Hi there! My name is Aubrey. My background is in writing fiction--I have a defunct self-published series and I've been trying to get traditionally published for a couple of years--and I've also been interested in game writing for a long time. To that end I took an undeveloped sci-fi story idea I'd had for a while--something incorporating influences from Metroid, Alien/Prometheus, Kameron Hurley, Sam Delany etc.--and began working on a Twine project tentatively called The Dive. A quick and dirty description is that you're a recovering agoraphobic, transgender space marine with a Venom symbiote, slapped into some power armor and dropped onto a planet orbiting a black hole to recover a mysterious Thing from inside a derelict alien structure.
I've been working on it for about a week and it currently looks like this:
It feels like the trouble with tribbles. I chide myself for pruning out boxes that are bloating the conversation trees on the right side; "you're not cutting bloat, you're cutting depth!!!" As it stands, the stuff going straight down on the right is the introductory descent into the alien structure and the stuff on the right is an optional return to the ship orbiting the planet where you can get some character development and advance your relationships with the crew. That stuff comes really naturally to me; I'm a bit worried about when the ship trip is finished and playable and I have to stop faffing about with that and actually begin writing the adventure.
At the moment I am picturing the trip through the alien structure as pretty linear. Much of the branching I have in mind has to do with how the player/reader handles combat, talking to the crew on the ship (both over radio and during periodic trips back), and encountering characters inside the structure. Already in the current build there is a seemingly minor choice which drastically effects the conversation you can have with the ship's doctor, and optional scenes you can look at (memories embedded as links in the narration) which then add details to future scenes which wouldn't be there otherwise.
In terms of games oriented around text I know we can basically go from "this is pretty much a short story with one player choice in it" all the way to Disco Elysium, so I think I'm keen for some advice on what would best suit this project. My goals are:
- 2-3 hours
- 4-ish endings
- Art, music, some SFX??
Recommendations for Twine or text games you really liked as an example of what can be done with the format are also appreciated. I know Depression Quest was one and I have played The Writer Will Do Something.
Thank you for reading this far!