This is a post-mortem for my game You.
Development
Eagle-eyed players may notice a few plot similarities between You and my 2022 entry, My Gender is a Fish. Actually, You came first. I had it about 70% finished when college application season came around, I condensed it into a shorter, finished portfolio piece, and then left it unfinished for a while. I picked You back up again over the summer, and brought it to what it is now.
It was weird finishing a project I’d started 2 years ago, but also somewhat cathartic. The original concept was intended to have much more of a focus on one particular facet of identity, but I ended up scrapping that in favor of a more abstract/intentionally vague framing that I felt was more nuanced. Other scrapped content includes an identity-stealing thief, swappable pronoun items, and a hedgehog witch.
Influences
This game’s biggest influence is probably Pace Smith’s fantastic Limerick Quest, which can be seen in the visuals and in some of the early ideas for text-formatting-based puzzles. The “fae wood” setting is largely inspired by SCP-4000.
Goals
My goals were:
- to make a game where changes in the player’s identity are mechanically relevant.
- for the player to have fun experimenting with their identity in a low-stakes environment (pleasant puzzle world)
- to make a Twine game with cool visuals
I’d say I partially succeeded in these goals. I definitely hit the first one, I feel like for the second one I had trouble striking the right balance between being too overt with the themes of identity and not incorporating them enough. For the third one, I was quite satisfied with the visuals but some of my playtesters and reviewers found them tough on the eyes, so I could have done a better job there.
Takeaways
A lot of players got stuck on the mushroom puzzle (the one where you have to match the sentient mushrooms’ appearance in order to talk with them). I think this was because the text hinting at the solution wasn’t very clear and it was easy to miss the overline/underline options.This was made a little worse by the fact that I didn’t include a hint system or walkthrough, so when players got stuck here they were straight up unable to progress. Although hint systems and walkthroughs are sort of a band-aid solution, it doesn’t cost me much to include them, so if I were to do this game again I would include both, even if it’s “just a couple of puzzles”.
Also, my game wasn’t optimized for mobile (and this wasn’t a goal of mine at all), but a piece of feedback mentioned that accessing the sidebar was inconvenient on mobile. Something to consider in future Twine games I guess.
Things I’m proud of:
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I’m proud that players had fun with the game, and connected with it. That feels like a win to me.
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I’m proud that I was able to pull off something cool/novel with the text formatting, I hope to play around with that more in the future.
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I’m proud that I was able to finish this project I started several years ago, and sort of pay homage to my past self.
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I am proud of one review I got that the ending choice felt meaningful, but that none of them were the “wrong” choice - that was important to me to include and I’m glad that came through.
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That I was able to make time for IFComp this year!
Thanks so much to everyone who played my game, and to everyone else in the comp. I feel like the games were particularly high-quality this year. See you all in the future!