Utopia Post-Mortem

Introduction:

I tried to make a short interactive fiction game set in a world of my own creation.  The game was meant to be a “outside visitor” kind of story in which the player was going to visit a planet which is a utopian society, although that comes at the cost of the inhabitants’ emotions.  As the player continues learning about the world he is stranded on, he/she has to decide whether or not the world is one worth living on.

I made this game in Ink as a short fiction narrative in which the player has to choose the experiences that they go through throughout the day and ultimately decide whether or not to stay or leave by the end.  This was done in a way where the player decides every action they do and each action has an outcome that might change what happens, although the final choice options always stays the same with two possible ending outcomes.

What went right:

The first goal that I achieved was understanding how Ink worked.  I thought that using Ink with Unity would be rather difficult and during the actual lesson on Ink I wasn’t able to figure out too much, so I was dedicating a bit of time to understanding how Ink worked and I was able to understand how it worked very quickly in terms of how to use it for story writing and creating options for the game, as well as creating branching paths for my game.

The second aspect of the game that I think was successful was creating a world with an interesting premise.  This assignment was based off a World Bible I wrote in which I created a world of perfection, but at the cost of emotions, and from a lot of feedback I got during playtests and even in the final demo, people found the premise of the world interesting and thought it’d be a unique world to set a game in.

The third success of the game was that the story was interesting enough and simple enough that people understood what the purpose was by the end in which I would give the players their ultimate choice of choosing to stay on the world or not.  It didn’t take long for the people who playtested my game to figure out what was going on in the game at all.

What went wrong:

The first thing that went wrong was trying to make a story that gave the players many options, the issue with my game was that there was a set path that they were meant to take and no other options, which made the game somewhat linear and the choice based options ultimately pointless.  I also wasn’t able to make any endings outside of one and the other options would send people back to the beginning of the game.

The second thing that I wasn’t too successful with was making people feel engaged in the story since it is ultimately very short, and right when the story gets interesting, the game ends.  There was much more I could have added and I only stuck to a simple story of events progressing from one to the next without too much context, which was mainly due to time constraints. I think that if I had more time and actually devoted more time to the game, I could really expand the story to something that would keep players continuously engaged.

The final thing that wasn’t successful was keeping the player away from getting frustrated, there were points in which the player would get sent back to the beginning because the story was written that way and so that would make the player feel less motivated to play the game at all.

What I Learned:

The first thing I learned was, obviously, how to use Ink with Unity, considering this is my first time using it, I really enjoyed it and want to go and try making another story with this and try to make it much more engaging since I have some interesting ideas, I also would like to go back and try to fix this game so there is more for the player to do because otherwise it feels extremely empty.  I find Ink to be simple and effective and it’s a good way for people who want to learn about story-writing in games and write stories for games to practice and use so that they can see what is effective and what is ineffective.

The second thing I learned was how to create a world, as that was the most universally praised aspect of my game, the world was interesting and one that would be quite unique to set a game in due to its structure.  This was the first time I ever created a world from scratch with its own rules and systems and it was a great opportunity for my creative side to show, I really enjoyed making the world with this game and would like to make more exploration/world-building based games.

The final thing I learned, but only after creating this project, was how to write an engaging story, and this was mainly from other similar projects in my class.  Aside from some aspects of the gameplay, the main problem with my game is that the story is not very engaging, and not at all subtle, despite the interesting premise.  I think this is mainly due to me coming up with a story kind of fast and on the fly, but next time I make a game with story in mind, I will devote the time necessary to write an interesting story which will engage the player from beginning to end, which is why I have a bit of a mind to revisit this game and update it with a more unique and immersive story that keeps the player wanting to come back to explore this world for more.