Hey! I'm Sam Wareing and welcome to this blog about all things game related! Be it my own work, reviews or thoughts on games and the industry, it'll all be on here! For my first post I'd like to talk about what I've been up to in my final year of university studying Writing for Games Development; specifically about my experience making a Twine game and how that went.
When we started the new term back in September 2019 we were tasked with devising a portfolio piece that would be our "Hero Piece", a piece we could be proud of and add to our ever expanding portfolio's of work. We had complete creative freedom so, naturally, my mind raced with possible ideas. My initial idea was to create a world bible that would go along with the game my team and I were creating for another module. It was to be a world centred around Alchemy, an expansive continent with different regions and people, each with their own customs, traditions and unique forms of Alchemy. However mid-way through prototyping phase of the team project, we had to scrap the alchemy idea due to difficulties in design, and thus my world bible was no longer needed. This left me a little downhearted, however it wasn't like I had lost the piece, so I continued to work on it. As I progressed with it though, I began to like it less and less, and although world building is something I enjoy immensely, I wasn't enjoying what I was doing.
I wanted to do something more exciting, something I could really get my teeth into and would allow my excitement and ambition to shine through. In the two weeks I spent mulling over ideas, I found a book at the bottom of a draw while having a bit of a tidy up. It was a copy of Steve Jackson and Ian Livingston's "Deathtrap Dungeon" a book in a series called "Fighting Fantasy". They were a series of chose your own adventure "Game books" which had a combat system and inventory system built in; a single player Dungeons and Dragons campaign if you will. I played them religiously as a child and finding this one again gave me an idea.
I recalled a piece of writing software I had been introduced to last year called Twine and knew instantly what I was going to do. Using the "Fighting Fantasy" books as a base, I started playing around in Twine to see if it was possible to create a "Fighting Fantasy" style game, and as it turns out, it was. I was excited. For the first time since starting the project I was genuinely itching to get started. My first task would be to get to grips with Twine and to see if I could make an inventory system. This was tricky. I am no programmer and absolutely appalling at maths, so getting my head around Twine's Harlowe coding system was a bit of a challenge. Harlowe itself is actually fairly simple when you get to grips with it but it took me a while before I was confident with it. I eventually managed to get a simple inventory system working that allowed items to be added, removed and each would have their own descriptions. My game was starting to take shape.
Next on the agenda was to create a stats system that would be different every time you played. In the "Fighting Fantasy" books you rolled one or two D6 dice to determine your Stamina, Skill and Luck scores as well as for testing your stats in particular situations and fighting monsters. I decided, for simplicity's sake, that I would try to emulate using D6 in the game to create randomised stats. This took a bit of digging around on the Twine forums. I knew what I wanted to do, the problem was finding the right way to write it so Twine would understand what I wanted. Eventually, with much trial and error (which there was a lot of during this project) I had a stats system that was fully randomised each time you started a fresh game. The stats were the same as in the "Fighting Fantasy" books (Health instead of Stamina, Power instead of Skill) but the third stat I changed completely to be Adrenaline. Adrenaline was a stat that, instead of decreasing like the others, it increased. You have a Max Adrenaline score and a Current Adrenaline score. If the Current Adrenaline Score ever equals or exceeds the Max Adrenaline score, it would be game over. The character had a special suit that would inject her with a shot of adrenaline whenever it's sensors detected she was in a dangerous situation. The Max Adrenaline score reflects how many shots of adrenaline her body can take before causing cardiac arrest.
It was around the time that I came up with the Adrenaline stat that I also devised the story for this game. Way back in my first year at university during one of the writing workshops, we were tasked with rewriting a fairy tale in a different genre. I chose to rewrite Little Red Riding Hood as a Sci-Fi story in which she was a bounty hunter. Long since forgotten, I was deleting stuff off of my computer when I found it again. I had also been re-playing Metroid Fusion (one of my favourite games of all time) at the time and with that and the newly rediscovered story fresh in my mind, the tale of Red "Riding" Hood, galactic bounty hunter and slayer of evil was born. She was to intercept a distress signal from her home planet, a place she hadn't been for five years and upon touching down, discover something had gone terribly wrong, and it all seemed to stem from the Galactic Space lab that sat looming ominously over the town she once called home.
I set about implementing the story into the game and this presented a whole new challenge within itself. As this was a chose your own adventure game, there had to be different paths the player could take. This, I quickly realised, was very time consuming. I had to create enough different options with their own consequences, items, dead ends and instant deaths to keep the player engaged, but also keep that number within a scope I could manage. Along side implementing the story, I was developing the all important combat system. This was probably the hardest challenge I had encountered on this project. Once again using dice rolls as my basis, I already had the code for the randomised rolls so that part wasn't an issue. What was an issue was setting up separate variables for the player character and the monster they were fighting. I took inspiration once again from the "Fighting Fantasy" books and used the combat system they used there as a base for mine. Both player and monster would "roll" two D6 dice to provide a random number. This number would then be added to their Power score to give a new stat unique to combat: Combat Advantage. Whoever had the highest Combat Advantage would win that round of combat and deal damage to the other. If the Combat Advantages were the same, then it would be counted as a miss and no damage would be dealt.
If the monster's health was reduced to zero, you won and could continue your adventure. If your health was reduced to zero, you would die and have to restart the game from the beginning, rolling up new stats. I had a lot of trouble getting the variables for Combat Advantage, damage etc to all line up properly and execute in they way they were supposed to, when they were supposed to. I ended up having to ask one of the programmers on my team to give me a hand and working together we eventually managed to get it all working. It was finally complete. After weeks of trial and error, learning a new piece of software and the coding system inside it and feeling like it would never get completed, it was done.
We had to hand the piece in for marking since it is a university assignment, so the week before all the third year writers had a crit session with our writing lecturer. It was here I learned that, we had only a ten minute slot in January to showcase our work (I already knew about the showcase, the time limit however, I did not). I knew I had to cut mine down. It was huge and would take more than ten minutes to show off! So I spent the week up until the hand in frantically trying to create a condensed version of the game in a new Twine project (I wanted to keep the original and work on it to hopefully release it in the future).
During the whole process a name for the game eluded me. I wasn't till right at the end that the name came to me: Project: WOLF. Quite fitting I thought, for a game about Little Red Riding Hood! And there we have it. The whole process was quite a journey, and I feel I really threw myself in at the deep end with this project, however I think that was good for me as a games developer and a writer. It has allowed me to try things I wouldn't have normally done and expand my writing skills, my game development knowledge and increase my confidence in all of those areas.
Despite Project: WOLF being "finished" even after the showcase in January I still aim to continue work on it and make it the best it can be. I want it to be a real homage to the "Fighting Fantasy" books that captured my imagination as a child and provided me with much joy over the years. In fact, they still do to this day. Steve Jackson and Ian Livingston, if you ever read this, I hope you enjoy my work, any feedback would be incredible, but most of all, thank you.
If you'd like to play the condensed version of Project: WOLF you can find it on the "Projects" page of my website. Feel free to send me an email with any feedback as it would be much appreciated! Well, I think that's quite enough for my first post. I hope you've enjoyed seeing the process that led me to creating Project: WOLF.
Until next time, take care.
Sam