reflective concrete

personal twine game assignment

intro to narrative game design NYU w/ Clara Fernandez-Vara

with a few songs by pánico.

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Post-Mortem:

With my twine story, I tried to play around with the form of the twine story by exploring what thinking is to me. Instead of having long passages with choices at the end of them, I played around with the idea of movement through images. I feel like the best thinking always comes in movement, which is why I wanted the player to be able to traverse all the passages easily. However, I feel there is always an initial barrier to thinking and reflecting, but once you get over it it becomes easy to just doze off. I tried to express this barrier through the action of initially having to search for the controls or the thoughts themselves. This system never changes though, and you only have to learn it once.

As to the thoughts themselves, I went through a few variations of what they were. At first they were all telling a long story, and you had to read every single one to properly understand what was going on. However, after various playtests I noticed that no one actually wanted to read every single thought and sometimes people just wanted to walk. I realized that the thoughts had to be able to stand on their own. Changing this actually helped to further expressed the main concept of the game. Players can now simply read a few thoughts which then accompany them on their walk. I kept the thoughts abstract enough for them to be able to mean different things than what they mean to me, and hopefully players will be able to think and reflect about some of these things, while in movement.