Postmortem

Postmortem

What went right-

Due to the extreme simplicity of the game to follow the rules that the assignments in the class should be microscopic, most of what I intended to do when creating the narrative game from start to finish went exactly as I intended. 

My main routine when creating the narrative game is marking each page with a bookmark, creating links for each decision on each page, and linking them to the correct pages, all but one page ending with a loss, a “THE END” linking to page one of the game making the player restart all their progress. 

On submission day, I was tasked to add some images to add a little bit of engagement when playing the game. Which makes sense when I think about it since the narrative game is created through google docs, I too would not be as engaged just reading pages of texts with no pictures. So I added pictures, and was told that they can be any images. While I spent some class time drawing very simple images, mimicking the style of the comic “Cyanide and Happiness”. I chose this style since my narrative game was inspired by a choose your own adventure game added into a Cyanide and Happiness comic I own. 

What went wrong-

Not much went wrong when creating a simple game through google docs. But if I were to think about any sort of moments that “went wrong”, I’d choose being able to stretch the story out not to keep it too short or too long. But I still wanted to keep it simple as it is my first time creating a game that relies on player’s choice, so I limited myself to two choices per page. 

I did attempt to capture the humor of “A Hot Date”, which was the choose your own adventure from the Cyanide and Happiness comic. I look back and flip through the pages of A Hot Date and see that there are a lot more branching choices and much more different endings that change the story drastically based on the player's choice. 

I find that I did not capture the same level of humor as A Hot Date since I don’t think humor is my strong suit, but I still tried my best to keep my game somewhat funny. 

Outside of the humor, I don’t think my choices were as creative as I originally visioned. But it is possible that what plays a part in this kind of thinking is that I created the game myself and know all the choices by heart. So the path to the only winning ending is linear rather than different choices leading to branching paths that eventually still lead to the winning ending.

Anything else I learned-

If there is anything I learned from this assignment is that I should create a much more engaging branching path and prioritize that over humor. My game has a linear path when playing to get the only ending where the player is victorious. On my next attempt at a narrative game, I should try to have branching paths and have some decisions eventually lead to one linear path to the ending, perhaps even create more than one ending.