Yesterday I couldn’t post anything during late-compo frenzy to get something shippable so I’m posting my recap now.

It was my first Ludum Dare, game jam, first finished Twine story, and here’s my biggest lesson:

Don’t do a game jam if you are gonna need a lot of content

That simple. In a 48 compo you can write some logic that luckily generates a lot of interesting gameplay combinations. You can add a bit of high quality content, or a bit more of basic content. But if your game depends on a large amount of content that you need to create manually, you are not going to make it according to plan.

Mechanics and content

Truth be untold is a game about lying or telling the truth. It is more story-oriented than gameplay-oriented, but at the same time I think it has more mechanics than typical exploratory Twines. Each choice you take is calculated from multiple factors that include all your previous choices, NPC knowledge, randomness or a hardcoded level of difficulty.

This mechanics could allow for some interesting progressions. For example, you could get a NPC that initially doesn’t trust you to believe your first lies due to pure luck, increase his trust, and eventually be able to make her believe the craziest stuff you throw at her.

All the pieces are in place to get that kind of gameplay. But I would need to write a lot of different scenes of interaction with that character. Handmade content is needed to allow the gameplay to emerge. And good handmade content is exactly what you can’t deliver in a 48 hour jam.

Of course, I knew this, but I overestimated my writing speed.

(More later)

Tags: interactive fiction, Twine