This was the second solo project I made in Twine, although I dedicated much more time and ambition to this one than I did the first one (You are a sword). Similar to the first one, I used Twine’s Harlowe scripting architecture to track what choices the player made, where they were in the house, and what items they had in their inventory. However, this game’s structure differs wildly from You are a sword: rather than moving linearly through a story, the player is allowed to roam through the different rooms of the house they are exploring. This meant I had to spend more time ahead of time and during development designing the layout of both the house and the game itself. Additionally, when I did the writing for the game I had to make sure it would always be engaging to read even if the player didn’t understand everything that was going on — since it was always safe to assume that they didn’t, in fact, know what was going on. Finally, I spent much more time with the visuals for this game: I used CSS styling to create different backgrounds for the different parts of gameplay, and to create the effect when a player tries to scry on an item they haven’t satisfied the conditions for.
Weird Old House is an interactive text adventure about exploring the titular Weird Old House and digging through the history it contains to put together the story of the people who lived there, long ago. My goal in making it was to see how hands-off I could be with the player during a nonlinear story: I wanted to give the player the pieces of the story I wanted to tell, and leave them just enough clues to put together what happened themself. I omitted character names in dialogue, I left no unambiguous timeline of the events of the story, I only gave the player interconnected places and things and people. The result was interesting: a low-tension, contemplative experience that is frequently vague and unclear — but also intriguing, engaging, and even funny! I’m quite happy with the end product, and the writing in the game is some of my favorite work. There’s still some room for improvement: some of the things I stripped away should have been left in like character names, and I could have been more clear with how to end the game, but I don’t feel these flaws are fatal to the game’s thematic and experiential goals. Weird Old House does what it sets out to do, and as result it’s one of the pieces of work I’m proudest of.