Post Mortem

Introduction

I started the project with the idea of writhing a story about a village of people who can not speak but have the ability to see the future. The main character has a different vision of the future from everyone else in the village. I thought there was not enough dynamic to push the story forward, so I decided to add an outsider from a modern city who travels to the village of the main character and will help him figure out what is the real future. 

At the beginning, I wanted this story to have a branching out structure and several very different endings. For example, I had endings of the city attacking the village, the village attacking the city, peace between the two places, conspiracy between the Goddess and the General who are the two leaders of the two places. In addition to that, each of those endings had two sub-endings of whether the main character’s vision is true or not. I tried to make the choices that players make influence what the future would be in the game, but then I found it a little confusing and it also blurred the focus of the story of revealing the truth instead of changing it. As a result, I narrowed down the four main endings to two by deciding a main storyline for players.

Another thing that I wanted to include in the story is the cultural difference between the village and the city. I planned to talk about the cultural backgrounds of the village by letting the main character show the outsider his hometown and that of the city when the main character get there. I cut those down because it slowed down the story a lot and it would take too much time to go into too many details. As a result, I just briefly mentioned the cultural difference through dialogues between the two characters.

What went right (3 things)

Ink Language

This is the first time for me to use the Ink language. I’m very glad that I didn’t encounter many problems with the Ink and that I learned a lot by actually using it in a game. At the beginning, I tried to write everything without knots but it became really confusing and very hard for me to find which ones should merge into the same thing. Then I googled things and figured that using knots would be way easier and cleaner. In addition to knots, I also tried to use variables that decide which ending the player would get to. Another thing I learned about Ink is that using “+” instead of “*” can stop choices from disappearing when players are provided another chance of choosing a different choice for the same action.

Speaking vs. Not Speaking

In the story, people in the village are not able to speak, but people in the city can. To show the difference between spoken words and sign language/written words, I used different quotation marks: “” for spoken words and 「」for not spoken ones. I didn’t directly tell players that the main character is not actually speaking. When the outsider visits the village, I tell players through his voice like “why no one in the village want to talk to me” with regular quotation marks and let the main character reply「that’s because no one here is able to speak」with narrator telling that those are written words.

Story Structure Map

This is my first time trying to create a story structure map and it really helped me figure out which choice lead to which result and what is the main story line as a whole. I also used different colors to mark different things, for example, blue for variables, purple for if statements, and red for endings. The neat story structure map also helped me a lot when putting things in Ink. It became way cleaner to see where I should start a knot and where I should go to another knot.

What went wrong (3 things)

Time Management

I planned to draw background images and do a soundtrack on my own but in the end I ran out of time. I didn’t expect that writing the story would take that much time. Another thing that take up a lot of time was actually trying to cut down unnecessary story branches. I had too many ideas going on in my mind that I just wrote down everything in the first version of the story, but then I realized that it would be too much and confusing. Then process of cutting down things became really time-consuming because I had no idea what I should keep and what should be dumped.

UI

I realized that the buttons do not look cohesive with the brown background after the presentation. Before that I never thought the button would be disturbing to the emergence of the game. Also I did not find a font that would sell the story better, I just used the default one in the game. Using different font can also help players differentiate which lines are spoken and which lines are sign language and written words.

Storytelling

I think the way that I’m telling the story in the game is a little weak. I found that not everything I wanted to express was delivered clearly. For example, during the ceremony part, some players got a little confused about what’s going on in the story. I think what I need is to add more narration details like who is speaking and what is going on with other people. 

What I learned

The most useful lessons I learned from this project would definitely be Ink language and the story structure. Story structures and mapping things out is going to be really helpful no matter what kind of game I want to create as long as it has a story. Next time creating an interactive fiction game, I will make a clear time management schedule before starting the project and I will also find someone give me suggestions about storytelling. I also need to decide on what is going to be detailed and what’s not earlier in the process. I feel like I wasted a lot of time going back and forth with writing the story and figuring out the endings, and I will make sure it won’t happen again in my next project.