The Black Hare Log #5

I'm back to my Black Hare shenanigans, and this time, I have a log that's a little more geared towards challenges and concerns rather than new features (though there are certainly a few of those that will be coming up in the next log). 

 

 

Current Status

• The game has approx. 40k words and 280 passages
• Finished the Vigilante route in the Prologue!!! 💪

The good news is that I'm about 99.99% done with the Vigilante Route (and the Genevieve and Kane sub-route setups) in the Prologue. There's just a tad bit of editing that needs to be done.

 

Snippet

His smile turns a little sad, and he looks down at his hands. "Oh," he says quietly, "no."

You shift slightly, keenly aware of the change in atmosphere.

"Things... got away from me," he says. For a moment, there is only silence. He raises a hand and rubs the white stubble on his cheek. "There were times when I was close. I thought I could really make it happen for us. But life has a way of sticking its foot out and making you trip when you're not looking." He shrugs and looks back up at you.

"It's alright," he continues. "We had a good life together, anyway. We made a home, and we had beautiful children, and we had family and friends who loved and cared for us. We had a community." His smile eases, and he doesn't seem quite as sad anymore. 

"Not all dreams come true," he adds at last, lifting his cane and putting it back down with a final thump.

Challenges and Concerns

(1) Missed Opportunities

I suppose this is a three-in-one type of a deal: it's a challenge, it's a concern, and it's a feature. Nifty. 

The current design of the game is a pretty unforgiving one, you could say. What do I mean by this? Here's an example:

You are exploring the train to Talesmoth in the prologue. You can visit a number of different train cars. You visit the vista car. There are three conversations you can choose to engage in: a woman, an old man, and a couple. You talk to the couple and the woman, but ignore the old man. You leave the vista car and explore the rest of the train. In the end, you decide, Actually, I think I will talk to that old man in the vista car that I ignored last time. 

It's too late; you can't get back into the vista car. You missed your opportunity to speak to him, and now you'll never know what he has to say - even if it's information that could have given you more context or helped you in some way. The vista car is marked complete when you leave it, and thus you cannot return to it. 

At first I thought this would be a bad idea. A game is a game, after all, and we don't want to needlessly punish the player. Then I thought to myself that there was a small degree of realism there - the small window of opportunity, which if lost, seems to be lost forever. At times, the window will come back again, but there are many, many times where the opportunity is gone. I don't think of this as punishing the player; important information that is critical for the progression of the game will not be something they can miss like this, and there will be a few moments where the same option is provided later on in the story in another context. 

That being said, additional information that would enrich player experience and provide them with more lore and information can be missed in this way. It's much less punishing to the player, and much more chance-and-fate coded, which is something I'd like to go for in this game.

(2) Adding Game Art

So, I've been doing a little bit of pixel art of late, and I'm excited at the idea of making some pixel art for this Twine game - the sprites for the characters, or images of items, etc. I may even create them as gifs to give them a little animation. That being said, however, I'm still a little bit lost at how to make sure that the art I have in my game is accessible for players. I believe I'll have to package them together - having the art folder included in the game. But I wonder what the limit is?

On the one hand, I don't want to make a huge game; ideally, I'd like to keep it under 500 MB (that's just a number that I got from my brain and which seems to me to be wildly reasonable, but we'll see how that holds up). Pixel art is a great way of keeping the file sizes down in terms of the graphic assets. But on the other hand, I want to include a lot of art. I wonder if a balance must be struck, or if most computers won't have an issue playing the game even with an abundance of game art included. 

(3) Tone and Style

I joked a bit online about making this a fantasy noir, but I'm seriously considering the shift in tone. I'll have to experiment with it so that it's not too heavy-handed with the noir mood, but I think something quite cool can come out of it. This idea is really important to me, because right now I feel like the story is lacking in tone and style. 

It seems rather lackluster in the storytelling overall, and a lot of that is probably due to the fact that this is my first "real" full-on try with an interactive fiction, so the medium is new to me, and also due to the fact that I've read and re-read the thing about a thousand times as I edit and debug and playtest. Maybe leaving it as-is for now and giving it a final "style" polish later on towards the end of the project might diminish the chance of me getting too bored with my own writing, and allow me to have a more accurate look at how the story actually feels for readers.

 

 

⭐Join my Google Group to receive my newsletter. ⭐