Industry Practice: Introduction
Industry Practice:
Interactive Fiction Introduction
Interactive Fiction is a game genre in which a strong narrative focus is presented through a largely text-based format, with art, music and gameplay mechanics supporting the narrative in a manner that enhances the story and its themes. In this project I will work with others to create our own Interactive Fiction game, writing and producing art assets for a game based around the theme of Mental Health challenges that young people face with a target audience of 14+. Target audience considerations aside, it is up to us as a group for as to how we approach the project.
This flexibility in approach is important to the genre of Interactive Fiction, which bears a great variety of different styles. These disparate styles can be seen visually - in how the game physically looks - in narrative and in how themes and ideas within the game itself are presented. Such differences can be seen in a variety of games.
For example of an Interactive Fiction game, Assessment Examination (Wenderly Games 2022) is a text-focused game in which a dark and formal tone is displayed through the backdrop of a police assessment. The player sifts through images of people and decides whether or not they would trust the individuals shown. Photographs and photo-bashing are utilised to push the formality and real-world nature of the game forward, enhancing the atmosphere it seeks to achieve. A horror game, as the player progresses, the text and images grow more unnerving: the text turns to incoherent repetitions and recalls disturbing phone calls, the images of the individuals you are judging growing warped and nightmarish. This comes together with the formal and detached tone of the game to enhance the story it is telling, the warped individuals turning into unknown and disturbing supernatural beings.
Assessment Examination (Wenderly Games 2022) uses images sparingly. They are only seen in the individuals you judge and to show specific locations or people. As such, the vast majority of the story is told through text. Becuase of this decision, the violence that the game does contain is relegated to descriptions in text: though not necessarily gory or overt in its violence, it is still an unnerving experience.
This is in stark contrast to other Interactive Fiction Games that use their medium to tell a story with different narrative themes. Assessment Examination (Wenderly Games 2022) seeks to cultivate horror and fear: others may not. Under a Star Called Sun (Cecile Richard 2020) is another example of an Interactive Fiction game I have played, a very short game that deals with more sombre and thoughtful theming about "...holding on to fading memories and carrying the world on your shoulders..." (Cecile Richard 2020). It uses a very simplistic style to tell this narrative, with basic pixel art for locations and characters. Though simplistic, I feel this creates a very effective experience and clearly demonstrates the themes of the game: in one section of the game, your character re-lives a past memory and the pixel environment shifts and deteriorates to clearly show how the character's memory is fading.
This clear display of narrative themes is confounded by incredibly effective writing that does not use verbose descriptions but instead states the subject of the game in a matter-of-fact manner. This, as with the simplistic art style, helps in the enforcement of the game's atmosphere and themes: the character is speaking to themselves, yet speaking as if they were talking to someone else they are close friends with. As such, it makes sense that they would speak in a more informal, blunt manner; this illusion of an informal conversation then helps to enhance the loneliness that the main character is experiencing.
These two games clearly show the difference in presentation and theming that Interactive Fiction games can have. In my group work I will seek to use these examples as inspiration that could help in how we present the themes and ideas of our own game.
Group Work: Initial Considerations
After our group had been assembled we immediately began discussing the brief and our ideas and inspirations surrounding it. These discussions included both narrative ideas and stylistic ideas, with a variety of games and inspirations being discussed that our work may draw inspiration from. We additionally went over the roles we expect to find in our project: a script-writer, environment artist, character artist, director and programmer were all discussed as independent roles we could have in the project, with us collaborating across these roles to inform one another and share group ideas.
Bibliography
Wenderly Games, 2022. Assessment Examination [online], PC. Itch.io. Available at: https://wenderlygames.itch.io/assessment-examination#:~:text=Join%20Jay%20today%20as%20we%20dive%20into%20the%20spine-chilling%20world [Accessed 7 October 2024].
Cecile Richard, 2020. Under a Star Called Sun [online], PC. Itch.io. Available at: https://haraiva.itch.io/under-a-star-called-sun [Accessed 7 October 2024]
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