You post-mortem

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:

  • I’m proud that players had fun with the game, and connected with it. That feels like a win to me.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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!

21 Likes

This game was one of my top ten favorite IFComp games. I love the tricks you did with the text formatting, and the worldbuilding was really fun. Thanks for making it and hope you enjoy making your future games!

7 Likes

I really liked the text formatting/color too among other things. I enjoyed trying to figure out what was going on, then actually figuring it out.

Congrats on getting this done despite so much going on in your life. It does feel good to pick up something you put down for over a year

I admit I’m sort of envious about you writing so much before you finished college! But of course I’m glad to see what you’ve made. Keep at it, whether it’s here or elsewhere.

6 Likes