Postmortem

There was a lot that went right and wrong with this project. First of all, I am not at all familiar with Twine, which is the engine I used to make this game, and I am also not very familiar with coding. Twine makes it quite easy to make narrative games with little coding knowledge, however i overestimated what I could do and ended up struggling quite a bit towards the end. It was lots of fun regardless though! I learned a lot through this entire process. 

My first week I spent doing lots and lots of research on Twine and basic coding principles. I wanted to wrap my head around what was and was not possible with this tool. I knew that I did not have much time to work on this game, so I tried to keep it as short as I could, without sacrificing any story or meaning the game has to offer. This balance was tough to find for me. In the end, I decided to go for a heavily interactive game, almost like a personality quiz, but much more abstract. My reasoning for this was that I am not much of a writer, and would rather not make a fully fledged story with characters and events in it. I wanted to make this game a personal experience for each player. This decision seemed like the easiest for me at first, but as I kept working on the game I realized that there would need to be lots of choices and questions for the player to make sure the game is not super short and forgettable. This wasn't a big issue until it was time to start working on my endings, which I will be talking about later in this postmortem.

My process after doing my research and deciding on a concept started with script writing. I started my script on a Word document, and found it quite difficult to find a good way to start my "story". I did however find it easier to write as I kept writing more. Everything seemed to flow much nicer than how it begun. Once I had a basic outline of my script, I switched back to Twine and started putting everything in. I wrote the script, added choices with different paths, and wrote more script for that too. This process was quite fun for me even though it started out being challenging! When I was getting close to finishing my script, I noticed that my game was going to be too short. I decided to try to come up with more questions and choices to offer the player in an attempt to extend my game, while trying to make sure I don't drag it on for too long.

This is where things started to go wrong for me. I did not think enough about how I would implement endings into my game, and kind of went with the flow instead. I was sure I could figure the code out once the time comes, which is not exactly what ended up happening. Since this game has so many questions and outcomes, there were a lot of overlapping outcomes as well. Due to this, I decided to make endings by assigning variables to each important choice the player makes, which I would use in the end of the game to determine what ending the player gets. I ended up with way too many variables to keep track of, which caused way too many endings, and I could not keep up with every single outcome. While adding the drawings for each outcome would not be much of a struggle, as the differences between the endings are very minor, figuring out the code for it was extremely challenging. I was able to code up to 60 endings into the game, and did not have the time figure out all other outcomes. This also caused me to delay the art for the game. As a result, I was unable to create any visuals for my game and there are no meaningful endings implemented yet. I was atleast able to customize the color palette of my game!

I would love to keep working on this game once I get more time! I am hoping to find a more efficient way of implementing my endings in the future... For now this is all I have, and I am quite proud of it even though there were aspects that made me struggle quite a bit.