alchan-Looking Outwards 12

For my final project I’m probably going to create a game (with Maddy Cha) along the lines of interactive fiction/ visual novels.

Kentucky Route Zero Act I, 2013, by Cardboard Computer

The first relevant project is Kentucky Route Zero, one of my favorite games. It’s being developed by Cardboard Computer, a small indie studio releasing the game in 5 acts (the 1st act was released in 2013, and the 5th act is supposed to come out in early 2018). It’s a magical-realist adventure game inspired by point-and-click games & interactive fiction, but with a heavy focus on characters and mood.  It’s essentially a winding interactive story. I really admire this focus, especially compared to more combat- or puzzle-oriented “traditional” video games. While we’re definitely not going to attempt something this ambitious (or in a similar storytelling genre), I really like how the game handles story and text.

overview of the latest version of Twine

The second project is Twine. It was originally created by Chris Klimas in 2009, but its development has since been open-sourced and is now maintained by several other people. It’s a tool meant to make the creation of interactive fiction accessible, essentially generating a series of hyperlinked HTML pages at its simplest. Games or fiction created with twine are thus easily customizable since they can be extended with Javascript, CSS, or any number of other possibilities. I admire Twine since it radically simplifies the process of making a story (as simple as writing passages and connecting them), and makes it easy to visualize the game/ story as a whole. P5 doesn’t really have the option of hyperlinks, but the idea of branching storylines and keeping track of past choices definitely applies to what we’d like to do.