Preface

Just as a little introduction to this project, i thought id give a quick run down of the who/what/why etc. This project was my final project in my "Writing Games" class in my final year at University. Prior to making this, i didn't even think it was possible for me to write, create and programme an enter game and i surpassed even my own expectations. I literally learnt how to write code from scratch just to make this (What on earth?!). I had a little help from my other half Andrew, who made some of the animations and assets for and with me (he really is the best). Incase you're interested i finished the class and bagged myself an 85% mark. In my final year. Blew my own mind i did that!

I know this game isn't perfect, but i really enjoyed making this, and people seem to really enjoy playing it. Thank you so much for taking the time to check this out, it means the world!

To go along with my game i had to write an Inception Report outlining details about them game and explain some processes. This gives a bit of a window into what i was thinking as i was making it. And again, thank you!

Inception Report

When I think about playing a video game, the last thing I want is to be reminded of is that I’m playing a video game. I want to be part of a world that tells a story and allows me to have an impact on that world. That’s what I had in mind when making my game in Twine Harlowe. I have a deep love for horror, and when I think about my favourite horror period in all of literary history it is undoubtedly the horror that emerged from games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill in the late 90s and early 00s. My game and the story it tells are heavily inspired by the story’s those games tell. I’m also a fan of Junji Ito and HP Lovecraft and their works have had an impact on the type of game I’ve made. Above all though, I think the works of Hideo Kojima have the biggest impact on what I write. He is a master of intertextuality and a true Auteur in his field, he also only speaks Japanese and to have such a command over telling story’s in multiple languages is absolutely inspirational and something I myself aspire to master.

How I told the story was also something I thought about in depth. There is not a single aspect of the game that I didn’t think about, everything has meaning and alludes to something. At first, I didn’t really know how Twine worked as a medium, so I thought the best approach would be to simply play some Twine games and see what other people have made. The ones I enjoyed the most were the ones that give the player room to breathe and explore, like Porpentine does in With Those We Love Alive. That’s where I came up with the idea to have this “Other World” that the player can traverse. This works well I think because the “real world” is regimented and structured, where the player is forced to work even though they have much bigger and important things going on, they are stuck in system they can’t escape from and the gameplay directly mirrors this by ushering the player on and forces them to make difficult choices. To contrast this, I wanted the player to have agency within the “Other World” and to create that agency they needed them to have an impact. This is where I took inspiration from series like Silent Hill and implemented a puzzle the player had to solve in order to hear the radio broadcast , and to unlock the door. As a reward for solving these puzzles I created my own version of an in game “cutscene” using multiple passages in twine, both text and image animations, as well as custom sound. What is written on the screen is very important, however I didn’t want to tell the player what was happening, I wanted to show them and allow the player to piece together the story like a puzzle.

In the context of making a game there is more than one way of portraying a story, what you see on screen and what you hear also directly alludes to what is being told. Therefore, making the images, image animations, and also making the sounds were important, and I think everything comes together to portray the story I wanted to tell without directly telling the player. For the characters, I couldn’t show who they were since Twine is a text-based engine. However, in order to portray each character as an individual I assigned them their own text colour, effect and transition. The player character for example is often speaking, so I assigned a typewriter transition and made their text red, and the mother character only ever communicates in the other world so I added a blurry transition to it and made it white to give her an ethereal quality, since she is not of the real world. I think this is very effective, the player themselves might not directly notice this in their play through, but it plays a vital part in separating who is speaking and what is happening on a subconscious level.

I did however have some struggles with Twine itself. At first, the limitations of the engine complimented the horror aspect of the story. I think providing these limitations made me get super creative when writing code, I managed to programme in the random red screen event by using several different coding methods and combining them, resulting in something I’ve never seen in a Twine game before. However due to the amount of code I used to implement this, sometimes there is so much running on an individual page that the page can skip and not give the player enough time to see what is happening. I also had an issue with audio, I could get sound to play over a single passage or over the whole game, but I could not get one sound to play continuously over say 4 passages without stopping/starting again. I tried many different techniques and combining many different sets of code, but I came to the conclusion that it’s just not possible in Twine Harlowe. On the other hand, I think the limitations of the engine from the player perspective only compliment the story telling process in a horror context. Restricting the player can be suffocating and uncomfortable, and that only serves to compliment my narrative.

I wanted to go that extra bit further to compliment my game and story, and I personally absolutely love it when a game has an amazing soundtrack. I edited all of the sound myself and created stuff from scratch like the radio broadcasts. I wrote them, watched some “how to do an American accent” lessons on YouTube and acted them out myself, and then went on to edit and mix them myself too. However, when a game has a theme song that just sticks in your head, like the Silent Hill theme by Akira Yamaoka, or even The Last of Us theme by Gustavo Santaolalla, it makes a game even more memorable and when heard again can stir up memories and emotion. So, I wrote and recorded a small song for my game, this can be heard in the title screens and the ending screen. This was probably unnecessary, but it was important to me, the story I was telling, and I’m even more proud of what I have made as a result.