Esther Has No Voice—Project Goals

A couple of days ago, I uploaded what I’ve written so far of my Twine game, Esther Has No Voice, to itch.io (you can play it here); and I added a listing for it to the Interactive Fiction Database yesterday. It’s a fantasy adventure game; the protagonist, Esther, is a nonverbal mage traveling in a sort of adventuring party as a healer. I’ve been working on this project off and on since late May, but it’s nowhere near done—I’m planning for it to be a pretty long story, with at least a few different endings, so consider what I have so far as more of a demo, or a glorified tutorial exploring some of the game’s concepts.

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I’m a pretty big fan of interactive fiction in general, and there are a lot of really fun titles out there; my primary impetus for this project was actually that I’ve kind of had an idea for a particular sort of game that I’ve wanted to play for some time, but I’ve never really found anything exactly like what I’ve had in mind. I’ve tried my hand at text-based games before, mostly using programs like Twine or Inform (one of my largest Inform projects, from about five years ago, was an admittedly ambitious adaption of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, in which you could choose to play any of the four Pevensie siblings, with slightly different gameplay for each character), but I’ve never published my work before in any form, so this is kind of exciting for me. Story-wise, I’m still not totally happy with the level of exposition in the game’s beginning, and I know that the characters need more development (especially the main characters other than the protagonist); but, overall, I’m at a point where I feel comfortable sharing my work with people outside of my immediate family. Even though I guess that I’m technically trying to plow forward without editing my old work too much, I tend to polish things up a bit every few playthroughs, even if it’s just something simple like fixing a typo; so I’m hoping that the narrative’s flow will improve with time.

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I’ve had a few goals in mind for what I want Esther Has No Voice to be like; I think that it’d be accurate to say that I’ve had most of these goals from the beginning of the project, so I thought that I’d explore at least a few of them a bit here, and compare what I had in mind to how my game actually turned out.

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First, a couple of technical goals. I’d honestly rarely used transitions in Twine before, but I really wanted the text to fade in, so that you could expand text within a page without it looking kind of jerky; I know that this sounds like a pretty small thing, but it was a bit of a learning curve for me, so it’s actually been my biggest hurdle (from a programming perspective) writing the game so far—but I’m glad that I kept at it, because this is actually one part of the game that turned out exactly like what I had in mind.

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Another coding goal that I have in mind is that I want to use as few variables as was practical. I tend to get a little annoyed by things like character stats, skill checks, and similar numerical trappings in interactive fiction, not because I think that they’re innately bad or anything like that, but because I feel like they’re often overused, sometimes even to the detriment of the narrative; it seems like I’ve seen a good deal of games that tend to (whether intentionally or not) kind of push you into specializing the player character into one or two specific roles, sometimes simply ending up limiting their choices to only being able to successfully pick maybe one option when faced with several different possibilities—ultimately resulting in players seeing significantly less of the game’s content, and not feeling as much like they’re really in control of their character’s actions when trying to solve problems creatively. I understand that I might need a few universal variables later in the game; but, as it stands right now, with the storyline still not having branched very much as of yet, I’ve been doing fine without any.

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On the more narrative side, another goal that I’ve had in mind is that I want the game to feel really immersive. In general, I feel like parser games tend to be better at making players feel like they’re actually present in the story, while hypertext games can sometimes feel more like you’re reading the story (not that that’s a bad thing). I think that there are a few of reasons for this, but one that comes to mind is that parser games tend to give you more limited initial information, requiring players to explore their surroundings more using commands (and admittedly, sometimes to a frustrating degree, requiring players to explore a bit just to find out which commands the parser will recognize; although this can also sometimes be part of the genius of the medium, a famous example being the way the player escapes the maze in Adam Cadre’s Photopia). For me, I think that having to engage semi-consistently with the game’s interface (whether that be typing in a command, or clicking on a line of text), and getting little bits of feedback like that—especially to more sensory commands (examine, listen, smell, etc.)—really helps solidify my immersion in the game. So—since I did actually choose to make the game in Twine, rather than a parser program like Inform—I decided to sort of compensate by doing my best to make the game feel kind of visceral, focusing a lot on sensory information (both what is considered ordinary for people to notice, such as sights and smells, and what’s seen as unusual, such as synesthetic experiences), and by delivering information in relatively small bits of text that would expand based on player interaction. I’m actually mostly happy with the level of description that I’ve put into Esther’s sensory experience so far, although I honestly don’t think that I’ve avoided the “wall of text” effect to the extent that I wanted to—both because some of the initial text is actually longer than I’d like; and because, once all of the links are expanded, some of the “pages” span for multiple paragraphs.

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Another narrative choice that I made is that I decided to write the story in the first person (most interactive fiction is written in the second person). Part of my reason for doing this is that I wanted the narration to sound more like dialogue (to this effect, I’ve actually tried to use somewhat simpler vocabulary and sentence structure than I usually use for prose, and have done my best to maintain a persistent voice; although I think that I’ve only partially succeeded so far), which I think helps give Esther a little more character, as well as limiting player information more than a nigh-omniscient narrator; I think that this also helps reinforce the idea that you’re seeing the story through her eyes, which is actually one of my more major goals: I really want the players to feel like they’re in a different person’s shoes, and not just themselves inserted into an unusual situation. This was also my reasoning for making the protagonist an actual character in and of herself, rather than focusing on character customization—again, not a bad thing in itself, but one that I think is honestly a little overrated, and can slow down the beginning of stories quite a bit. Speaking for myself, I actually enjoy kind of roleplaying when playing games, and I pretty much always have; but, whenever I’m playing a text-based game that starts out asking a bunch of questions to customize my character (plenty of which usually have little to no effect on the story), I honestly usually just kind of make myself and get on with the game. Maybe most people are more creative when they’re faced with character customization in a game like that, but I’ve never really found it particularly engaging or interesting in a text-based medium; even when authors try their best to weave the questions into the narrative, like some kind of Mad Lib (“You brush aside your ____ hair…”), I usually just find myself mildly annoyed (ditto for the emphasis on romance in some text-based games; again, not something bad in itself or anything, but I’ve never really found any examples of romance in interactive fiction that I’ve found compelling, and it seems to be that most that try to incorporate it feel super forced—but, I don’t know, maybe it’s a me thing, and I’m just not that romantic of a person or something, but I’ve at least seen examples of romance in other mediums of fiction that don’t seem forced or annoying).

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One other thing that I would like to explore, but which I haven’t really delved into very deeply yet, is what a quest looks like from the perspective of a member of an adventuring party other than the leader. In Esther’s case, she’s the healer, which—even though obviously very important—is generally seen as a more supporting role. This is something that doesn’t seem to happen very often in these types of games, but I’d really like to see more of it, because it seems like there could be a lot of interesting elements to it that would affect the player’s experience—from more particular things, like not being the one usually deciding where the group is going or how to execute a specific plan, to more general concepts, such as how playing a character in a technically more subordinate role (whether that’s more literal, such as playing as someone of lower military rank in a platoon, or more in reference to the plot, such as playing as a guide character to a young adventurer) reflects in the group’s relationships and dynamics.

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Of course, my primary goal in making the game is for it to be fun and engaging. I hope that you enjoy playing what I’ve made so far; again, this project is far from over, so please stay tuned for updates as I continue Esther’s story.

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Today’s Question: While we’re on the subject, what are some of your favourite interactive fiction games? Also, do you generally prefer games where you type commands into a parser, or click on linked text?

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Today’s Joke: Like today’s questions, there are actually two:

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For my birthday, my family gave me an alarm that swears at you instead of beeping—it was quite a rude awakening.

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Also, I have a great new joke about HIPAA. Unfortunately, I can’t really tell it to you guys.

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-Isaac““

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