Task 5.4 The Time Traveller’s Personal Shopper
Play on itch.io: https://etec565sdruids.itch.io/the-time-travellers-personal-shopper
My original concept for this game was a time-travelling adventure in which the player would have to interact with various forms of language technologies (spoken word, clay markers, scrolls, codices, radio, television, e-mail, etc.). As the project evolved, I steered away from a full implementation of this idea as I realized that the time-travel element itself (and the juxtaposition of making the player memorize or write down abstract code from a hand-written note in order to operate an advanced machine in the game) could be an interesting aspect to explore using Twine.
Instead, I decided to focus on using the affordances of variables in Twine to responsively change the content of certain scenes based on the player’s past actions, rather than manually creating numerous branching unique variations of passages to try to replicate the same effect. This allows for players to navigate parts of the game more freely, rather than being contained to interacting with passages only in predetermined orders along set paths that I created. This is best demonstrated in the 3 pickup times/locations. Not only can the player choose to visit these in any order, but the description of each scene responsively includes comparisons to times/locations that have already been visited, without referencing any that have not yet been visited.
Given that writing and programming for the players who do everything “correctly” is rather straightforward, my strategy for implementing the mechanics of this game was to first focus on what happens when a player tries to do things like going back to previously visited scenes or entering space-time coordinates other than the ones that lead to scenes I have written.