iec- | Never Let Go Of

Design Achievements

This is a first-draft text adventure, created for a mastery thesis project at SMU Guildhall. Best described as an interactive novella (approximately 120 pages long), the game focuses on character development, thematic writing, and providing compelling player choices and consequences.

Narrative - Constructed a story that offers a powerful mixture of dramatic and thematic structure.
Game Design - Crafted an adventure with choices that lead to subtle but far-reaching ramifications.
Scripting - Made strong use of basic scripting tools to create emergent consequences.
The game can be played on any modern browser, whether mobile or desktop (link to the game).

Design Achievements

Never Let Go Of

Text adventure created in Twine 2 ◦ 3 months ◦ 2016

Link to Text Adventure

Narrative

"Never Let Go Of" doesn't just use writing to push the story forwards, but relies on many literary techniques

Game Design

The adventure is mostly linear in nature, but a great deal of nuance went into choices and consequences

Scripting

Conditional scripting and a large number of choice variables leads to a unique experience for every player

Narrative

"Never Let Go Of" doesn't just use writing to push the story forwards, but relies on many literary techniques

1/3

Game Summary

Never Let Go Of is the first episode from a series of text adventures titled The Path. Each adventure focuses on different aspects of narrative and game design, with heavy attention given to metafiction, and every one of them has a grounding concept that intertwines with the characters, mechanics, and story. The theme of this chapter is "time," a theme that is brought to the fore through character motivations, conflicts, choices, and consequences.

The Reader is thrown into the story to find themselves controlling Dr. Kennelly Crayton, a paranormal analyst whose aim is to explain the unexplainable. At The Agency (a fictional organization that takes obvious inspiration from The SCP Foundation), the supernatural is normal, and so the first half of the story plays like a slice of life. The Reader is introduced to the mostly mundane lives of Kennelly and his friends as they go out for a surprise birthday outing, and the game sets up the character backstories and allows The Reader to make small conversational choices that subtly affect the attitudes of Kennelly's friends.

The group and The Reader are lulled into a false sense of security while learning more about each other, and the story slowly drifts them towards dire circumstances. On a drunken lark, the four friends walk off into the Russian taiga in search of the Dream House, a myth among myths, a fabled location that grants wishes and possesses powers that even four paranormal experts deem to be absurd and impossible.

Game Summary

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narrative