For the final project, I made a twine game based off of the short story that I wrote about the first Quiet Year game we played earlier in the semester. I used some CSS styling, including flex boxes and styled links, but I played more with the twine specific elements to make the experience more interesting. Similarly to the last time I did a hypertext project, I used Char NG, N+7, and Otter.ai for language generation for the alien and refuge segments. I used Char for the neighboring village, as it left me with a relatively similar text to the original, that is understandable but not necessarily correct. I used Otter and N+7 to make the incorrect translations of messages from the aliens. I used crowdsourcing for the endings, I gave my friends just the loose concepts of what the endings were, and that they usually involve a prison for most of them. Then I had them write short endings for each one.
For the oblique strategies cards, I used these 5: Change nothing and continue with immaculate consistency, Use fewer notes, Are there sections? Consider transitions, Disciplined self-indulgence, and Faced with a choice, do both. My thinking for each in order were: 1. To not overthink. I had too many times working where I would get caught up thinking, is this really good enough? But I found it more worthwhile to just trust myself and know I can make something of quality. 2. I found myself, in relation to the last one, trying to rely too much on original source material, and instead by the end found myself improvising more and enjoying what was coming out of that much more. 3. Making a twine game there were obviously sections, but I found a lot of importance in making specific transitions for different story elements. What is your standing with the council? Do you have a map? These things were important for me to write as it made the game feel more unique for different playthroughs. 4. This card mostly inspired the labyrinth part of the game. Originally there were a looooot of choices about how to get more and more lost, and I had a lot of fun making those, but I realized it made it easy to spiral into a rabbit hole that was hard to get out of, so I settled for a median that I enjoyed that still kept some of the indulgence but wasn’t too over the top. 5. This influenced again, the thoughts I had about making different choices in the game, I found that instead of trying to limit myself to one, I should just do both, and if one doesn’t work I can always take it out. But I made them all work, so no harm there.
I used botnik in the vg titles voice to come up with my title: alien attack: the great quest, and I used the anagram generator to come up with the willful hut monk, the character that betrays you, as it is an anagram for the council of murkwell.