Evolution of the Story

*** Spoilers ahead. Play The Year here first. ***

The original story for The Year After was complicated: it was one part Day of the Tentacle by LucasArts and one part Passage by Jason Roher. It was about a literal time traveler walking through time and seasons and the landscape would loop, much as it does now. The player comes across a family of four trapped inside a burning house. People were scattered across different rooms and you could save some, but not all of them. The story progressed differently depending on who you chose to save. Everything centered around this difficult choice and unlike the final iteration you see now, players would be fully aware of the choice they had to make. They would second guess themselves and keep returning to the past to try for a different outcome.

After some thought, I decided on a simpler, more metaphorical story and the potential for one of three family members to be taken by sickness. (The child could die) I started arranging the scenes, then decided to simplify more: Only one of the two parents could die and the cause of death: a wild animal. Players would see one of the parents walk off and never return. It was much more immediate and easier to communicate visually than sickness. But how could I prevent players from choosing the child, I asked myself? If there is a selection arrow over the mother or father, there should be an arrow over the child. The solution? The parents would obstruct the path to the child:

Because only one of the parents could die, there was a clean loop: players had a reason to move forward (to see what would happen) and then backward in time (to see what could have been). Players could experience the entire story in one session and the two story paths would complement each other.

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