A Confession
I didn’t intend to compete in IFComp at first—You Can’t Save Her was initially written for my final creative writing module in university.
For this module, I first started work on a sprawling, more traditional CYOA-style game, but in the middle of writing and coding it, I realised that it was impossible to complete before my assignment deadline. I knew that the workload for IF could compound by a lot… but I forgot how much it could.
So five days before the deadline, I scrapped everything I did and tried to think of a new, much shorter story that I could finish in time.
Hence, I think some of the problems with YCSH stemmed from how it was conceived: I designed it such that it could be completed within four days, and I wrote it for a teacher who wasn’t familiar with IF. This meant that I had to write in a style I was confident in and make “safer,” more tropey decisions—which was good for completing it in time but may have harmed the game later on.
Still, I’m happy that I managed to complete something at all and submit it to IFComp! And I learnt a lot, so I hope my next projects will be even better.
A Conception
Since I only had four days to write this game, I felt that it was safer to build a foundation on one of the existing ideas I had: a turn-based game where two sword-wielding warrior nuns on opposing sides of a religious divide are forced to battle each other—but it is revealed, through flashbacks, that they used to be friends growing up.
This was based on a Warhammer 40K fanfiction idea that would feature Ephrael Stern and Miriael Sabathiel, two minor but famous-ish characters, but I scrapped this since this story would probably require me to take liberties with Warhammer 40K lore. I don’t really want to upset fans who have encyclopedic knowledge about 40K lore—and I’m not super familiar with it in the first place.
Other than that, I think the main influence on the writing was Porpentine’s Twines, particularly With Those We Love Alive. The game was inspired by an action scene in With Those We Love Alive where each page ends with the words “One second”, “Two second”, and so on—I loved how this conceit added a sense of time, progression, and increasing tension to the writing, as prose doesn’t strongly communicate how time passes. Or at least, unlike film or video games, prose isn’t a time-based medium.
Since my background is in making short films and writing poetry, I tried to draw on these media:
Like a short film, I wanted the writing to have a cinematic feel and cut seamlessly between the past and present. Another inspiration for YCSH was the On Your Mark music video, which was directed by Hayao Miyazaki. I loved that it swapped between alternate realities to emphasise the emotionality of each, and I tried to do the same in my story. (In hindsight, though, I think I will switch between scenes less often in the future—it’s more confusing to cut between scenes this quickly in prose.) I also wish I had more time to ensure that the flashbacks and alternate realities were woven together more plot-wise, perhaps in a Nolan-esque way. But because of the deadline I had, I knew that designing a complex plot would be a big risk, and in a crunch, I felt that it was safer to write something that made character-sense and emotional-sense, rather than plot-sense and logical-sense.
On the other hand, like a poem, I wanted the writing to be compact and punchy. Like drinking a shot of espresso. Like Porpentine’s writing style. I also wanted to ensure every element felt intentional, so the game would feel cohesive. Since poems are so short, poetry forces you to trim out all the fat, so you need to be careful with selecting your ingredients, and you need to bring out the best in them. I tried to do that for YCSH too.
Story-wise, to me, YCSH is a story about having to leave your friends. It’s about having to leave behind childhood friends, even best friends, because of differences in your core beliefs and life trajectories. Like many people, I’ve lost friends along the way. And for me, YCSH also isn’t really about religion itself, but how religion (or any set of beliefs) is manipulated by organisations and entities to gain power, which can harm people.
But like any story, I think it’s all open to interpretation—this was just how I interpreted it.
Some other notes:
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This was the first time I used Scrivener to organise my worldbuilding and plan my plot, and being able to move sub-chapters around in the UI was really helpful.
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I didn’t want to use quotation marks as I wanted the writing to feel similar to oral storytelling. A bit like Cormac McCarthy (though I haven’t read a McCarthy novel in full yet).
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The large font size of the chapter titles was inspired by another Porpentine piece: The Soft Rumour of Spreading Weeds. I just think it looks dramatic and cool.
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I also think it’s interesting when pink represents “evil”—such as for Calamity Ganon in Breath of the Wild and Galarian Moltres in Pokémon, especially since it’s a traditionally feminine colour.
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The symbols denoting the fourth and fifth chapters are Egyptian hieroglyphs: 𓂓 and 𓂘 respectively. The former means “soul”, representing how the goddess has “stained” the second protagonist’s soul—and it also looks similar to anthers, like the ones she grows later. The latter symbol means “embrace”, referencing the only plot choice you get to make—whether to hug your friend. I don’t think most people would catch this, but I think it still works on a visual level.
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The nuns and religious worldbuilding are inspired by Warhammer 40K, but particularly, I was inspired by this faction called the Sisters of Battle. They’re basically militant soldier nuns with guns. The Catholic imagery of this faction, which has been amped up to eleven, is very funny to me—they have a tank that is… also a giant church organ?! The idea of militant, “evil” nuns is also very funny to me. And isn’t “nun” a funny word? Nun nun nun.
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I didn’t want to name the protagonists as I didn’t want to tie them to a specific culture or time—I wanted the only (obvious) cultural references to be Catholic. I like the idea that this story can take place in both the far future and distant past.
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This is probably the most indulgent thing I’ve made—I basically just bashed together things I liked.
A Conclusion
This is the first time I’ve competed in IFComp, but it’s also the first time I’ve received so many reviews for my work. Thanks to everyone who played and reviewed my game! I don’t respond to reviews on principle, but I just want to say that I’m really grateful for all the feedback.
This postmortem is a little late, as I wanted to finish the post-comp release first… and you can now play it here! I made minor changes to the writing and visuals, added a colorblind mode, and fixed some bugs.
Thanks for reading this postmortem!