Postmurder (postmortem haha get it.......) (05)

WOW.

I made a game in Twine, an engine that I had no idea existed until around two weeks ago. I’m proud of what I achieved in the time that I worked on it.

Michael’s Murder Night is exactly what it sounds like. A night in which Michael, the main character, commits murder. It is a really simple concept, you follow a murderer as he stalks his victim until he kills them. You get inside Michael’s head as you play, getting to know more about his wicked motives and desires.

I already explained this in the devlogs, but I went with this idea to stop myself from trying to tackle a bigger concept. Having the game happen during just one night helped me focus on the important parts of it, and not try to add unnecessary things that would consume more time than what I had. This has been a problem for me in most of the little games that I make: I try to work with a huge concept and then I have to figure out how to make it actually doable. That makes me delete a bunch of stuff that I had planned, and while it works out in the end, when I see the original concepts I do get a little bit upset that I could not accomplish everything that I wanted. With this game, however, I did all that I had planned and even more, gameplay-wise. This was because I set more realistic expectations, and I made it work. I did have to rush some of the art, and I would like to redo some of it sometime, but overall I think it is great. I think the story by itself also worked quite well. I got to establish Michael as someone that was outwardly very nice and patient, but has a twisted side to him and a morbid curiosity. He can also act reckless when threatened, as seen by some of the bad endings.

Now, for the things that did not work. I wanted to use the Sugarcube format, since it seemed to be a bit more complete and most of the games and templates that I found used it. I even found templates for Sugarcube, but when I tried to work with that, I was genuinely lost. I spent some time trying to get the system to make sense in my brain, but the words just were not clicking. I then changed back into Harlowe, and since it is more basic, I understood it faster. However, since I used Harlowe, I did not find a way to customise everything the way that I wanted. I probably could have done it, if I had more time and possibly more patience, but that did not happen. I also had problems aligning the images, as well as getting the right sizes. It looks okay currently, but it is not exactly how I wanted it to look. I do not like the spacing between the lines, but that is a minor complaint. Also, for the death of the player ending (the one where you get a cracked screen), the sound effect is delayed, because if I added the sound before the text in the passage, the text did not appear, but when I put the text first, the sound took a while to happen. Even then, I think the gunshot sound does not work in the itch.io version, so I really am just needlessly exposing myself over here.

Overall, I really enjoyed this project. I might use Twine again to develop other small stories, since it is easy to use and I like the interface. I think I am getting better at recognising what I am able to do and how to set realistic expectations. I still have to be better at organising my tasks and getting stuff done before I’m doing it last minute. I also believe I learnt to condense stories into a shorter format, because had I gone for a longer story, I would not have finished the game. It was a very nice learning experience, and it was lovely to have a game with characters that I had already developed. The fact that they already existed in my brain and I did not have to create them from scratch made me more motivated to work on it, and it also made it easier. I already knew those characters, I just had to tell their story. As some people say, creating takes time, and it usually turns better when you have a deeper connection to what you are making.