What I Learnt

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• This project was a tremendous writing exercise as it had me churning out and proofreading story content like never before. Through the various iterations of the same story, I could tell how much I had developed as a writer. The story that started out as a generic detective story evolved into a much more interesting one with people wanting to replay it just to experience the multiple endings.

• Creating a system for a game book was an entirely new experience. Balancing the numbers to make sure it wasn't too unforgiving for the player was the best exercise in game balancing that I have ever had since this system was entirely created on paper.

• This project also gave me an in-depth experience on crafting branching narratives. I can now confidently write and create flowcharts of branching narratives for games that feel more like a cohesive story rather than disconnected and broken parts of one.

What went wrong

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• Though the project started simple, it became very complicated, very soon. Paragraphs kept adding and the branching became increasingly more complex as seen in the branching structure image. This made editing them at a later stage became immensely time consuming as each change would have a ripple effect of inconsistency throughout the rest of the story.

• Keeping the choices meaningful was a challenge. In the first iteration of the story, most choices had only two branches which were very binary (the choices were simply good or bad which made choosing between them rather boring and non-immersive as the player did not have to think like the main character to choose). It also had a lot of illusive choices. Through multiple iterations, I managed to fix these and give the player multiple branching choices that were not only non-binary but also meaningful and led to majorly different outcomes. 

What went right

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• The system of the game fit perfectly with the universe I had created for it. The setting of the game got the players attention and the unique system kept them hooked.

• Using Twine instead of a traditional PDF turned out to be a good decision as it displayed the paragraphs in a flowchart structure based on the choices. Therefore, it was very easy to manage and edit parts of the game book without having too much continuity issues regarding the paragraph connections.

• I used a variety of tools and personal methods to keep all the data and content organized.  Balancing the system and managing the story content was challenging, but with the steps that I took to keep everything scoped and organized, I was able to mitigate risks.  Furthermore, I learned about my personal strategies to keep priorities in order that I can bring into future projects.

Post Mortem