I said I’d try to make a Twine game by the end of this month, and that means I only have a week and a half to go. I haven’t had as much time to work on it as I’d have liked, but I finally have a complete first draft of the game. My next step will be to revise and expand the text, maybe flesh it out with some more scenes, and then see if I can get some people to playtest it on a fairly tight deadline.
The game is smaller than Rage Quest, both because it has fewer passages and also because I decided a very concise writing style was appropriate for the game so there are fewer words per passage. It’s also more linear, with only one path through the game, although I’m planning to add an epilogue that changes based on decisions you’ve made along the way. Basically, you can go on a rampage that mostly only causes property damage, or you can murder absolutely everyone.
The tone I’m going for is violent black comedy, inspired especially by that scene from RoboCop where the police robot demonstration goes wrong. Also, many of the people you can murder in the game are bad people, and I’m intending there to be a cathartic value to that. I haven’t tried to write a game or story with this tone before, and I’m a little worried it’ll end up being offensive or just tasteless, but I’ve got to keep experimenting and pushing myself even if some of the experiments fail.
I’m still hoping to launch the game at the end of November, although I’ll delay it rather than launch a bad game prematurely.