Tower Keeper- Interactive Fiction Postmortem

Tower Keeper- Interactive Fiction Postmortem

Introduction

Tower Keeper is an interactive fiction made by Twine(Harlowe 3.01). The goal of this project is to build up environment in a fictional word by text and let players exploring in it by meaningful choices. The project is developed based on a world bible, telling a fairy-tale like story about a young man adventuring in a desert to find his father. The project has a unique perspective for the player that he/she is acting as a dungeon master, to view the protagonist from the “god view” and prevent the him to moving forward in the game. This project also uses and experiments on variables, functions, and stylesheets in twine tomato the game more intractable and interesting for the player.

What went right

1.     Story Map/Structure

The storytelling in this interactive fiction project is following a clear structure of branch and bottle + open map. The story is built on a map that has 4 different areas and the player is able to see the protagonist move between areas. These areas create branches for the story, and they all come together at the last area. The game also has 3 different ending based on the choices that player made previously in these areas and the choices that player made at the end. When I built up the story, I followed this structure and mapped story blocks in twine. Therefore, I didn’t lost when writing the story and the game  has proper amount of breaches that enables player to have meaningful choices in the game, and at the same time, the branches didn’t explode to too many.

2. Different kind of choices and stylesheets on them

In this project, I give players different types of choices, and differentiate them to the player by stylesheets that changes font colors and back ground colors. There are two type of major choices. One is liked to some hidden text in a page, and clicking them will show the text, which will give player additional information. Also, if a page has a lot of text, this type of choices will separate a page to several parts, and inform the player what a part is going to talk about. Another type of choices is linked to other page, and they are going to decide the direction of the story. These two type of choices have different stylesheets and are both showed in the first page of the game, so player know that which choices are just give some information, and which choices are important and going to push the story further. These choices are helpful to make this game more interactive. Player in this game are not simply reading. They have a lot of things to click and some things to think about.

3. Players’s Perspective

In this game, the role of player is a tower keeper who surveils the forest from the “god view”, and have power to set up barrier in his forest. Unlike normal adventures story, the player in this game is not the protagonist, and has a role like a “dungeon master” to set up challenge for the protagonist. When player make a choice in this game, it will not directly lead him to different scenes, but it will change some variables in the game, and affect the behavior of the protagonist in the next scene. For example, at the beginning of the game, you can choose to remove the plants that block the way or not. If you don’t remove the plants, the young man(protagonist) will use his torch to burn down the plants. Then when he enter the graveyard(an area in the game) at night, he will not have torch and have to find other solutions. This unique perspective is one of the creative part in this game. It coordinates with twine variables make this project more interesting and produce replayability.

What went wrong

1.     Plot and Storytelling

This project supposed to tell an adventurous story between the a young man and a tower keeper, and a touching story between a father and a son. The player, the tower keeper, lost his memory, and will able to find his identity that he is the father of the protagonists from the details in the game. However, the story in this game is triggered by the variables, so player may miss part of the plots if they didn’t trigger certain variables. This makes the story seem fragile and the turning at the ending seem not very nature and fluent. Also, I write the story and connect them in twine at the seem time. When I write the story, I focus more on to make it completed and operational on twine. Therefore, the story is not as amazing as my expectation, and have a lot of space to improve.

2. Balancing of Branches

Players have a lot of decisions to make in this game, and this decisions will lead the protagonist to certain areas in the game. However, the amount of count in each branch of the game is not equal. For example, I developed the graveyard firstly, so there are a lot of things can happen here in the graveyard, but comparing with the graveyard, the maze has much less content. Therefore, if a player choose certain decisions, they may miss a lot of content in the game and feel that this game don’t have a lot of things to play with. This is also a problem caused by project management, and can be improved in the future projects.

3. Twine Variables and Function

In this project, I used and experimented with a lot of variables and twine functions. The game has an inventory system, time system, and variables to record player’s decision in the game. Those variables are working together to affect the direction of the story and the branches that player is going to face. For example, the protagonist has to spend time on barriers, and then he  will enter certain area in different time. Entering the graveyard at night or at morning will have different stories. However, the amount of contents links to variables lack a priority, and the game didn’t show to player that these variables are important. Player may not notice those variables if they only play once.  Moreover, connection between variables created a lot of bugs in twine, and cost me a lot of time to debugging for things that are not that important. I think that focusing on one kind of variables and developing it further will make this project better.

In conclusion, in this project I learned the process to develop an interactive fiction. Choices are really important in a IF, and I think I did fairly well in this project and can keep it in my future works. I also learned to use Twine functions and variables to make this piece more interactive and interesting, but in future I may need to find a priority for this technical things and focus on it. Project management is also really important, and I should control the amount of work for each section in project and balance them better.