Gearworld CYOA commentary
Sep. 16th, 2022 04:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silvercat17 posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
ursulavtweetmeme(thread starts https://twitter.com/UrsulaV/status/1570092961462902784 )
Goddamnit, after running that Twitter game, now I kinda want to play with Twine again. Which is a totally different experience for the player, but I feel bad for everyone who wanted to investigate X and was overruled in voting. (Also there was some cool stuff!)
It doesn’t have the pure delight of a live game, of course, which is like… an EVENT. Shep tweeting wildly about retiring to the turnips, people going “can I use this thing here?!” in the comments and making me think “crap, can they?” and so on.
It IS interesting how puzzle games have trained some of us, though, to assume that every object is significant and should be used somewhere. Like a broken faucet knob.
I genuinely had no intention of making the knob a door handle until the comments filled up with people asking to do that. It’s a broken knob! You can’t open a door with a broken knob!
But y’all thought you should be able to, so that became a subplot of sorts.
The improv online also has the advantage of building up the story as we go. You weren’t an English Lit major until you corrected that poem, which I decided meant that you didn’t recognize the later frog call. But you might have remembered a poem later.
The bees didn’t have to be clockwork. They could have been eyeless, or wasps. But then it becomes an decision point—will you help the bee? And later, with the sudden find-a-gear subplot, I thought “hey, let’s use those clockwork bees.”
(I suspect that made it look way more planned out than it was, since people are asking me about my decision trees, and ha ha, no, I was making it all up as I went along. Sometimes things just fit together neatly.)
One aspect I tried to work with was having y’all not just decide what to do, but what was in the environment as well. What DOES the god in the alcove look like? Is there a cryptic message or an egg? Which, as with the clockwork bees, actually had major knock-on effects.
That would be interesting to try in Twine, since you’d have to set some pretty persistent branches based on what the player decided was there.
Meanwhile, here on Twitter, the next explorer through will always see clockwork bees, and the faucet would always be broken.
(Hmm, I wonder if Twine has persistent-from-game-to-game variables like that? I know Ren’py did, so you could do the games where you explore all the various ramifications…)
Twine runs in a browser window, though, so probably if you close the window, you lose the variables. Not sure.
And who knows…if you’d retired to raise turnips, maybe the next Explorer’s School grad would have a partial map and a broken knob left to them by a mentor?
Anyway, as always, different ways of running games give you different results. I do love the improv of GMing on the fly.
I will say that I was mostly not surprised by Teitter’s choices, with a few significant exceptions. I absolutely expected y’all to go for the cryptic message, did not think you’d stick your arm in the pipe, and actually thought you’d consult Jimmy as soon as you had the choice.
(I was utterly unsurprised at how kind you all were, though. Never a doubt in my mind that you’d help the bee or save Jimmy.)
Questions:
Editor note: some answers were compiled from multiple versions of the same question and rearranged for readability
Q: How do you nail an egg to a wall?!
A: I have no idea. I did a tiny painting of an egg nailed to a wall years ago and put it in.
Q: What were certain deaths?
A: You could not have made the jump from the pipe to the grate, you should never mess with bees, and sleeping next to the scary door would have been very unwise. (The rest I’ll save for another run) You would not have gotten your head back from the pipe, though. The frog room was safe. The door room was not.
Q: Why was going home to turnips an option so much?
A: Actually in a lot of cases, I didn’t have a fourth option, so just rounded it out. Well, there’s also the “running gag” quality, of course. But speaking of horror…once I took the turnip option AWAY, judging by the comments, people got nervous fast. Oh, when it switched to “You loved turnips once…” there was some panicking. So it’s not just a choice, it’s also a marker of how deep the shit is, once you suddenly lose the previously persistent option to go home.
Q: Also, how long does it take you to plan out all these conceivable paths and their destinations? How did you keep track of them all?!
A: *laugh* It’s less impressive than it looks. Most of it is improv (although maybe that’s impressive, I dunno.) I had a lot of basic room ideas, but I made up the choices on the fly. The rising water was possibly the most planned out of the whole thing—I kept a mental tally of time elapsed until the Point of No Return. Most of the other choices were much simpler. Bothering the bees was instant death, for example.
Q: Hey outta curiousity what would have happened if we HAD chosen to stick our knife into the big giant gear?
A: You’d have broken your knife. Not immediately fatal, but it might have come up later.
Q: Was there a no death option once you entered the flood water?
A: Waiting until it receded would have been good. Preparing to fight crabs would have been… well, not lethal. Wait, you mean at this last one? No, you were doomed. It was basically down to whether you were gonna save Jimmy. (I never doubted that y’all would.)
Q: What happens to Jimmy?
A: Jimmy is fine. He gets away safely and all the other finches listen to his stories and buy him rounds of birdseed. He eventually finds another partner who respects his age and wisdom.
Also he gets a tattoo.
Q: I want to know how bird tattoos work. Do they tattoo areas without feathers? Shave (pluck?) the feathers and tattoo the skin underneath? If the latter is the tattoo covered once the feathers grow back, or is it magic tattoo that changes the color of the feathers that grow from it ( https://twitter.com/VincaMinor42/status/1569886135215857679 )
A: I assume they do either the feet or the nares of the beak?
Q: Were the turnips certain death?
A: No, you would have retired to raise turnips and lived happily ever after, the end.
Goddamnit, after running that Twitter game, now I kinda want to play with Twine again. Which is a totally different experience for the player, but I feel bad for everyone who wanted to investigate X and was overruled in voting. (Also there was some cool stuff!)
It doesn’t have the pure delight of a live game, of course, which is like… an EVENT. Shep tweeting wildly about retiring to the turnips, people going “can I use this thing here?!” in the comments and making me think “crap, can they?” and so on.
It IS interesting how puzzle games have trained some of us, though, to assume that every object is significant and should be used somewhere. Like a broken faucet knob.
I genuinely had no intention of making the knob a door handle until the comments filled up with people asking to do that. It’s a broken knob! You can’t open a door with a broken knob!
But y’all thought you should be able to, so that became a subplot of sorts.
The improv online also has the advantage of building up the story as we go. You weren’t an English Lit major until you corrected that poem, which I decided meant that you didn’t recognize the later frog call. But you might have remembered a poem later.
The bees didn’t have to be clockwork. They could have been eyeless, or wasps. But then it becomes an decision point—will you help the bee? And later, with the sudden find-a-gear subplot, I thought “hey, let’s use those clockwork bees.”
(I suspect that made it look way more planned out than it was, since people are asking me about my decision trees, and ha ha, no, I was making it all up as I went along. Sometimes things just fit together neatly.)
One aspect I tried to work with was having y’all not just decide what to do, but what was in the environment as well. What DOES the god in the alcove look like? Is there a cryptic message or an egg? Which, as with the clockwork bees, actually had major knock-on effects.
That would be interesting to try in Twine, since you’d have to set some pretty persistent branches based on what the player decided was there.
Meanwhile, here on Twitter, the next explorer through will always see clockwork bees, and the faucet would always be broken.
(Hmm, I wonder if Twine has persistent-from-game-to-game variables like that? I know Ren’py did, so you could do the games where you explore all the various ramifications…)
Twine runs in a browser window, though, so probably if you close the window, you lose the variables. Not sure.
And who knows…if you’d retired to raise turnips, maybe the next Explorer’s School grad would have a partial map and a broken knob left to them by a mentor?
Anyway, as always, different ways of running games give you different results. I do love the improv of GMing on the fly.
I will say that I was mostly not surprised by Teitter’s choices, with a few significant exceptions. I absolutely expected y’all to go for the cryptic message, did not think you’d stick your arm in the pipe, and actually thought you’d consult Jimmy as soon as you had the choice.
(I was utterly unsurprised at how kind you all were, though. Never a doubt in my mind that you’d help the bee or save Jimmy.)
Questions:
Editor note: some answers were compiled from multiple versions of the same question and rearranged for readability
Q: How do you nail an egg to a wall?!
A: I have no idea. I did a tiny painting of an egg nailed to a wall years ago and put it in.
Q: What were certain deaths?
A: You could not have made the jump from the pipe to the grate, you should never mess with bees, and sleeping next to the scary door would have been very unwise. (The rest I’ll save for another run) You would not have gotten your head back from the pipe, though. The frog room was safe. The door room was not.
Q: Why was going home to turnips an option so much?
A: Actually in a lot of cases, I didn’t have a fourth option, so just rounded it out. Well, there’s also the “running gag” quality, of course. But speaking of horror…once I took the turnip option AWAY, judging by the comments, people got nervous fast. Oh, when it switched to “You loved turnips once…” there was some panicking. So it’s not just a choice, it’s also a marker of how deep the shit is, once you suddenly lose the previously persistent option to go home.
Q: Also, how long does it take you to plan out all these conceivable paths and their destinations? How did you keep track of them all?!
A: *laugh* It’s less impressive than it looks. Most of it is improv (although maybe that’s impressive, I dunno.) I had a lot of basic room ideas, but I made up the choices on the fly. The rising water was possibly the most planned out of the whole thing—I kept a mental tally of time elapsed until the Point of No Return. Most of the other choices were much simpler. Bothering the bees was instant death, for example.
Q: Hey outta curiousity what would have happened if we HAD chosen to stick our knife into the big giant gear?
A: You’d have broken your knife. Not immediately fatal, but it might have come up later.
Q: Was there a no death option once you entered the flood water?
A: Waiting until it receded would have been good. Preparing to fight crabs would have been… well, not lethal. Wait, you mean at this last one? No, you were doomed. It was basically down to whether you were gonna save Jimmy. (I never doubted that y’all would.)
Q: What happens to Jimmy?
A: Jimmy is fine. He gets away safely and all the other finches listen to his stories and buy him rounds of birdseed. He eventually finds another partner who respects his age and wisdom.
Also he gets a tattoo.
Q: I want to know how bird tattoos work. Do they tattoo areas without feathers? Shave (pluck?) the feathers and tattoo the skin underneath? If the latter is the tattoo covered once the feathers grow back, or is it magic tattoo that changes the color of the feathers that grow from it ( https://twitter.com/VincaMinor42/status/1569886135215857679 )
A: I assume they do either the feet or the nares of the beak?
Q: Were the turnips certain death?
A: No, you would have retired to raise turnips and lived happily ever after, the end.
