For my final project, I made a Twine interactive fiction game called The Dusk Forest. The Dusk Forest is a text-based horror adventure game about the main character and his friend Steve finding a way to escape the mystory forest. Many abnormal events happened and the game has 5 different endings and there is only one way to survive. The player will make choices at certain points to decide the character’s destiny. I got inspiration from our The School Year Project, we had a really fun discussion about a mysterious school with ghost teachers, I am also personally a fan of horror novels, so I decided to write a horror adventure story.
I came up with the setup and title about the forest by using botnik.org. Then I wrote a really brief plotline and tried to expand it. I used Otter.ai. to record the process while reading the different versions of scripts, which is easier for me to make changes later on. Then I used Oblique Strategies to develop my plot furtherly. The five cards I used in my story were Always first steps (the main character in my story noticed the dangerous signal as soon as he enters the forest), Go to an extreme, move back to a more comfortable place, ( During the process, the character may accidentally eat the meat of his best friend, which might cause a mental breakdown, but after making certain choices, he became more calmed) Take away the elements in order of apparent non-importance(the turning points of the story are hidden under the most ordinary things), and question the heroic approach (the ending is dystopian). I also used Anagram Generator and charNG during the writing process to enrich my language. While developing the game in Twine, I used SUGARCUBE 2.xx and added arrays (the sanity level) and variables (the name of the character) to it, which really expanded the interaction part of the game. I also applied css on the layout, text colors and sizes, images, and hover, and removed the hover as well. I also tried to embed the audio into it but for some reason, it didn't work out, which was a bit of pity.
I think that I deserve an A on this project because I checked all the boxes and spent really a lot of time developing the story and also learning the functions of Twine. It was a challenge for me to develop 5 different endings for an adventure story because I never tried writing any fiction before.I also tried a large amount of color and text combination sets to come up with the most suitable one.
For the class, I think I deserve an A-. I joint this class 2 weeks later than the others and it was really confusing for me at the beginning because I don’t have any coding experience. I spent a lot of efforts on learning these to catch up. For the assignments I completed most of them and also tried to infuse my graphic skills into the design of the websites. This is my last semester at Pratt and I also gone through a lot, I really wish I could’ve attended more classes to perform better on the participation. But overall I think I made a great progress on this professional field by comparing to myself and i have tried my best, so it has been a satisfactory learning experience for me.