Quests and Games

This week in digital writing, we talked about what it meant to construct a game with your audience in mind. This was a good topic to cover as we approach the deadline for our next project. We also submitted our drafts for our Verification Quests, and we peer reviewed them.

I had never really considered writing a game before–nor do I play very many in my spare time (I’m more of a watch-a-playthrough-and-live-vicariously-through-Markiplier kind of person). So, reading the chapter of Story Mode by Julialicia Case, Eric Freeze, and Salvatore Pane was fascinating for me. I personally think it’s super interesting the different directions a game can take its player, especially when the story line remains cohesive. I always thought that must be difficult to arrange and work out on the development side.

This chapter addressed that, and the authors made it seem a little less frightening to try and tackle. They gave us tips about managing the different directions a story can go and making sure our scope is broad enough to be engaging but narrow enough so it’s not overwhelming.

Most of the chapter focused on the importance of remembering your audience. There are different kinds of players, and different people want different things out of a game. For our projects, it was helpful to consider what kind of experience we wanted to provide for our players. For instance, did we want something more narrrative driven, or did we want to provide an experience that let our audience explore or collect achievements?

Of course, it was vital to make sure what we picked fit within the scope of our project and also added deliberately to the information we wanted to give with our chosen topic. For this class, too, we had a couple of guests from local high schools. Our little group got to chat one-on-one with one of them, and he was very sweet. He had some fun ideas about utilizing the different Twine tools to provide a “collection” experience with different songs, like building a playlist. It was neat to get a new perspective on the potential of Twine, and I’m looking forward to really digging into this new project.

We also are beginning to wrap up our previous project. Peer reviews went well for Verification Quest, and it was great to get to see some of my classmates’ projects! They’re coming along really nicely, and I loved getting a backdoor peek into how they’re choosing to use HTML and CSS.

When I was writing my project, I was intimidated at first at the thought of writing CSS. However, I think that was my favorite part overall. It was just so fun getting to try different fonts, colors, layouts, and effects. Not all of them worked at first, but I’m actually pretty happy with how my project ended up looking (thank you, Bailey!). I hope I get the chance to work with it more in the future, even outside of this class.