Martin Game Postmortem

Any game would be time-consuming to make, and I got too enthusiastic with the idea of the range of things I could do. I was excited by the idea that I could doodle a silly, low-quality drawing depicting the situation for some passages on Microsoft Paint, but I quickly realized that simply coming up with the different branching storylines and ending was time-consuming enough without illustrations involved. This is how my twine web of passages ended up looking once I was done making all of the branching options and endings:

It's already a lot, and it's already messy to look through, but my original idea was to have even more branching passages and ending options. I realized that it wouldn't be realistic, and I had to cut down on the ambition. I also generally just had to ensure each choices would lead to unique enough situations to encourage replaying, without worrying about repeats.

Originally, you would have been able to go through all 4 initial options in either the red pill or blue pill side, so that you could choose not to miss anything. But in a branching game like this, I realized through play-testing that it meant repeating dialogue in replays that got boring. I set a limit to only picking maximum two of the 4 initial options to decide how your story ends. It helped my plan for the story-lines/endings to be much clearer, too. I realized that, creativity be damned, I couldn't just figure out how the story would branch out on-the-go as I made passages. I needed to put together a plan for the structure of the game's base "story", and how the player's choices would affect stages of the story-line. Now, here's my humbling page of notes as I tried to figure my plan out. It's likely not legible to anyone else but my ADHD mind, but luckily, I wasn't working with anyone else who would be subjected to this: