Joke Game Postmortem

Since the premise of the game was supposed to be built around the idea of telling a joke, I thought about what I would be comfortable working with, given that there are many facets to what people would define as humor. As I wanted to keep the level of offense to a minimum, this meant that crass humor was most likely out of the question. Additionally due to the limitations of bitsy being a narrative driven engine, this would probably mean visual gags, while doable, would be fairly difficult to consider. Ultimately I settled on using a pun for the joke line, since they are relatively inoffensive in the most generic cases. And in terms of generic cases, there's nothing more basic than a bar joke. I then expanded on the idea by creating a multiple punchlines, which not only gives the variable that is needed for the assignment but adds a level or replayability to the game that is a nice bonus.

One of the most notable affordances of Bitsy is the ease to create a linear based narrative.  While there are options to move back and forth between scenes, ultimately the driving force is to keep pushing through scenes to drive the gameplay forward, as expected for a narrative genre.  While this would be perfect in conjunction with linear pattern of a pun (that being a setup, followed by the punchline), simply telling the joke over two scenes isn't much of a narrative to begin with. Ultimately I decided to create a series of rooms that would ease the player into the joke. While these rooms mainly are meant to be a distraction so that the joke is unexpected, it does also offer a form of logic to give the player a sense of immersion (their purpose for playing the game).

The variable that changes based on gameplay is, in fact, the joke itself. As there are many different variations of the "X walks into the bar" joke, I thought it would be fitting to make this the interchangeable effect in the end. Thus the player will get a different ending based on their choices, and as a result the joke changes accordingly. The original plan was to implement a point system based on the players choices, which would be the system to determine the outcome of the game. This would have been the most orderly way to do so and would keep the results consistent over multiple games. Unfortunately as I attempted to implement this, it became increasingly wary to add more variables, multiplying the workload practically exponentially. In order to alleviate this I ultimately had to switch to RNG and have the outcome be random instead, which while it sort of adds to the humor in an absurdist way, it also removes the consistency I had hoped for. Ultimately this was a change that was acceptable as I changed my objectives. I feel like if I looked a bit deeper I can find a better way to organize the choices, but with Bitsy's limitations I might have to consider a different coding software to look at better ways to organize the variables.