Interactive Fiction Narrative- Artist's Statement ("The Stakeout")

For this project, I chose to make a small game based on a person (I wrote it in a first person perspective to make the players more absorbed in the game) who is kidnapped by the government and told to go on a "stakeout" to examine a sample on a warehouse located in the middle of the sea. In order to limit player choices, I presented them options which were described in the text before moving on. This way, all the choices could sound sensible. In order to get past certain points, the player had to solve miniature puzzles. In one part, the player will radio message their boss. The dialogue was not changed in any way except for changing a period to an exclamation point, revealing themselves to the enemy. I used the puzzles in a way that I could make the player fail, but also as a plot device so that the endings were not abrupt.

There are a few other things that I would like to take note of. The earliest possible failure would reveal to players they were just having a bad dream. One peer reviewer noted that he thought of this as an inconsistency. Obviously, this was intended to be a non-canonical (used to describe fiction that has no bearing on other entries in a franchise) ending, but I also used it as a subtle way to get the attention of the player. This interactive narrative was designed in a way where the story would take prevalence over the player's actions. One of the ways that players could tell this was that even though the story was more or less of a straight line, I gave all of the failures enough detail that a player could just quit once they failed and still have been told a complete narrative (not a "completed" narrative, but one which had a reasonable beginning that can connect with a reasonable ending).

The process of making this narrative was relatively simple, only requiring about 4 hours. The tricky part of making the narrative was coming up with ways the player could fail. As mentioned above, the difference between a period and an exclamation point could change the fate of a player. Another ending I made required the players to turn off the power (which I designed to catch inattentive players off guard, as the weather outside was described as harmless). There was the consequence of a guard noticing the power go out and catching the player, spoiling the temperature sensitive sample, and an ending where both consequences occurred. Apart from writing the endings, I had to make sure that players would not get lost in the story, which consumed about 1 more hour. There were a few things that I wanted to incorporate, but were left out of the final project. One of these was a timer. Since inklewriter has no such feature, I decided to scrap the idea immediately. Decision reversal was also considered, but would have caused a big mess when trying to piece all of the story together. Instant failure was also considered, but for most situations, I felt just ending the story abruptly would ruin the game feeling. Ultimately, I was pleased with how my project turned out.

You may find the finished project here: http://writer.inklestudios.com/stories/gcw5



Jacob Bacci