My Old Kentucky Home (MOKH) is a Twine based work of interactive fiction written during the compo. It’s my first completed work in Twine, though I’ve attempted work in the medium before, and my second Ludum Dare entry ever. Previously I’ve worked in HTML and in card games. The games soundtrack is also performed by me.

This is meant to be read after you’ve played the game, so it does have spoilers/etc in the contents. If you care about things like that, then you shouldn’t continue reading until after you’ve played. The playthrough’s I’ve watched take about ten to fifteen minutes. You can play the game here.

MOKH is a story about a fifteen year old girl named Emily who lives in rural Eastern Kentucky. Two years ago a massive calamity took place that she refers to as the Happening. It’s a class-A, post-apocalyptic event — think zombie invasion, Rapture, I am Legend. Whatever has happened has left her alone, living out of a coal mine in the woods above her empty town, and she is running low on supplies. The basic premise of the story is a take on the tale of Little Red Riding Hood.

What Went Right 

The music went over shockingly well. I wrote almost the entirety of a game inside a defunct soul studio, so I had a feeling I was going to be including some music into it. I researched the type of songs that I wanted to include, as well as remembering what songs were actually performed at the Eastern Kentucky funerals that seem to have been staples of my childhood. All of the songs were recorded in a single take, and they have a shaky quality in them because I’m terrified of performing. Thankfully that lends itself well to the character.

I also feel like I managed to capture a cultural memory of Eastern Kentucky. A large portion of my family is from, and continues to reside in, the area around Pikeville. I attended funerals where family slept in the funeral home the last night of visiting, have sang Amazing Grace at several funeral homes, and have seen the function of coal as a life blood to an area. Some of the strongest women I know are from Eastern Kentucky, and it is that spirit that I wrote Emily. When I read the story aloud, I hear the timber of their accent in Emily’s voice. I say a cultural memory because most of the included details are either from childhood visits or stories told by my mother.

The ending of the story also seemed to work well. My original draft called for a longer, extended scene wherein terrible things were happening to you that you were unable to control, but a macro would push you through those scenes quickly so that it was almost as though the moment was whizzing by. I wanted to simulate the effect that I actually managed to achieve with the final scene — the death blow with the frying pan. Those couple of lines are some of the best that I’ve strung together, if simply by effect alone. I wanted the player to feel as I imagine the character felt, hopeless, slightly vengeful, and knowing that this was necessary. The feedback I have received has stated that that moment functions overwhelmingly in the way I intended, and because of that, I feel successful.

What Went Wrong 

Due to the quick nature of the event (48 hours) there wasn’t the amount of time I would’ve normally spent polishing my work and ridding it of minor things like typos, but also major things like making sure the continuity was strong and editing out events that were not as important. The fire starting event in game took a very long time to write, but almost all of the play throughs I’ve seen have resulted in a successful fire start, thereby rendering the alternative paths from that point in time unnecessary. In a related note, some of the branches near the fire starting tree don’t function the way they are supposed to — the first song is meant to be almost an Easter Egg and because of the way the game functions, almost everyone encounters it.

I would like it to be longer. For some, the pacing was slow, but I really did want to build towards the moment where the player feels the desperation of the character. Right now her decision to go down the mountain seems almost like a whim, and I really wanted it to be a need.

I wish there were more possible outcomes. Near the end, I was contemplating an ending wherein Emily fails to fend off her attacker, and he kills her. I had already mapped out how the scene would take place, but removed it because I felt that a player that was invested in the outcome of the game would feel cheated or thwarted. If the game built in such a way that that was an option, I feel it would be more accepted, but didn’t think that it would work in the context of the game as it stands currently.

The Future 

I plan to continue working on MOKH, from the minor (fixing typos and grammar) to the major (more music, some minor graphics, etc).

If you have any questions, I’d love to answer them, and you can play My Old Kentucky Home here.

Tags: LD28, postmortem, Twine

So with a little over 2 hours left in Ludum Dare judging I’m sitting down to talk a bit about the game I’ve worked on. It’s called rot, and it’s a short interactive fiction piece about menstruation, coming of age, and the post-apocalypse.

If you haven’t played and/or rated it yet, I’d be super pumped if you did.

You can play it here.

I’ll include a longer post-mortem after the cut, but don’t want to bog down the front page. If you’re interested in hearing more about the subject, about using the interactive fiction engine ink or about trying to create a varied experience everyone will still undoubtedly comment is too linear – read ahead

I’m going to be talking about the content of the game, which covers menstruation, and has trigger warnings for blood, gore and sexual abuse. They’re not really heavy handed, but they’re definitely there.

Picking Engines

I like to start Ludum Dare by setting some basic goals for myself. This time around I wanted to use the interactive fiction tool/engine ink. Ink is a really fascinating engine developed for use in the game 80 Days. One of the things that differentiate it from a few other common IF tools is that it allows for really fine tuned control of where the narrative goes. When you’re working in interactive fiction, the narrative is the mechanic, so finding a tool that worked like this was really interesting.

I’ve used a lot of different engines for different games during Ludum Dare, from Twine to Tyrano Builder to good ole Unity, but I had a lot of fun learning and adapting ink to suit my needs. The first day or so was spent both wasting time and reading ink documentation, which probably could’ve been cut down. You live and you learn.

Ink is free and if you’re at all interested in fine-tuned adjustments in dialogue systems or in interactive fiction in general, I’d suggest checking it out.

Making A Game About Periods 

Earlier in 2016 I participated in the Train Jam. It was a fantastic experience, and I highly recommend it if you’re in the Midwestern United States heading to GDC and haven’t somehow already heard about it. It’s a 52 hour game jam across the United States, on a train. During the ride I happened to start my period which was uncomfortable and awkward as those things normally are.

Combined with discussions about Snowpiercer that were happening at the time, I began to focus on how I really needed to make a game about the post-apocalypse and menstruation. Nothing was firmly in place before the jam started, but it was an idea I’d been knocking around for awhile. In addition, one of the better movies I saw this year was the VVitch, a Puritan witch horror thriller. Both of these experiences came together to create rot.

One of the people at our jam site started doing free-association with words on the white board. When she asked us what we thought of when we thought about the term “one room” I thought about “wombs.” From there I remembered my earlier experiences with the Train Jam and realized that that was what I was going to make a room about. My original thought for this Ludum Dare was to work on making a sweater into a game, but with the theme I just didn’t feel inspired at all. So I started working on a game about menstruation instead.

With rot, I really wanted to touch on the alien feeling of periods, specifically for the first time. I was also struck by how, especially if you had no concept of what was going on, the idea would be really horrifying and gross. I mean, even if you know what’s going on it’s not pleasant. There’s a really old Tumblr post I can’t find where a woman describes her period to someone who is a man, where she breaks down all of the pieces of what it feels like — the stickiness, the smell, the pain. The memory of that description was a big impetus for me writing this. Women don’t talk about menstruation, not openly. Not really. At least not where I live. And yeah, that’s probably cause getting into the chunky bits is a bit gross, but it’s also something that happens every month.

So I wanted to write a kind of body-horror game about what it would be like in a world where you aren’t raised with female role models, where the women are taken away when they reach some odd arbiter of “sexual maturity” and the extreme discomfort and horror of the first time.

What would I change

The game suffers for lack of background music. About an hour before the end of the compo, I realized I didn’t actually know if ink exported to a playable form by itself (without say a Unity shell). Luckily for me it did. Unluckily it doesn’t really natively support pictures or sound, so I had to spend the last hour inputting images manually in the javascript file. It’s not hard, just tedious and I didn’t have time to add in sound effects as well.

If I publish a definitive version, it will have audio. But that’s the big thing I wish the game currently had.

Anyone, after reading about periods for a little bit you’re still interested in playing rot, you certainly can. The game can be found and rated here.

Tags: ink, interactive fiction, post-mortem, rot