Play Our Room: luckycoding.itch.io/our-room
SPOILERS AHEAD:
Content warning: This game explores grief, the death of a friend, and references to a fire.
Estimated playtime: 30 to 90 minutes, depending on how much you explore. I recommend headphones and a mouse.
Overview
Our Room is an interactive narrative about losing a friend. It’s August 2014, and you’re Riley, a teenager spending another late night on their computer. There are old photographs, unfinished plans, emails and diary entries scattered across the desktop. Most of it seems pretty ordinary, until you start noticing that something isn’t quite right.
Eventually, you find ScribbleRoom, a drawing site where Riley used to spend time with their best friend, pip. You talk, draw together, make silly things and plan what to build in Craftopia, their shared block world. For a while, it almost feels like nothing has changed. But Riley’s files tell a different story. Some conversations stop in June, a news article mentions a fire, and even the drawings on the board begin to disappear.
When ScribbleRoom finally stops responding, Riley opens Craftopia and walks through the unfinished world Riley and pip made together. The path eventually leads to a lookout overlooking the sea, where two chairs are waiting. Four years later, Riley is preparing to leave for college, with one more letter left to write.
My goal was to build empathy for Riley, and for the grief of losing a friend, by letting players feel the friendship Riley misses instead of just telling them about it. You can’t change what happened to pip, but you can decide what Riley remembers, what you create together and what they eventually say goodbye to.
Figure 1: Riley’s desktop in phase 1.
How the idea changed
I started with a liminal space and a story about loss. The first story was set in a school computer lab, with a friend who had moved away and was going to die during the game. Lucas, one of the course assistants for CS 377G, couldn’t see why a player would be socializing in a computer lab. The lab was my experience, not a shared one. And I couldn’t justify pip dying on screen: if the outcome is inevitable, there’s nothing to do but wait. So I flipped the premise. pip had already died, and the game would be about how Riley keeps living. At first the player was a YCH (“your character here”), a blank for the player to fill in. After Sabrina told me about Emily Is Away, a game where you play a fixed character in a chat window, I made them a fixed character, Riley, because a set character was easier for people to sympathize with.
That also settled the endings. I had imagined three: a madness ending, where Riley retreats so far into Craftopia that they stay there, an acceptance ending, with a scheduled email from pip, and a sad ending, where a news report reveals the fire. Lucas, who was teaching our prototyping activity, said that a linear story can still have meaningful choices. That made me realize one ending was within the scope of my game. I also realized I couldn’t expect players to experience Riley’s grief exactly as Riley did. What I could do was help them understand why Riley was holding on, and hopefully feel for them through the friendship they shared with pip. I didn’t want players to feel like there was a right or wrong way for Riley to grieve, or that choosing the right dialogue would somehow fix what happened to pip. So I condensed everything into one ending. Everyone reaches the same lookout and sees Riley four years later, but what they remember from the journey is different. Players still decide what Riley draws, what they remember and what they say, without deciding how their grief should end.
The game, phase by phase
Phase 1: ScribbleRoom (rising action). The player explores Riley’s computer, finds the Wi-Fi password in the notes, and enters a private drawing room with pip. They reply to pip, draw and pin things, pick the house material (wood, brick or stone) and landmark (a pond, a huge tree or a lighthouse) for Craftopia, and draw Jerry, whom nobody tells them is a dog. All paths hit the same blackout and the gradual loss of pip.
Phase 2: Craftopia (rising action). One walked path through the world Riley and pip built. The house, landmark and Jerry the player chose are in it. All paths end at the lookout, where Riley finally breaks down over pip’s death, the climax of the story. For some players, this is also when they realize what happened.
Phase 3: four years later, a three-part thank-you (falling action). Riley thanks their friends through an ordinary group chat about a lake trip, the place they’re going through their acceptance letter, and pip through one more letter in Room 5. The letter has three moments with three options each, so there are 27 possible letters, and nobody answers it. Then Dani arrives and the player turns the computer off.
People: Riley (the player), pip, Dani (Riley’s friend from Maple Hollow, who emails in phase 1 and picks them up in phase 3), Jerry, and Mara and Jules (Riley’s friends in phase 3).
Branching choice map, part 1 of 3: phase 1, Riley’s computer. Click to open it full size.
Branching choice map, part 2 of 3: phase 2, Craftopia. Click to open it full size.
Branching choice map, part 3 of 3: phase 3, four years later. Click to open it full size.
Using the medium
I built Our Room in Unity, with Yarn Spinner handling dialogue and game state. I used AI tools as a development aid for the foundations of the desktop, windows and websites, and for a lot of help with Craftopia (it was really good at optimizing, so I could get it working for the web). I used Unity MCP alongside Claude. I still decided what it looked like, how players interact with it, and what those interactions mean. I didn’t want a visual novel with a picture of a computer behind it. The player opens folders, moves windows, reads email, drags photos and draws, and learns who Riley is through those familiar actions, with no narrator stopping to explain. It feels like snooping through someone’s real computer, and Butch, a recent Stanford graduate who TA’d CS 247G and CS 377G, said that going through someone’s device was exactly the kind of story he wanted.
Why the Empathy Machine looks old
The computer, the Empathy Machine, looks like an old Windows 98 desktop: pixelated, gray windows, an old browser. Part of that is nostalgia, and an old interface is an evocative space, one that draws on memories the player already has. But mostly it is character. The game is set in 2014 and 2018. I wanted the machine to feel out of date, as though Riley had kept it for years and was stuck in the past too. In phase 3 the desktop is still there, with new diary entries, but the browser is plainer and their life has changed. The computer preserves the past, but Riley doesn’t have to stay in it.
Who I designed for
My target audience was people who enjoy character-driven stories and exploring digital spaces. I especially had Bartle’s Explorers in mind: people who open every file, compare dates and try to piece together what happened. Riley’s diary stops after June, pip’s emails stop getting replies, and a news article mentions a fire, so the question shifts from “what happened to pip?” to “why is pip still answering?” This is embedded narrative: the story is spread through the virtual machine (called the Empathy Machine) for the player to piece together. I love this kind of storytelling in games like What Remains of Edith Finch, where you learn about someone through the things they left behind. Butch was probably the clearest Explorer I tested, spending about 20 minutes on Riley’s computer before entering ScribbleRoom. But I also wanted people who were more interested in spending time with pip than investigating every document to enjoy the game, and in a lot of my playtests I got the comment that the friendship between Riley and pip felt real. I left room for other kinds of play too. If you scribble over everything, pip responds when their drawings get vandalized, and the story progresses the same. Craftopia is built to be fun to move around in, with a bridge with gaps at the end that players can speedrun through.
What I didn’t plan for was how well the game worked for players who didn’t investigate. Some went almost straight to ScribbleRoom and read it as a chat between friends. When Riley kept talking to pip in Craftopia with no answer, they sensed something was wrong, and some only understood when Riley broke down at the lookout. Their experience was shock, not suspicion. Riley has always known, and the player is catching up with them. Sabrina, a Stanford junior and CS 377G peer, cried at the end of phase 2, at 44:52 of her recording (watch her session). Zeike, a Polish artist and online friend, hadn’t realized pip would be dead, so the breakdown shocked him and he cried. I wanted an attitude outcome (more empathy for Riley), an aesthetic outcome (nostalgia, companionship and sadness) and an information outcome (memories and relationships can stay meaningful even as you forget the details). I didn’t measure a lasting change in attitude, only how players reacted in the moment. What interested me most was Zeike saying he could imagine himself doing what Riley did. I wasn’t trying to make players experience Riley’s exact grief. I wanted them to understand why they were holding on.
Figure 2 (Sabrina’s recording, Oct 28, 44:52): the end of phase 2, when she cried.
Design choices
Jerry and the text tool. Jerry is the clearest choice that doesn’t change the ending. Nobody is told what Jerry is, so nearly everyone draws something different, and your Jerry returns in Craftopia. The mechanic is drawing, the dynamic is everyone doing something different, and the aesthetics I wanted are expression, then discovery. The drawing room also has a text tool that advances nothing, which players enjoyed. An affordance can be worth having without being needed to progress.
Figure 3: Jerry, according to my playtesters. He is supposed to be a dog.
Here’s a compilation of playtesters drawing Jerry.
Choosing what Riley and pip built. The player picks the house and landmark on the Craftopia map in phase 1, and they appear on the walk. After Bruce, a Berkeley sophomore, treated that screen like a puzzle, I rewrote every hover line to read as a memory (“brick. we were so proud of it”), so players choose what they remember, not what’s correct. That’s what makes the walk a return. A mechanic doesn’t produce its emotion by default: a slow walk gives an impatient player frustration, not reflection. Butch said the landmarks made him nostalgic for something he’d seen 15 minutes earlier.
The last image of phase 2. At the lookout the game takes the camera: it turns back to the two chairs (blue for pip, red for Riley), then rises and pulls away over the mountain until the screen goes black. An earlier ending leaned on the sun, and Krystal, a master’s student and CS 377G peer, said it looked like a Cheerio, which detracted from the final breakdown. The whole point of Craftopia was reaching this lookout. Riley and pip had decided where their two chairs would go, so I wanted the camera to return to a place meant for two people, where now only Riley is.
Figure 4: The camera has pulled away over the mountain, with the lookout and its two chairs small at the top.
Why phase 3 is a three-part thank-you. Phase 2 ends with Riley wishing for more time, and I didn’t want the breakdown to be the last word. It’s also a thank-you from me, to the friends who are here now, to the place I’m at, and to the person I lost. In the final letter, Riley admits that they’re starting to forget things about pip, that there are days they don’t think about pip at all, and that they’re scared to leave home. I wanted to show that even when we begin to forget what someone looked or sounded like, what they did for us can stay with us. The game doesn’t judge any of their answers, and nobody replies, because you can create but you can’t undo. The players I asked about phase 3 agreed that it felt like a necessary addition.
Making choices meaningful without changing the ending
Our Room has one ending, so agency here isn’t about changing what happens. It’s about who decides what Riley remembers, makes and tells pip. A choice felt meaningful when the game remembered it: the Jerry you drew stands in Craftopia, the house and landmark you picked are on the path, and the letter you write is one of 27. The limits are part of the meaning too. You can fill the gaps after the blackout but not restore pip’s drawings, and you can write to pip but not hear back.
Fewer branches wasn’t only about Ngoc, a Stanford alum, saying there were too many. Several dialogue options that lead to nearly identical replies aren’t more meaningful than one choice that changes something you see later, and fewer branches also let me control the pacing.
Early on, though, players had many choices that went nowhere, and they often didn’t know where to go. Ngoc said “less was more”, and she missed Craftopia entirely. That really encouraged me to railroad. I shortened pip’s lines, cut choices, added a more visible Craftopia map, one walked path, and notifications when players missed clues. Each change solved a real problem, but together they asked whether I was helping players or taking away their freedom to explore, which shrinks the possibility space. Some narrowing was right: pip’s death is what the game is about.
I eventually saw the limits of that approach, as I describe in the history. A linear story isn’t railroading. Railroading is when players feel their interactions don’t matter. In Our Room you can’t change the story, but you can leave your mark on it, and you still have room to look around. I don’t think linear stories are better than branching ones. This one suited what I wanted, and a fixed story doesn’t have to limit exploration.
History of the playtests
Sixteen people played between Oct 18 and Oct 31, and Lucas played twice. Most sessions were recorded on Zoom, and I link the recordings I use. Six of them are women (Sabrina, Yuelan, Krystal, Ngoc, Julianna and Riley, my friend) and ten are men (Lucas, Aden, Max, Jeffery, Bruce, Kafkell, SweetWaffle, Bunsen, Zeike and Butch). For most of them, being in my target audience simply meant that they took the time to explore the computer and resonated with specific parts of the game. All of the players I played with were between 18 and 23. From this, I would recommend the game for ages 16 and up (players who are mature), but it is geared more toward this generation of playtesters, since the nostalgia would land harder for them.
Round 1: Finding the premise and the interface (Oct 18 to 20)
Lucas’s first playtest (Oct 18) showed me the computer lab didn’t work, so the game moved to Riley’s computer at night. He also found that pip talked a lot for someone who is supposed to be depressed, so I shortened pip’s lines. Lucas was excited about my game, though he didn’t explore much. (Target audience: yes.) Aden, a Stanford senior and CS 377G peer, found pip’s doodles slow, so I made pip draw faster. Aden thought it was cool, but I’m not sure he resonated with the story. (Target audience: unclear, since I only showed him a prototype.) Later I decided pip wouldn’t draw live while Riley is there, so the board holds drawings that already existed.
Sabrina’s tip (Oct 19 to 20, not a playtest) was Emily Is Away, and that is when the player became a fixed character, Riley. Max, a freshman and friend from a club, found the computer hard to use, so I added Back and Up buttons and resizable windows. He also wished the Wi-Fi password was hidden behind a document, which became the Wi-Fi gate. Max cared more about the virtual machine than the story. (Target audience: no.)
Round 2: Making pip feel real (Oct 22 to 23)
Lucas played again (Oct 22). He liked the pixel style and the anole turning brown, but he couldn’t tell his drawings from pip’s, so everything pip draws now shares one style. Some of pip’s lines felt like tech support, so I rewrote the conversation. He didn’t know what Craftopia was, so I added a background change and a shortcut. He also said he didn’t yet feel sad for Riley and that the player needs to see Riley panic after the reveal, which is why the breakdown stayed.
Ngoc (Oct 23) loved the anole too, but she felt lost: pip talked too much and there were too many choices (“less was more”). I shortened pip’s lines, cut choices, and made phase 2 a single path. She also missed Craftopia entirely, so I added the map and a shortcut. Ngoc is an artist who plays Valorant and League of Legends, but also enjoys art-driven games. (Target audience: yes.)
Round 3: Testing the emotional journey (Oct 24 to 28)
Riley (a friend, not the game’s character) and Julianna, a sophomore and a junior who are best friends from back home, were the first to play with the Craftopia map (Oct 24). They missed the email and news, so I added notifications, and they found the walking slow. Riley explored a lot, and she plays Minecraft, so she loved Craftopia. Julianna resonated with losing friends. (Target audience: yes, both.)
Figure 5 (Riley and Julianna’s recording, Oct 24): the email thread with pip, including “we should actually finish our house”.
Figure 6 (Riley and Julianna’s recording, Oct 24): the start of the Craftopia walk, which they found slow.
Jeffery, a master’s student and CS 377G teammate (Oct 26), loved the computer’s affordances and called Craftopia “mind-blowing”. He found the walk too slow and called himself impatient, so I added a sprint. He also pointed out change blindness: people may miss the disappearing drawings. He explored a lot and loved Craftopia. (Target audience: definitely yes.)
Figure 7 (Jeffery’s recording, Oct 26): the shared room with his drawings on the board, including a flower and a “HI” speech bubble.
Yuelan, a Stanford student with some Unity experience (Oct 27), asked whether pip was her and forgot she’d logged in as Riley. She didn’t look at the documents that matter and didn’t know what Craftopia was, so she suggested a hint on the computer, like an ad or an update for the game. (Target audience: unclear, since our session was rushed into class time.)
Sabrina’s full playtest (Oct 28, recording) is where she cried at the end of phase 2 (44:52). She wondered whether pip was a ghost or a memory and wanted clearer direction on where to go next. Phase 3 broke when she played it, but she still felt it was a necessary addition. She resonated with the game. (Target audience: yes.) Krystal (Oct 28) found that the story sped up before she could read it (“things are happening without me”), and in Craftopia she wished it would pause when she stopped moving. She said the sun at the end looked like a Cheerio, which detracted from the final breakdown. Krystal didn’t explore much because she was short on time, but she got her own story and message from the game. (Target audience: yes.)
Round 4: Refining and breaking the game (Oct 29 to 30)
Bruce (Oct 29) treated the house screen as a puzzle. I rewrote every hover line to read as a memory (“brick. so many bricks” became “brick. we were so proud of it”) and removed the blue box over a choice. Bruce plays Valorant and League of Legends. He enjoyed the story and played slowly. (Target audience: yes.)
Figure 8 (Bruce’s recording, Oct 29): the room right after the first blackout.
Kafkell, a UCLA junior, tried to break the game and found photos overlapping the exit bar and windows that broke interactions. I fixed these the next day. Kafkell approached the game differently from my intended audience. Instead of investigating the story, he was the most disruptive player, a Killer type who deliberately tried to see what he could break, which was useful at this stage. (Target audience: no.) SweetWaffle, a sophomore and online friend, and Bunsen, a senior and an MIT friend I met over the summer, mostly found more bugs, which is what I wanted from this stage. SweetWaffle is an artist who plays games. Bunsen enjoys narrative driven games. (Target audience: yes for both.)
Zeike (Oct 30) played while we chatted, so I have his chat log. He started out loving the dynamic between pip and Riley. He hadn’t noticed the clues until I pointed them out, and he didn’t realize pip would be dead. Then he reacted strongly to the ending and cried, and soon after he said it was something he would do himself and asked to show it to his friends. He explored, but only suspected that something was wrong until phase 2. (Target audience: yes.)
Round 5: Testing exploration and freedom (Oct 31)
Butch was my final playtest, and I describe it in the next section, with the full recording and transcript. Butch explored a lot. (Target audience: yes.)
What Butch made me question. Ngoc’s playtest pushed me to cut choices and add a map, a shortcut and notifications. Butch, the kind of player I’d originally designed for, got frustrated when he accidentally advanced and couldn’t go back to what he was doing. I’d started treating exploration as something to manage instead of something players should enjoy. I still think the story needs to be linear, but I don’t think the exploration needs to be.
The final playtest
Butch’s session on Oct 31 was my final playtest. He played for about 80 minutes and then gave feedback. The whole session is recorded (watch the recording), and the full transcript is attached as a file (Butch-Playtest-Transcript.txt). Timestamps are from the recording. The Craftopia part of the recording is very choppy, so for that part the transcript is the better source.
He investigated everything. He started by saying that going through someone’s device was exactly the kind of story he wanted (00:02:25). He opened every note to prep them before reading (00:05:06). He reached ScribbleRoom after about 20 minutes (00:24:28), which takes me about three, because he likes exploring everything he can before doing what he’s “supposed to do” (00:24:41). Soon after, he guessed that pip might be a figment of Riley’s imagination, because pip was online after Riley had missed a week of school and never mentioned it (00:26:33). He later said that pip’s birthday on August 9th and Dani’s email made him know something had gone wrong, “two documents before anything else” (01:23:56). He said it gave him Her Story vibes.
Drawing Jerry. He said drawing Jerry was a lot of pressure, since he can’t draw (00:30:22), and he drew from 00:32:10 until 00:36:31. He was the only one who used text, and he told me text is a great affordance: it doesn’t go to a mechanic, but it gave him joy from something unessential, and I should talk about that in my write-up (01:59:59). The drawing didn’t feel important at the time, but when he saw it again in Craftopia, it felt much more important, because he felt he had contributed to it.
Figure 9 (00:34:00): Butch with Jerry drawn and labelled.
Craftopia. He didn’t follow the path. He called it a walking sim and said it’s how he’d play every game (01:00:09), and he jumped the gap at the bridge and then went back (01:09:14). At the booth he asked whether it was a representation of what he drew (01:05:33). In phase 3 he liked seeing the old room before and after (01:12:52).
What resonated. He said the email about finishing the house in Craftopia rang true: every time anyone makes Minecraft plans, they say “we should actually finish this”, and it never happens (00:21:25). He said choices which don’t change the path are still powerful (01:23:17), and that he cares about the story more than player agency (01:29:56). He said the game combines the best features of Her Story, Emily is Away and You’re Gone, “in the most flattering way” (01:34:00 to 01:39:16). That made me really happy as I have yet to play those games!
What went wrong. pip moved on after he pressed the debug skip, and he couldn’t go back, so he said “that wasn’t clear” (00:36:54 to 00:39:10). At 00:57:09 he clicked “done drawing” before the new email arrived because he reads fast, and the story stalled because the game couldn’t keep up. I’ve fixed that. One of his complaints, which he said wasn’t even a big deal because it’s funny, was that the shutdown button force-quit instead of giving a warning (01:40:08). His main criticism was that he wanted more to explore in certain sections, to create more of an emotional impact.
Figure 10 (00:57:09): “done drawing” showing, as he says he clicked it before the email.
What he suggested. Most of his advice came near the end (01:43:08 to 01:55:48). He wanted ScribbleRoom to say more clearly that you’re free to do whatever you want, or to let you go back, because he dislikes being forced to move on in a game where exploring is rewarding. He thought Craftopia hit harder than ScribbleRoom, but each landmark gave him one sentence when he wanted more. He also felt the climax background colour was an afterthought, and he said I don’t need to modernize the computer in phase 3 (01:39:59). If I ever publish it, he said I should make Craftopia its own experience, not just a Minecraft homage (02:08:22).
He called the narrative “100% there” for a P2, said the ending was “impactful” (01:23:56), and said the game has the potential to be publishable with months more work (02:08:22). Watching him turn my 30-minute game into almost two hours was really rewarding, and the feedback he has given me is feedback I can take with me into P4.
What I chose not to change
Most of the feedback I got went into the game, so what I left alone was mostly on purpose. pip’s death stays fixed. The walk stays long, because the change from conversation to an empty world should be felt, though I added a sprint and, later, on-screen hints for Shift to sprint and Space to jump, which also go into the chat history. I’m not explaining phase 1, and players read it as memory, ghost or imagination. I kept the Empathy Machine’s old look.
Ideas I dropped: a wallpaper change after the blackout, the computer-lab setting, branching paths, and letting the player pick a name. Overall, players felt these were good changes.
Reflection
I knew from the start that the hardest part would be making players feel the grief of losing a friend, which meant connecting them to Riley. At first I had players input their own name, but I realized that for this game, players seemed to empathize more easily with someone else in the situation than when they imagined themselves in it. They look at someone else and imagine what they’re going through. That’s why Riley is a fixed character, and why phase 1 is mostly ordinary conversation: players had to spend time with pip, laugh at their jokes and draw things together before the absence meant anything. That is how I tried to help players understand Riley. Sabrina and Zeike both cried at the ending, which made me happy in a weird way. I had made something that genuinely affected people.
I also learned how differently people play. I designed for investigators, and the surprise was that players who skipped the clues still reached the loss, through Craftopia and Riley’s breakdown. I learned to value both, without pretending I planned both. And Ngoc said “less was more”, which really encouraged me to railroad. Butch showed me where that went too far, and that players need more to explore.
Looking back, the biggest thing I’d change is being less afraid to playtest early. I was nervous about showing people something unfinished, but some of my best changes came from watching someone use something that barely worked. I’m really grateful for such a supportive cohort. Their excitement and feedback helped me keep pushing the game forward.
So thank you everyone who playtested my game and took the time to read my post!
