPT and DeepSeek (eventually also Claude Pro, which my dad pays for on my email address? Weird).

I reached out to Nicholas Vizzi, one of my best friends from high school, and we started working together on putting together the artwork. I made a pinterest board for aesthetic inspiration, and we went ahead and started pulling together assets.

My aesthetic goal was simple: mostly black and white with a few splashes of color. I chose this because I’m colorblind and wanted to make sure all the puzzles and interactions would work for me and everyone else. But it also felt right for the story—the black and white world shows how bleak everything feels for Desmond right now, like he’s stuck in this gray space between wanting to play and being too afraid to try. The little bits of color that do appear—only in colored text—all feel like interruptions in his monochrome world, moments that might pull him out or push him deeper, and pull the player in closer to paying attention to what matters.

I also began to draw my own assets and port them into the game, following Nicholas’ style as closely as I could. Here are some of mine:

At this point, I was still running playtests on the Inform version, while I made the Godot version more polished. Here’s another playtest I ran, with Christina this time.

Playtest 4 (?)

Christina’s playtest was super helpful. She laughed at the right parts, gasped when the professor’s letter got harsh (saying, “dick!”) and actually breathed along with the prompt—so the emotional stuff was totally landing. She said she related hard to the anxiety, which is exactly what I wanted.

But she got stuck a couple times—couldn’t find the club address in the magazine and forgot Desmond even played saxophone. The professor’s letter was too long; she said to cut it down. Also, her daughter plays sax, which was cool—made the whole thing feel more real.

So the feelings are working, but the directions and some of the text need to be clearer. Just had to smooth out those rough edges so nothing pulled you out of the mood.

Version 3:

Finally made it into Godot for a playable game. Was able to implement so many of the Inform systems into the game in Godot. The phone rings, the subway map works, the conversations are dynamic, the apartment is explorable, and there are even more cutscenes, showcasing more emotional moments—something that lots of playtesters wanted more of, like Stella in Berkeley.

Bringing in the music and sound was a big step. Since I work as a sound designer and composer, it felt natural to really lean into the audio—it’s such a core part of telling this story. I ended up using around seven or eight music cues, almost all recorded by me (some recently, some pulled from older stuff I had). Each one was placed to support the narrative beats and keep the emotional flow going.

I also layered in other sounds—heartbeat, city ambience, that kind of thing. One moment I really liked was how the opening builds: voices and applause get louder and louder until it just cuts to silence. It felt powerful, and it worked well to set the tone.

It was a cool challenge adapting to interactive audio. In theater, you know exactly when things will happen, but in a game, the player controls the pace. Took some tweaking to make sure the sound felt responsive no matter how someone played.

I also started to add more subtle things, like a background rumble and the train animation.

Luckily, she’s recovering extremely well and will be hopefully back up and around in no time. We had a long talk about the idea of interactive fiction, and how games have changed over all the time she’s been around on this planet. She told me that she never thought games could tell a story in this way, and was having trouble conceptualizing it as a game—”what’s the game?” she asked. But as she played it, she realized that she was “totally immersed in the feelings of the character,” and had lots of verbal and vocal reactions to the things happening. She was able to explore the apartment, which she really liked, and she was able to piece together the narrative just by finding objects around. I was impressed by her video game literacy—or maybe it was just so intuitive anyone could figure it out.

Final Playtest:

I playtested with Justine, a trumpet player friend of mine, who I imagine the target demographic of the game is.

Reflection

I set out to build a game that could translate a very specific, physical feeling—the scariness of performance anxiety—into an experience anyone could inhabit. I built Giant Steps.

I learned that empathy in games isn’t just about showing someone’s story. It’s also about making the interaction to allow players to feel the constraints of that story. The medium is the language itself. I also learned that “choice” is a flexible tool. By designing a path that was linear in outcome but wide in emotional understanding, I could make players feel the trapped sensation of anxiety rather than just observe it. The most valuable lesson was in the playtests—seeing someone else breathe along with the prompt or call the professor a “dick” was the only real proof the machine was working.

Next time, I’d prototype the “anxiety mechanics” even earlier. The heartbeat and breathing were late additions that became central; I’d want to find more of those visceral, interactive moments from the start. I’d also be bolder in trusting the player to sit with discomfort. Some of my initial writing was over-explanatory, trying to ensure the player “got it,” when the silence and the environmental details were often more powerful. Finally, I’d document my playtests better—so many insightful comments were lost to random recording errors (or me just being stupid and not writing anything down).