Play Make Write Think

Before starting the reflection for creating DMD’s Revenge, I wanted to mention that I feel like our group slacked off when naming this game prototype. We kept the placeholders we used while writing. The only name that appears in the game, DMD, is actually a shorthand for “someone unlucky” as we jokingly decided to call him since he never made an appearance alive.

In the process of creating the game, my main role was to add in detailed descriptions for each of the scenes, making sure the tone of the game is consistent, and putting everything together using Twine.

The story of our game was inspired by an episode from the Japanese TV series, “Unnatural”. Before deciding on the subject of our game, we were stuck when deciding what social issue we should address. One of our members brought this episode and bully up as a theme. After that, while Wendy and Elaine wrote the main storyline, Roy and I worked on adding selection choices and details in scenes to make the story more interactable and game like. While writing out detailed scenes for the game, I tried to shift the perspective of the player onto different characters, hoping to increase their curious about what’s going on.

Looking back at the game, I’m pretty happy with what our group has created. DMD’s Revenge seems more like a visual/interactive novel as it is more plot based with less controllable options and paths to take. If we were to make this game fully, I think we could add in a lot more details into the suicide case itself, making it more of a suspense and even almost a detective game.

We could do this by developing a more complete and complicated case. Then, by adding more in depth interactable characters, a hint collecting system, and making different pathways for players to take based on hints that lead to different endings, give the players more control over their character in the game. Adding on to that, while players shift perspective onto other characters, we could write out parallel ongoing stories with actions that affect other character’s choices. This would improve characters’ development in the game and make the game much more playable repeatedly.

In terms of visual and audio, while it’s good to add them, it’s better to keep them limited to have the players focus on the plot and use their imagination for scenes through descriptions from the text. For example, some background noises of people talking could be added to the classroom scene and some sort of stream notification sound for the stream watching scene. Visuals we could incorporate into the hint system for players to observe and obtain some information.

Aside from the detailed writing, telescoping has been a very important skill as I needed to keep the main plot in mind while managing different options and descriptions for scenes, making sure they make sense and connect to finally make up the whole story.

The plot of our Twine game is inspired by a Japanese tv series called Unnatural Death. We adapted from one of the episodes. The main character of our story is a forensic doctor and a bunch of high school students. In the story, the main character DMD undergoes tremendous school violence and begins to seek a solution to change his life. Due to the extreme mental trauma he received, he decides to commit suicide and try to impute his death to the one of the students that has been bullying him. The truth is discovered eventually, which means the main character failed to do so. By the end, we want people to pay attention to school violence, to actually understand what bullying is, which is not a simple physical attack between students. 

The creation process was smooth, four of us decided to split the work. Therefore, we didn’t assign roles. Since I was the only one in our group that had watched the tv series, I wrote the original plot of the game first, and my group mates revised the plot to be more game-like. I think we did a great job choosing the topic, and setting up the framework.