Category: Games

After procrastinating on NaNoWriMo 2022 to a sufficient degree that it has just become another story I hope to finish at some point, this week I’ve turned my attention back to The Last Question, which was my world of choice for NaNoWriMo 2021. I have some ideas for where I’d like to go next.

Two months ago I revisited The Last Question, a basic RPG I wrote at the start of the pandemic. A group of friends has agreed to start an actual campaign with me later this year — we’ve had trouble finding a good time to get started — so I decided to retool the game itself. I wasn’t happy with the initial set of mechanics; it didn’t seem to mesh with the intent of the game.

After some research, I settled on the Motif system, which focuses on asking questions. A natural fit. I wrote a gameplay guide in Affinity Publisher¹I learned InDesign at work, but am certainly not in a position to subscribe to the Adobe Suite, so Publisher was a great option. that I’m pretty proud of, and will provide below.

I’m excited to play this game with some friends. It’s a creative outlet just for us. There’s no spinning this into an actual-play podcast. There is a lot to be said for having fun in a way that isn’t performative for someone else.

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  I learned InDesign at work, but am certainly not in a position to subscribe to the Adobe Suite, so Publisher was a great option.

Text adventures are, almost by necessity, designed to railroad the player into doing something without it being obvious or annoying. Any mechanics introduced should be a natural extension to the world the player discovers, provide sufficient freedom so they don’t feel like a funnel, yet guide the player in the correct direction. In the text adventures I’ve listen to played on the Cortex/Upgrade crossover episodes, I’ve noticed that mechanics often act as hints. They are like bumpers on a wall (which may kill you, but you can make a different decision the next time.)

All these realizations have come after thinking carefully through the mechanics and puzzles I wrote which were clearly bad (and the few which were actually good), and trying to figure out what precisely caused them to have the effect on the players they did. It’s often me not paying attention to my good sense and the feedback of testers. More frequently it’s me trying to subdue the text adventure genre until it allows me to try and tell a story, rather than building a story that works within a framework.

Directly, most of my text adventure failures have come from a single mechanic undermining any positive decisions I made.

I want each text adventure I write to have a unique flavor. Mechanics aside, the story behind it should be fresh, typically built from a single idea, and the more I write the more my mind recognizes these singular bits of inspiration. One thought or phrase is typically enough for me to build a world from: sitting down with a thought, then branching out from the initial point in whatever way my mind flows. I’m going to discuss how this process worked for each of the four text adventures I’ve written and released so far, and try to dissect what I learned in the process. In the next post, I’ll focus more on the thought process (or lack thereof) that went into developing some of the game mechanics around these ideas.

I’ve written several in-person text adventures modeled after Parsely games over the past couple of years. Through persistent effort, I’ve managed to improve them and recently began to notice a particular style develop. Since I’m finally pleased with where they are headed, I figured I would document my journey in writing them: Why I write them, how I find ideas, how I develop those ideas, and the actual mechanisms of making a document as reference. This whole set of posts will probably be four parts over the next month. So we start off at the beginning: Why did I start writing these, and why am I still writing these?