Post-jam postmortem

A big thanks to everyone who played my first, finished narrative game! If you like reading, game development, history, or Native American mythology, then you might enjoy this postmortem.

So, I've had this idea since... 2016? I think? when I tried to recreate Telengard (1982) as a purely text-based game. Not being a huge fan of conventional fantasy, I gave it a horror theme and placed it in an urban setting. Someone who tested it said it was boring and the horror theme was too generic, so I reinvented it.

I've always wanted to write a spooky story about foreigners experiencing the urban legends of an unfamiliar culture; it adds an extra layer of... well, unfamiliarity. I couldn't think of any other horror stories set in Colonial America, so off I went.

The four co-protagonists in the finished game were actually the playable characters of the original game, which was an RPG. I did my best to research the setting and make it period-accurate, but I'm absolutely certain that I messed up. For starters, I thought that I could choose any Haudenosaunee name for my Native American character, but then I found out every name is unique! Not having an expert to consult, I changed the vowels of a name I liked. I humbly apologise.

I'm a bit of a stickler for historical accuracy where I can help it, so I decided on a few key points:

1. No shying away from the language and prejudices of the time.

2. All characters must behave like people from that time.

I also decided that the foreigners cannot be the ones to defeat the Flying Head. I wanted to avoid the "white saviour" trope, so only Skahtenatowi could fulfil that role.

To research the language used, I read some books from that time and watched the John Adams (2008) miniseries. To my delight, they basically sounded British, so writing for them was very easy! Despite that, I used American English in the script because I wanted it to feel like a story told by modern Americans.

The threat in the story is the Flying Head, a legend which was a smaller part of the original story but I gave it a greater role for Orifice Jam. I think it helped to give the story a stronger identity, so I'm grateful for that.

As for the engine... I could've done better. I'm sure it's fine to play but it's all spaghetti code under the surface. I'd never made a game like this before so I stumbled a lot. If I did this again, it would be better for sure.

The UI was inspired by old PC-88 adventure games. I have no idea how to make an actual interactive fiction parser (I did try) so this was a compromise. Despite that, I think it plays okay, even if you have to stretch your fingers across the keyboard sometimes.

I'd love to make another game in this style. If anyone enjoyed it, I hope they look forward to it!