5.1.- The apple
In the first place I needed to make the player know the availability of an apple in the tree. This is something that can seem obvious for some people but not for everyone. In fact, my transcripts show that people were trying to climb the tree as one of the first actions (some ancestral behavior here?), so I decided to show them the existence of an apple when they climbed, making it fall. I didn’t want it to be an easy gift to obtain with a simple “get the apple, so a “Deus ex machina” rat appears to take it and run.
It was expected that people would probably try to find the rat, searching it or trying to follow it to another location, or at least they would understand that the rat has gone elsewhere. So, this was also an invitation for players to explore other possible rooms because nothing in the game (beyond how other text adventures works) hints that multiple locations can exist here.
And this game was not made only for text adventure experienced players, but it is also a humble try for new people testing this genre, that perhaps didn’t want to try a usual game, thinking, “oh, that stuff of boring reading…”
There is another medium to make the player know of the existence of the apple, for if you try to use the classical verb “take” with the only thing in the screen– “take tree”-- that will show you that there’s an apple in the tree in a weird funny deadly way.
So, the apple exists, and the player would probably know about it and would try to get it, no matter if he did not know yet what can be done once he gets it. I wouldn’t like to make it so easy and immediate as “take the apple” or “search for fruits”, so the little puzzle here was shaking the tree, a usual way to get fruits from trees in real life, in fact. When you climb the tree and the apple falls, some little lines at both sides of the tree try to give a hint about the fact that the apple falls because of the tree being shaken during the climbing process.