Posted In: Reflections
This week in our course Digital Authoring Practices, we began brainstorming and wrote our proposals for our final project. I had a lot of fun looking over everything we’ve studied this semester to determine what exactly I would be creating as my final project object. After being intrigued by the Twine game Depression Quest, I knew I wanted to create an interactive story that would keep the reader interested at a greater level than a normal short story because of the user’s ability to alter the life and events of the protagonist.
After deciding to take this path for my final project, I dug deeper into Depression Quest to see what I wanted to implement and what I wanted to change or tailor for my own creation. As far as design and styling goes, I liked the color theme of the game, a simple style that not only keeps the user’s focus on the content of the story itself, but colors that reflect the dull and empty feelings that the story brings: a protagonist struggling with depression.
The content of the story itself, unsurprisingly due to its serious subject matter, is quite mundane, reflecting on the seemingly dragging life of a victim of depression. Contrastingly, I would like to make each section of my story, despite the choices of the user, interesting and suspenseful, always keeping the reader on their toes. And the interactive choices that the user makes for the protagonist will be more meaningful than day-to-day decisions. Because the genre of my story will be horror, the user will be aware that each decision he makes could affect the life of the protagonist.
Some interesting elements that I plan to include in my own site have to do with the choices themselves. First, I want to include one choice that is no longer an option, indicated in Depression Quest by a line striking through the text. In the game, the purpose of this is to indicate that this choice is not an option for a victim of depression who can not always make the best or healthiest decisions for him or herself. In my own story, I hope to do this by reminding the reader what is no longer an option due to the circumstances of the story itself. For example, if the protagonist is walking through a dark hallway and drops her phone, calling for help can be one of the options on the bottom of the screen, but it will be crossed out since she no longer has her cellphone, adding to the suspense and reminder of paths to survival running out.
I would also like to include is the overall theme of inevitable failure. There are not always options for health and healing for a victim of depression. The game shows that even if the user chooses the healthiest options for the protagonist, this will not sidestep the fact that he or she is sad and lost in their emotions. Likewise, to add to the suspense of my own story, new problems will always arise for the protagonist, emphasizing the horror of no-way-out.