A Walk in the Woods
Narrative Game, 2024
A narrative game where, as the title says, you take a walk through the woods. Unfortunately, there are many dangerous things in the woods that you will encounter.
Skills
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Game Scripting
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Game Design
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Background Art
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Playtesting​
Tools
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Twine
- Harlowe 3.3.8
- Photoshop
- Google Docs
Creation Process
A Walk In The Woods is a text-based video game that I created for a special topics studio course. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure narrative inspired by fairytales and horror stories, stemming from my interest in mythology and folktales and how oral stories have been shared, adapted, reimagined, and repopularized across time and mediums. This game was created in one week, including the writing, coding, artwork, and editing.
Scripting
I started by creating a skeleton outline, breaking down each encounter with important interaction choices, results, and pathways. Using the outline, I wrote the game script in Twine. After writing one encounter, I playtested the game before moving on to the next section, going back to make changes if needed or new ideas came up.
Visual Design
I created a mood board to help define the hand-drawn storybook and old horror aesthetic I wanted for the game. The background assets were digitally drawn using Photoshop. I first drew mock-ups of each scene by hand before importing the sketches into Photoshop as guides. Because I wanted the background to look hand-drawn, I used a variety of brushes and played with the stroke opacity to build texture, layering objects to create a two-dimensional, worn paper look, and I stuck to a black and white colour palette to emulate horror story imagery.
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I used Harlowe 3.3.8 to style the game, deciding the font and colour scheme, formatting the text placement and backgrounds, and creating tags to distinguish each game section. I chose a serif font to fit the old storybook aesthetic and changed the default text colour from white to black for readability. For the interactive text, I chose to make the colour dark red to stand out against the black and white backgrounds and to lean into the soft horror theme of the game.
Playtests
After the game was complete, I had it playtested by peers (both frequent and non-frequent video game players) to gain feedback. In their playtests, I asked them to play through the game as many times as they wanted and then inform me of anything they found confusing, their frustrations, gameplay suggestions, and any ending(s) they got, as well as general notes on error messages and grammar mistakes. With their feedback, I edited the script and made adjustments to improve the experience. However, though the game is finished, it is admittedly not polished, and I hope to improve it and add more to it in the future.
Afterthoughts
As one of the first full game experiences I have made, I am very happy with it. I have always wanted to create video games, and as a combination of my love for writing and game design, I am in love with this project. Though it is far from polished, and I hope to improve it in the future, I am proud of how it currently is and proud of myself for accomplishing this. Not only did I have fun creating this game, but I also had fun playing it, and I hope if you played it, you had fun too.