First, I would like to start by saying how interesting this final project was!
I really enjoyed creating this game and twine is a wonderful tool for creating interactive games like this! The whole game is about finding a lost dog. And as the journey goes on, you get to meet with many people and visit numerous places to look for the cute little maltese.
Along the journey, I used Char NG as the words of someone who does not know how to speak English. In my game, you get to talk to this one foreigner who is not good at speaking in English. And the way he talks with unstable sentence structure is shown with Char NG. Next, moving on to N+7, I used this for getting answers from multiple people. I thought of this idea that hearing the same thing multiple times might make it clearer for some people but more confusing for others. Crowdsourcing is also used a lot throughout the journey. This is because most of the journey continues with asking people if they have seen the dog, and getting multiple answers that eventually help in finding the dog at the end. The anagram generator was also used as the speaking words for this one woman in the story. And she has Alzheimer's disease so she could not speak properly. The predictive writer botnik is used for the text, “I want this to be a dream.” I wanted to express thoughts in words with this botnik website. Lastly, there are five different oblique strategies I used for my twine game. The first one is “Once the search is in progress, something will be found.” This statement explains the whole game itself and this is what inspired me to make this game a finding game! The second one is “A line has two sides.” As you play the game, you will see that you have to make choices every time you get somewhere or meet someone. One will end up in a great place, but the other choice might take you back. And I thought that this idea really connects to the second strategy I got. The third one is ‘Breathe more deeply”. This would be a helpful strategy for people playing this game. Since it is the game of finding a lost dog. And as you get more and more engaged in the game, you might get nervous and frustrated just like how the owner of the dog inside the game does. So, whenever that situation comes, I want to tell the players, breathe more deeply. You can do this! The fourth one is Into the impossible. This is the idea I was going for at the beginning where the game does not have the end and continues to go around the cycle of finding the dog which makes the game impossible to end. However, as I was working on it, I thought that it would be too harsh on people who really tried their best to find the dog inside the game, so I ended up adding the scene where players actually meet with the lost dog. But I did include various choices that lead players to the same ending where they could not find the dog. The last strategy emphasizes repetition. This strategy is definitely used in my game because in a lot of the situations players get to face, they will need to go back and forth to find the right place and right person. So there will be some repetitive situations that they have to go through. But, this is what makes the game more interesting.
Overall, I definitely learned a lot from this course. I had fun playing games in different styles. And it was fun learning various aspects of HTML and CSS. I would totally recommend this course to my friends. Since I enjoyed it so much and learned a lot from it, I think I deserve a good grade for this project and the class overall. I did really like this twine game making as final, but what I loved more was the hypertext narrative that we did for midterms :)