Yikes, this post ended up long. I don’t know if it’ll actually be interesting to anyone, but I really enjoyed getting to take part in Spring Thing this year alongside so many brilliant games, and it’s been very thought-provoking for me – so I figured I’d type up some of those thoughts.
I started working on Rescue at Quickenheath back in 2021, got a first draft to a more-or-less playable state, and promptly abandoned it to languish in the unfinished projects heap for years, because I could tell it wasn’t in a state I wanted to share but I was out of impetus to fix it. This year’s Spring Thing, finally, gave me that impetus. So I submitted an intent to enter, promptly got the feeling of being in way over my head, and started frenziedly remaking Quickenheath from the ground up in an attempt to turn it into something I’d be willing to let see the light of day.
I doubt anyone is ever 100% happy with a project, but I’m glad that Quickenheath is out there now, and grateful to Spring Thing and this community for providing a great motivation and a way to get past the ‘first time sharing something’ dread. It’s still wild to me that people have actually played this silly little game, let alone responded to it so thoughtfully!
Quickenheath-related thoughts, in no particular order, and full of spoilers:
How much self-indulgence is too much?
I think one of the hallmarks of this game having started life as my first ever Twine experiment is that it ended up as a sort of mishmash of components. The primary motivation behind most of it doesn’t run any deeper than ‘I think this thing is fun, so let’s see if I can make it work’. So: flamboyant highway robbers, Gratuitous 18th-Century Capitalisation, wretched puns, rhyming clues, Twine stylings like cycling links and mirrored text… the list goes on. The upside to this writing approach is that I had a great time. The downside, I think, is that the end result runs the risk of feeling inconsistent, if the ingredients I’m tossing into the soup don’t actually meld together, or if something gets added that’s fun in itself but detrimental to the whole.
An example: I love escape room-style puzzles, so I wanted a couple in Quickenheath. But the game isn’t (primarily) a ‘puzzle’ game, and so while I tried to make them as coherent with the story as possible, there’s still a degree to which the inclusion of the puzzles might lower immersion in the story. And I worried that it would be too puzzly for people looking for a romance story, but not puzzly enough for people looking for a puzzle experience.
Or another example, that I agonised over: some of the earlier options in the game (like dealing with the newspaper crier) aren’t really ‘choices’, but unsuccessful options that you can fail at before getting to the approach that succeeds. This is basically inherited from something that I enjoy in parser games, which is the opportunity to try something, fail, and find entertainment in the game’s response to a failed idea. Except, of course, that in a choice game it feels different, because you’re not coming up with the ideas to try yourself – so is there a point to the game offering you a choice between doing A, B, and C, if only C will work? Why put in options that are doomed to fail? Is it annoying? I ended up taking some instances of this out of Quickenheath when I was editing it, but I left a couple, because I like the way they read. (Specifically, I wanted to make it clear from the offset through the narration that Kit as a protagonist is nowhere near as cool as they think they are, so setting them up to fail leaves space for characterisation in a way that I personally find amusing.)
Hopefully I managed to get away with it, and keeping the game short-and-silly with a specific goal prevented it from feeling incoherent. But if you played it and ran into anything that made you go ‘Why did they include that? What on earth were they thinking?’ – solid chance that the answer is just ‘Thought it would be fun’.
Agency, branching, endings
I knew from the start that there was going to be one (happy) ending for Aubrey and Valentine. The conceit sets up two prospects: either you save Aubrey, or you fail and they die. Any other ending apart from those two would feel like a cop-out, and wouldn’t be suitably dramatic. Ending with abject failure and death didn’t fit the lighthearted tone of the rest of the story, and on a personal level, it wasn’t the story I wanted to tell. From a narrative perspective, to steal a quote from E.M. Forster, ‘a happy ending was inevitable’. So, how to get to an inevitably happy ending while still maintaining a sense of stakes for the player?
My biggest worry here was letting the player say Aubrey’s True Name. I wanted to leave that as a choice, and specifically a free text input, in an attempt to let the stakes feel legitimate. Even if you’re absolutely certain you’re correct (and the game doesn’t make it difficult to guess correctly), I hoped that being faced with the ability to say anything at all in that moment would spark a little bit of tension. This meant that I had to figure out a way to allow the player to get the True Name wrong, and still have the plot turn out, without then having to do a hard pivot into tragedy for the final five minutes. It’s, inevitably, a bit contrived, but hopefully it provides an equally satisfying way of reaching the game’s ending.
In terms of choices throughout, while you’re always going to end up at the same ending, there are a couple of different ways you can get there. One thing that I found interesting was that the first section (in London) felt more interactive to players than the second section (in Fairy). Mechanically, the choices in Fairy ‘mean’ more: in London, you’re essentially ticking every location off a list and the ‘interactivity’ comes from being able to choose the order in which you do it, whereas in Fairy there are a couple bits you won’t see, and item options that you won’t have available, based on your previous choices. But because the game presents you with one thing after another in Fairy, it feels like there’s less player control, even if the specific sequence you’re experiencing is a direct result of your choices.
I don’t especially mind the game feeling linear or on rails, since I think it needs to build a bit of momentum towards the end. But for future games, it’s helpful to have a clearer sense of what gives players the feeling of interactivity, and I do think some choices in Quickenheath could have been telegraphed more clearly to be more satisfying. (For example, the choice that determines whether you get the chaperoned stalagmite encounter or the chaperone-less hunt encounter is whether you’re polite or belligerent with the Ambassador. But by the time it plays out, it’s not clear that what’s happening is even a result of a choice you’ve made, let alone that you’re experiencing one of two options – so you don’t get the satisfaction of knowing that your choices have an impact.)
On a related note, one thing that came out in playtesting is that the vast majority of playtesters picked the same options/route through the story. The game is written so that the consequences for each choice were essentially equivalent, with no outcomes that would lead to failure – but of course players don’t know that. So if there’s a branch that seems like a horrendously obviously bad idea (eating fairy food, for instance!) people aren’t likely to risk it. The one that really threw me was that most playtesters pickpocketed the nobleman – although I suppose I could have predicted that if I’d thought about it, since ‘steal from someone with lots of money’ is going to seem like a better choice than ‘steal from someone who’s flat broke’.
me: i can’t believe you didn’t eat my nice fruits that i gave you
all my playtesters, in unison: DO I LOOK LIKE I WAS BORN YESTERDAY
I tweaked the wording of some of the choices in response to playtesting, because I struggled a bit getting used to the idea that I’d written things that very few people were going to actually see. But in hindsight I’m not sure I’d actually want to change it. I think losing the sense of stakes that comes with believing there are ‘wrong’ answers would probably be detrimental to the pacing and immersion, and the other choices are still there for fun or to be experienced in replays. I guess this might be something that interactive fiction deals with and static fiction doesn’t – accepting that players aren’t going to see everything!
What counts as a puzzle?
This was tricky for me! Aster’s incredibly thoughtful and intelligent post puts a lot more consideration into the point of including puzzles than I did at any point when writing them – and I’m also realising that I’m not experienced enough with IF to spot what will come across as a puzzle and what won’t.
If you’d asked me while I was writing it what the puzzles in Quickenheath are, I’d have said there were three, or maybe two and a half: getting the password for the warden, the maze, and potentially the Queen’s riddle (although that one doesn’t prevent you from progressing if you fail). If the game didn’t have those things in it, I’d probably have listed it as puzzle-less (and then have run into people demanding ‘What do you mean, puzzle-less!’).
For example: guessing Aubrey’s True Name. I hadn’t thought of that as a puzzle at any point while writing the game, because while it has a right and wrong answer story-wise, it doesn’t have a mechanically wrong answer in terms of impacting the game’s winnability – so in my brain, what you say there was just another choice, rather than a solution. But of course, to the player, who doesn’t know that there’s not a ‘wrong’ answer, it plays out like a puzzle! Likewise with the inventory puzzles – I viewed most of these as narrative choices rather than puzzles with a solution while I was writing, because the majority of them have more than one correct choice, and (with the exception of the Queen’s riddle) if you try something that doesn’t succeed you can just try again. This wallowing around in between ‘puzzles’ and ‘choices’ is a detriment to the game, I think, since it ends up giving the player the experience of a lot of things that feel like puzzles but aren’t actually very satisfying ones.
There’s a bigger question here, I guess, which is where the line between ‘choice’ and ‘puzzle’ falls, if it exists. Is every choice in a choice-based game a puzzle? If not, at what point does it become one, and what does it need to be a good or satisfying one? Would the inventory choices in Quickenheath have felt less like puzzles if there hadn’t also been Obviously Puzzly Puzzles in the game? I don’t have answers, but I’m interested in thinking about it more, since I think Quickenheath ended up feeling more puzzly than I anticipated!
Gender selectability
I spent a long long long time deciding whether or not to keep the gender selectability in Quickenheath! I’m aware it doesn’t work for some people, and I’ve enjoyed hearing more about why that is. Here’s an outline of the things I was considering when I put it in there.
It seems like one of the ways people view selectable gender is as something that makes the characters feel less well-defined and more like a ‘blank slate’, so if you’re looking for a strongly-defined protagonist then selectable gender can dilute that. In general, I tend to agree with this. I enjoy protagonists that add to the story in some way; Quickenheath is about specific protagonists, without a lot of character customisation – so why keep them gender selectable?
One of the things I like in choice-based games is that the range of choices themselves can add to the depth of characterisation, or provide more information about the world. The options that the player is choosing from are also options that the character is choosing from, and picking one branch doesn’t necessarily render the other branch non-canonical – it can provide a sort of ghost of potential, where the choices define an envelope of possible characterisation that fits the protagonist. Allowing a choice of gender does the same thing, for me. When I was writing Kit (and to a lesser extent Aubrey) I wanted to define the characters as people who could be any gender. Whatever you like about these characters, it transcends gender; there’s no essentialism or inherently gendered quality to them, and they can switch between options and still be themselves. The ‘canon’ Kit isn’t any one gender, or they’re all of them at once.
Another factor was the inescapably romantic nature of the story. The game kicks off by establishing three things: You – are in love – with Aubrey. If it was a third-person or first-person story, or if the romance was optional, or if you got to choose a love interest from a range of several characters, then I might not have felt the need to keep the genders selectable. But something about the combination of all three made it feel too dictatorial to me to have the genders fixed. I worried that telling people right off the bat ‘You are this gender, and you are attracted to that gender’ would be alienating, and since (to me) the characterisation and story wouldn’t have been strengthened by defining genders upfront, it didn’t feel necessary. Ultimately, I figured that in a romance context, gender is a lot more meaningful to people in real life than it is to the characters in the game, since it’s a setting in which gender doesn’t impose any constraints or cause any problems for the characters whatsoever – so leaving the choice with the player felt like the right thing to do.
Finally, since the game doesn’t give you a lot of say over what you’ve got to do plot-wise, I wanted to make it as easy as possible for players to buy into the romance premise. The game doesn’t really work if you don’t care about the romance, so by giving players a bit of agency to define their own preferences, I wanted to manufacture a feeling of complicity in the romance, and provide a quick way that the player could relate to what might otherwise be unrelatable characters in an unrelatable situation.
Let them kiss!
This is the response I’ve received the most on itch. I thought about it! There are a couple reasons why I didn’t, but the main one is that I genuinely just couldn’t write it in a way that didn’t feel awkward and break the flow.
I blame the narrative voice for this. I tried to give the game’s perspective a lively/wry/detached angle, in order to keep the pacing up, keep the tone light, be able to make fun of Kit a bit (lovingly), and avoid falling too deeply into the slough of melodrama that is Kit’s emotions. The flashback around the campfire with the pearls is the most unfiltered Kit-ish-ness we get, and I was worried that it would be too sappy for such a silly game, hence why it’s containerised in a flashback.
So I got to the ending, considered writing a kiss, decided the only way I’d be able to make it work tonally would be to full-on plagiarise from The Princess Bride, and gave it up as a bad job. Probably someone who’s better at writing second person romance than I am could manage it, but I decided that the catharsis of their emotional arc came through most strongly and sincerely in dialogue rather than description, and that a kiss would be egregious. (Or that’s what I’m telling myself, anyway.)
What's next?
In the short term, I’ve got a tiny update planned with very few actual changes – filling out some more hidden easter egg content, and adding another answer to the Queen’s riddle, because someone who played it came up with a pun that’s even worse than anything already included and it needs to be honoured.
In the long term, if I was ever going to properly update the game, I’d add music. I have a couple tunes written for it, but not enough for a whole soundtrack, and my Twine skills aren’t currently confident enough for me to try to wrangle it. So I think that’ll remain a hypothetical ‘maybe in another three years’ goal.
And I have a couple ideas for future stories in the same world, so there might be more of Aubrey and Valentine at some point. (If I ever get around to them, and if other projects don’t get in the way!)
As this abominably long post makes clear, I could think in circles about what works and what doesn’t in Quickenheath forever, but in the end there’s only one real goal I had for it: for the people playing it to have fun. So if you did play it, thank you very much, and I hope you got at least a fraction of the enjoyment that I had in writing it. 
In that kind of context, the main ‘reason’ for including a puzzle is that it’s fun to solve in itself, and the mechanical function of them is that they give you information in a specific order to keep the game moving – so, solving a puzzle will allow you to progress by giving you more information for future puzzles.
