P2: Expect the Unexpected (Jessica)

Game Overview and Initial Concept

Expect the Unexpected is an interactive fiction game that explores the joys, challenges, and everyday decisions involved in raising a child during their first year of life. The idea for this game initially came when brainstorming what I know during P1. However, as I continued to think about how a similar idea could increase empathy for young families in P2, I began to think about how parenting is often framed as an individual responsibility, even though so much of the parenting experience is shaped by the communities, workplaces, and policies surrounding families. Especially in a political climate that claims to want to support increased birth rates, I wanted to create an experience that would encourage players to reflect not only on how they would raise their own child, but also on how their decisions could make the world a better place for other families. The game begins during pregnancy and follows the player through their child’s first birthday, combining humorous, relatable moments with opportunities to consider larger social issues. 

While the prompt is to create an experience “where players explore space and experience a gripping story”, this game relies primarily on evocative story telling inviting people to explore their own lives and choices as opposed to another land. The magic circle allows players to experience a streamlined and optimistic view of the potential in our communities and families as opposed to an imagined space. It invites you to snuggle up with a blanket and hot chocolate instead of grip your seat. 

Please play the game now or risk cheating!

https://jyauney.itch.io/expect-the-unexpected

My initial concept mapping focused on two categories of decisions: personal parenting choices, such as breastfeeding versus formula feeding or when to introduce sugar, and broader societal choices, such as advocating for paid parental leave, accessible sidewalks, and affordable childcare. While the personal decisions are presented as equally valid options that help players shape their parenting experience, the societal decisions have consequences that accumulate throughout the game. I also wanted to capture the positive emotional experience of parenting so I scoped a digital baby photo book that gradually fills with memories as the child grows but only based on the consequential choices you make. Ultimately, my goal was to create an experience that feels like a personal journey through parenthood while encouraging players to not only empathize with families but recognize that society collectively shapes and supports parenting and people can take action to support them.

Interactive Development

I had my first playtest with a young female Stanford student. My current draft of the game prioritized the parenting scenarios and left the consequences of the choices and the game map for future development. This was made clear when the playtester praised the scenarios but expressed questions about the impact of the choices. They nodded along with scenarios, said Aww and mumbled about “universal rights.” However, they explained that as the game is currently designed it feels very educational and seems more like a quiz than a game. It is important that the choices given convey real agency. They suggested that you could go deeper into each scenario giving the player time to sit with their actions. They also suggested that choices have payoffs so that they cannot simply always choose the ‘correct’ answer. They also expressed difficulty tracking how old the child was. 

Some changes were made to fix bugs including embedding variables in links, fixing the order of one passage, and ensuring that the dad perspective persists correctly. She also commented twice about not knowing what something meant so passages were added to explain them.

I added several custom elements to support game play and information management. I added a timeline that tracks the child’s growth.

I added a list of your accomplishments at the end. It was basic and unformatted but should allow for feedback.

I added additional passages for three of the consequential choices. I also attempted to increase the feeling of narrative by adding additional use of “Disasters” as discussed in class but purposely included positive and negative disasters.

At this point, I felt like my original vision had been met. I would happily share this game any friend who asks about advice for having kids.

The teaching team shared advice that I check out “Are You Still You: A First Year Survival Challenge for New Parents” and the beginning is somewhat interesting and similar but relatively quickly I saw that it made two choices that I do not want to make. The title, the icon, and the 3 health bars communicated a game where the focus really is survival. While I understand the challenge personally, I think that view in fact represents an antipattern that while it may create sympathy for parents, falls short of accurately representing the experience and fails to support families as part of our community. It begs the question why, have children and I want anything I create to make it clear that each struggle has a pay off. Additionally the first passage makes an assumption about how I will parent. At that it makes an assumption that is counter to medical advice. If possible breastfeeding is medically advisable and barring significant medical challenges, should still be pursued even if there are challenges during week 1. If dad is feeding the baby at 3 am that also implies that they are using a bottle which should not be introduced until several weeks later lest the baby have difficulty with nipple confusion. This reinforced my desire to not add a lot of health bars and to not assume any significant parenting decisions.

My second playtest was with a father of a 1 year old who is in his 30s. He is a gamer who plays things like League of Legends and Balder’s Gate. Video can be seen here: Video_2026-10-20_15-25-07.mp4 With narration, he spent 26 minutes playing through the full game. He had a positive reaction to realizing that elements of the story were borrowed from our family’s experience.

He struggled with the interface (1:00) so I added whitespace between photos and links. 

At 2:25 even though he is already a dad (and his sister-in-law swears by the spatula), he chose to take the optional side quest to learn what the spatula is. This suggests that this addition made based on the first playtest was useful. At 3:25 he comments that the questions don’t feel like they are resulting in a branching storyline. In part, I think it may be because the passage he was reading did not correctly assign the role so I fixed that. However, the story up to that point was linear in the hopes that slowly adding mechanics would allow easier onboarding and would prevent people from accidentally going off track early on.

Overall it felt very positive. At 4:30, 6:30, 9:40, and 13:40 he started discussing his opinion well beyond the question asked. This is evidence of the type of learning and empathy building that I hope the game provides. However, the biggest question at this time is how I can make answers feel impactful when I explicitly do NOT want many of the choices to be impactful. He commented several times about wanting a more visible impact of his choices. It was fascinating that at 12:00 he is excited that there is answer dependence based on his choice to cosleep. The reality of the game is that all 3 choices are reasonable so you get the same feedback regardless as this is an inconsequential choice. At 23:45 he entirely misses the feedback that he missed a photo opportunity. At 26:00 he realizes that he missed two photos but he doesn’t know how he missed them. Optimally this would lead to curiosity about the missed opportunities. I added more information to the end game summary to see if this helps meet this goal in the next playtest.

My next playtest was with a woman in her 20s who does not have children or an immediate interest.

Here is the link to the recording: https://stanford.zoom.us/rec/share/mAkTwLrsmLBgU0mLoKU_NifchU29rYDDRdYkiIqqxW4v2IKpbUrwXhruwXZ5hCht.x4XiohsNEeCBvIbw  Passcode: hR9Q=%9Q

Several small fixes needed to be made to the game mechanics to ensure playability. For example, at 0:45 she selects one of the paths that is purposely a short dead end. However, I want to make it easier for her to choose to play again so I added an in-game link instead of relying on the restart button.

At times she acknowledged that the answer was specific to the choice (1:20) but also commented on feeling like the introduction to the game did not acknowledge choices (8:00) so I added small acknowledgements of two early choices. Several times in the game, she took significant time to decide her response (6:45 and 7:20) which shows evidence that the game is impacting the player’s thinking. At 7:30, she audibly laughs and smiles which is evidence that my aesthetic intent of cute and happy seems to be realized. She specifically calls out that she appreciates the different choices for different people’s style (7:30) and is adamant that she would not accept a structural challenge (8:45) which is potentially the best evidence that my goal to have people respect different parenting choices but support the group collectively is being met.

She suggested the addition of sound so I added several sound components. This should contribute to the theme and ambiance expanding the embedded narrative from images to include sound.

• https://freesound.org/people/gumballworld/sounds/398552/
• https://freesound.org/people/f-r-a-g-i-l-e/sounds/613089/
• https://freesound.org/people/reinsamba/sounds/49727/

TA feedback at this point suggested that instead of allowing players to play as mom or dad “to stay within scope for the timeline, consider limiting to 1 perspective and really building empathy for that person!” I have ignored this feedback for several reasons. Logistically I have already fully implemented both perspectives so it would be additional work to remove it. I also have had players play down both paths in playtests successfully. From a narrative standpoint, I do not want to create empathy for moms or dads, I want to create empathy for parents. If you were to limit the game to one gender you would either reinforce gender norms or seem to be explicitly countering gender norms and I do not want to do that.

My next playtest was with a woman in her 20s who does not have children or an immediate interest.

Here is the link to the recording:  https://stanford.zoom.us/rec/share/Chj-_UyyMxI3t_66J6exRgt8ebyU2_B9o5lqT7T1aHu2-g4xBUN-ZIf8xpYRmOgw.3yevlrTmuqPi7bnU  Passcode: FZIF2d$E

She gave generally positive feedback including for the sound effects (5:00) and photo book (6:30). She also positively engaged with the photos of Leo (9:00). She also engaged with the questions (12:40). Small updates to the narrative were needed due to some confusion (5:45) but otherwise the playtest was uneventful. I followed her suggestion to bold a single important element of each narrative.

The last playtest that I completed was with a man in his 20s who does not have children or an immediate interest.

Here is the link to the recording: https://stanford.zoom.us/rec/share/jbv-P_hQb-NIfRIPAnYw1324hqOZrlZmT-u34dAmkzREoXWyAyaCjCbi1NiWu2AQ.GL-rj7Afa-cfDQvW  Passcode: r.ktYB*5

They chose paths that had not been previously explored and were more observant so there were many small corrections. These included clarifying small things like “baby’s name” or diner and moving links. The most significant update was the choice to remove the energy bar and replace it with short narrative feedback to support the intended experience where players are naturally weighing time costs instead of creating an arbitrary external one. Several of the ideas that they questioned were very intentional and remain unchanged. For example the slight annoyance with repetitive children’s song that gets tuned out over time and a quick anxiety when a baby is crying. They were concerned by the lack of workplace specifics but that is not the focus of the game so I am okay leaving the player to fill in those blanks.

Their style of play also led them to realize more than other players what they had missed (44:05). They made a reasonable request that the photos they collected could persist through game play. Sadly given the timeline that is not something I can complete at this time. They also pointed out that if someone is meant to imaging themselves in the game then having someone else in their spot in the picture is counter productive (50:00). I think it would be awesome to use AI to integrate them into the photos and that would actually be quite feasible if not for the deadline.

However, they still had broadly positive feedback for the information provided (12:10), the consideration for systemic concerns (13:50), the baby age timeline (25:20), and the breadth of the narratives (47:45). They also showed significant concern for the challenges reflecting out loud about their own experiences as a child (22:16). They shared that they did feel significant empathy for new parents and more importantly for the systemic challenges faced by them (48:00).

The TA’s also suggested that moving the timeline to be always present would help give more visual impact of your choices. If I were to move this to another platform that would be very reasonable. However, given the limitations of Twine, I chose not to do this because it would be visually chaotic. They also suggested an animation that appears when you’ve gained a new photo, each photo has its own passage which in my opinion is the equivalent of an animation in Twine. 

The playtest done by the person most in my target audience was with a woman in her 20s who is considering growing her family.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1s7Lq63_MmcA_cIDoVbneRN7RYSdgU8Am/view?usp=sharing

Overall the playthrough went extremely smoothly with only minor tweaks.

• At 1:19 she struggled with what to do after selecting “Cool Auntie”. I still want to allow people to select this choice and read the list of tips to support parents but I also want them to know they can play the full game as a parent so I added more explicit language to say just that.
• At 14:11 she pointed out an error in the narrative because I had reordered the passage so I fixed the tense of the narrative.
• At 16:55 she pointed out a ‘glitch’ in the variable injection so I fixed that

Generally she reported that it was fun and laughed throughout (17:35, 18:14) at comments like “Apparently the baby is still in there is insufficient”(5:00). The most interesting part of this playtest for me was that she laughed significantly more and was visibly more engaged when her husband unexpectedly joined her. They laughed at the passage ‘they’ were in (7:36). They also commented and laughed about how the images looked like my family (8:00). While I initially discounted the joy people had in recognizing us this seems to be reflective of some of the topics in the zine reading where the game is more like a youtube video of our son walking just a game version. 

This made me wonder if players would have more fun if they were explicitly playing with a partner. I somewhat jokingly considered that this would be a great game to play on a date to determine if there are any significant compromises that need to be discussed before having kids.

In regards to accessing learning and gaining empathy. She clicked on both of the optional learning passages and had a positive reaction to both (3:26, 6:10). Which is positive. It was interesting to see her audibly argue for her position on the consequential questions (3:06) and explain that she recognized some of the answers as correct but struggles to complain (10:36). I think there is some bias in how I wrote the options so that I am leading the player to certain answers but I am happy to see players still choosing honestly. Part of me worried about people not collecting all the photos and not caring but I have come to feel that it is okay and regardless of the choices they make people gain empathy for parents. If someone is enough of a gamer to want to find the perfect path that is available to them but is unnecessary for my target audience.

One additional improvement I made as I reflected on the affordances of Twine was to add alt-text to all images. Interactive Fiction naturally is one of the more accessible forms of digital game for players with visual impairment. The text can be easily read by a variety of tools. However, images are an important part of my game so I chose to ensure that they can be accessed by tools like screen readers.

With infinite time, it would be fun to add mechanics for resources (packing the diaper bag) and add many more photos (and connected statements about how society can support families) but I think I’ll decide to go collect more photos of my own little one playing.

Branching Choice Map

The game includes a total of 28 scenarios. Any image that fits in the length of the experience is not legible but you can see that is largely linear. At the start of the game there are single passage deviations from the path and as time continues there are additional deviations of up to 4 passages long.

This visual breaks the lines into 4 lines that proceed from top to bottom and highlight the questions and consequences. One scenario is meant to teach the player that taking photos is a consequential part of the game. 13 of the scenarios are consequential and determine if the player can collect an image for the baby book. The green lines point to the places where a photo collection occurs. The first two of these choices have passages that provide players feedback regarding if they got it ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. The remaining 14 scenarios are fun and have multiple correct answers. There are several passages that collect state data including the player’s role, the name of the baby, and the gender of the baby. Other state tracks what actions were taken and what photos were collected which are used to provide a final accomplishment list and baby book.

Reflection

I built a game that made me immensely happy. It also brought joy to several of my friends that I expected to like it. My husband initially tried to convince me that I had no taste in video games, because I don’t regularly play them. I argued that I just don’t have his taste in video games. I believe that this game is one example of what Anna Anthropy spoke about in Rise of the Videogame Zinesters. I made a game that is the equivalent of a youtube video I share with my friends who are thinking about having kids that shows the joy and helps them begin thinking through the challenges and a youtube video for friends who ask what they can do to support the people in their lives having children. It does not have mainstream video game appeal but it was never supposed to. I feel one step closer to being able to label myself a gamer but I am still not quite there despite running into problems in class because I have played so many games. As long as my grade isn’t tanked because I interpreted “gripping” differently I hope to own my unique preferences just a little more in P3/P4 but also in my role in computing broadly.

Note on AI Usage: I asked AI to make my photos appear animated so as to make them slightly less identifiable. I also used it to debug the html/css elements.