This was a solo project that I made in Twine, a software for producing HTML text adventures. I used the program’s built-in scripting system (the Harlowe architecture, there are several) to create persistent ways of tracking the player’s current state and past choices — which affect what things they see and what choices they can make in the game’s present. I also wrote all the prose in the game, and designed the game’s narrative structure.
You are a sword is a short text adventure about what it means to exist as an inanimate tool, bound to the will of another. My goal in making it was to experiment with player agency: I wanted to create an illusory feeling of restriction and resign, which could be subverted if and when the player learns that their decisions do actually impact the world around them — even if mostly in small, incremental ways. I was successful in doing so, although given that this was only a short experiment there is room for improvement. The behind-the-scenes method for tracking the player’s decisions and current level of resilience is good, and I’m still quite happy with the writing in this game. However, the writing and systems occasionally clash in some ways that weaken the themes I intended for the game to create, making the resulting narrative a bit shallow. If I were to spend more time refining this project, I would re-distribute the importance of each choice the player makes: as it is right now, the game is determined by a couple key choices and the rest are mostly (although not entirely) meaningless. Distributing the impact of each choice more evenly to create a slow chipping-away at the player’s “goals,” such as they are, would be a much stronger system thematically.
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