Devlog #2 - First Dates Postmortem

I’m pretty satisfied with the outcome of my game. What inspired me for this game was actually the Twine game, “You Can’t Save Her”. It was a simple interactive short story, only with simple text, and no illustrations–but the narrative was emotional and compelling. Its main mechanic was being able to cycle through different sentences, and it would change the outcome to what would happen next. After reading it, I decided to make that as my main mechanic as well. This main mechanic was my first challenge. I’m not going to lie, I tried to use ChatGPT as a shortcut and was asking how I would be able to do what I wanted. I didn’t know anything about Twine, and I was too lazy to go through tons of tutorials to learn it. However, everything that it was suggesting kept giving me an error in Twine (not to much surprise), so I kind of gave up on it. It was also giving me really complicated ways to do it, and it just felt immoral to use something I didn’t understand–as it wasn’t technically my work. So I gave up on it and ended up having to go through a bunch of tutorials anyway. 

I went through a few Youtube tutorials to learn the basics of Twine, and for specific stuff, I had to search through tons of Twine forums and Reddit threads. So, in the end, it turned out to be a success. I learned a lot about Twine and I also documented my process for the coding in my first Devlog! So I guess the lesson I learned is to actually learn the basics of a program first if you don’t know it well. It’s also really useful to go through forums and threads as there’s probably someone else out there that has the same question, especially if its a common mechanic that you see in similar games. 

While I am satisfied with the gameplay, and just a simple interactive story with no illustrations was what I was going for to make sure I could finish this quickly, it would’ve been nice to create a nicer main menu, and to include some illustrations with music. In a perfect world where I could’ve learned a lot more about Twine and its way of coding, I would’ve gone down the visual novel path. I’m glad that I kept the scope small though. I was sick starting this project (and still currently recovering from a nasty cough and stuffy nose as I write this), so I didn’t have the time to be staying up until 3am. To compensate for the lack of aesthetics, I tried to focus a lot more on the writing. While I do regret not exploring adding music and imagery, I recognize that I could always add to this project on my own time.