Development Log

(I originally wrote this post for the Devtober forum. Enjoy!)

Howdy Devtober Folks!

I'm a little late to the party, but I wanted to talk about my Devtober experience and releasing my first ever game, THE SECRET OF WITCH ISLAND. 

https://dapper-dinosaur.itch.io/the-secret-of-witch-island

A little context. I'm a writer working in animation, and I began this process with exactly zero coding experience. I heard about the Devtober challenge through a friend of mine, and since I was between freelancing gigs and always had an interest in working in games, I said to myself, what the hey. I signed up thinking it would be a fun side project, just a little thing to occupy my time. 

It wound up becoming so much more than that, and after a hectic 31 days (and a few days into November) I learned a ton, wrote 18,000-ish words, and released my first ever game. 

DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

Knowing I had a limited time frame, I conceived of doing the game as some variation on a text adventure. Phoenix Wright and this weird online adventure game about exploring an abandoned house with friends were big inspirations. For the first couple of days, I experimented with a variety of game making engines to see what would be workable and easy to use. I tried Twine, Inform, Ren'Py, and Godot before ultimately landing on Twine due to its ease of use and it felt the most easily customizable in terms of adding in features. 

STORY

While I was messing around in the systems, I began brainstorming what my eventual game would be about. I wanted to make something inspired by my own childhood growing up in Portland, Oregon. With the pandemic preventing me from visiting my Pacific Northwest home, I was drawn to the moments and months leading up to me leaving home for college as a teenager and all the goodbyes I had to make to friends, family, and my home in general. Wanting to explore that moment and feeling, I decided to center my game on that whole theme. Not wanting to get too autobiographical with it, I thought it would be fun to root the game in a more fantastical setting filled with magic, giant beasts and mysterious ruins. I found a lot of the specifics as I began writing the game, but it felt nice having a solid emotional core to really lean into. 

GAME DEVELOPMENT

With the game engine and story shape decided on, I still had a mountain to climb in figuring out how to actually implement what I wanted to do. I wanted players to be able to pick up and use items, explore various locations, minor dialogue trees, ability to remember choices, etc. I spent a surprising amount of time figuring out how to program variables, change appearance of texts, and creating chains of "if true, else if not true" expressions. I'm exceedingly grateful to the Twine discord, Twine cookbooks, and the countless forums and tutorials that taught me how to do everything that I wanted. I'm so used to screenwriting, and it was a whole new challenge to figure out how to not only write what I wanted, but also program all the mechanical features, simple as they actually are. Along the way, I modeled some puzzles based on unexpected / fun ways to interact with various text features including delays, scrolling, links and timers. You'll have to play the game to see what I mean.

WRITING PROCESS

Writing the game wound up being such a headtrip compared to my usual screenwriting fare. I had to write explainers for puzzles, dialogue leading the player to look one place or another, lines for characters to say when picking up items, etc. Despite the process feeling wildly different compared to what I'm used to, I really enjoyed it. It felt oddly freeing to work outside the scope of a screenplay where things need to always be so precise and just so. I didn't include multiple endings and as many dialogue trees as I expected, but overall I'm satisfied with how all the characters feel on the page, and I like several of my jokes and lines that I could only write for a project like this. 

PLAY TESTING

I'm deeply indebted to my friends and roommates who playtested the game to give me pointers. My first playtest session was particularly illuminating where I learned that I was being way, way, waaaay too wordy. Subsequent revisions made me cut way down which helped the game play so much smoother and cleaner. I also learned the importance of tutorials and the need to telegraph answers to ensure I wasn't being too opaque. Just as getting notes from friends on scripts is important, playtesting seems absolutely vital to development of successful game projects. 

CONCLUSION

I began October uncertain how things would pan out, but after a ton of work and late nights, I ended the challenge (give or take a few days) with a fully completed adventure game. I learned so much and in spite of the time crunch, I'm really happy with the end product that puts a fantastical, interactive fiction twist on a real life experience of mine. This process was so rewarding, and here's to making another game project somewhere down the line. 

LINK TO GAME

https://dapper-dinosaur.itch.io/the-secret-of-witch-island

If you play my game, be sure to drop a comment! Also since I'm a little late to upload, I tragically missed the window to submit the game to the Devtober game jam. Cest la vie!

You can check out my twitter feed for my slapdash development log with more pictures of the process. @Ian_Rickett