Choosing the story (01)

When we first got the assignment, I was really excited. The story is one of my favourite parts when making games, so this seemed to be an incredibly fun idea.

I usually think of Godot as my first option and engine of choice, but our professor showed us Twine. At first, I wasn't too into it, and I really didn't understand how it worked, but after playing a few games made in Twine, I realised it would be pretty fun to work with it. I just had to decide what to do.

It's not like I don't have stories to tell, but the opposite. It was hard to decide what story I could tell through this medium. My first idea was actually to make an Ace Attorney fangame, since the stuff you could make in Twine made me think of the Ace Attorney games. I even started planning the plot, but I'll keep it a secret in case I do choose to develop this idea at some other point.  But since making decisions is always hard, I started thinking of other options. I have a character that has lived multiple lives in the past, and I thought it would be fun to tell his story. However, when I started doing the outline, I realised that it would be too hard to condense everything in a super short game. My third idea was to make an Undertale fangame, following Chara, but then I started wondering if a narrative game needed to have multiple endings. When I asked that, the answer was yes but not really. Technically, a game over is another ending. Therefore, there can be one ending, but ways in which you can not reach it, which branch into different directions.

With all that in mind, I started considering all my options, and the thing that stood out the most was the fact that everything would take too long for the amount of time that we actually had. Then, I thought of ways to keep the story short and simple. I could make it happen in just one night, and that would stop me from going too insane and making it too long.  I started thinking about what kind of characters I have that would have a whole adventure in one night, and that's when I remembered my little murderer character. That sounds so wrong.

He studies during the day and pretends to be a normal little guy, so he only kills at night and it doesn't even take him that long, so I decided that I could make a little game in which you follow him as he stalks his victim of that night and kills them.