Journey Through Folklore

Journey Through Folklore

For this assignment, I allow the story to be transformed through the medium of Twine. As I argue in my theory of interactive fiction, all storytelling is interactive and shaped by the affective nature of individuals. Journey Through Folklore is an interactive twine game where players explore the folklores directly inspired by Jay Dragons’ RPG Wanderhome [1]. Influenced by the warm feeling of playing cozy games such as Wanderhome, I wanted to create a cozy-adventure story (through both aesthetic and technical elements) where the player’s decisions lead to results light in nature. By never really defining where home is, I allow the player to shape the story in their own way. Pooky (they/them) is a character that came to be during my playgroup’s play of Wanderhome. Pooky is a cat Ward whose Guardian is the person playing the Twine game. Still maintaining a three-act structure, Journey Through Folklore has five potential endings in which the Guardian journeys with Pooky to find their home.

As Nat Mesard said, Wanderhome uses the design pillar of heartfelt questions to focus on the theme of rebuilding and allow players to decide that something has to be true [2]. In Journey Through Folklore I use this notion of deciding what is true to lead the player to Pooky’s home. While playing Wanderhome, my playgroup found it difficult to create a story with a structure of rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. I wanted to encapsulate the story we did generate in our gameplay within Journey Through Folklore yet structure the story in a different way that allows for a coherent beginning, end, and climax. There are five endings, all of which are similar and light in nature which was inspired by our Wanderhome gameplay.

As Nat recommended, when creating RPGs it is necessary to question one’s use of randomness [2]. By providing players with two options, I create tension similar to how the coin-flip mechanic functions in Gods of Rock. Having said this though, some decisions lead to different paths whereas others are simply choices of the player that lead to the same outcome. After playing Bandersnatch multiple times, I realized that adding those elements - ones that are more personal to the player - creates another level of interactivity that I hope to capture in my game. The Twine games Space Frog and Recipe for Love, use a mechanic similar in nature to that of Bandersnatch’s choices that do not make a difference to the story outcome, as the players could click on certain words to reveal more descriptions about what is written [3,4]. I enjoyed playing with those descriptions so I decided to use that mechanic in Journey Through Folklore in order to add another interactive element to the game.

Works Cited

[1] Dragon, Jay. Wanderhome. New York: Possum Creek Games Inc, 2021.

[2] Mesnard, Nat, Personal communications on Zoom, November 23, 2023.

[3] Npckc. “Space Frog.” Twine game hosted in itch.io. https://npckc.itch.io/space-frog. 

[4] Alon, Shelly. “Recipe for Love.” Twine game Made for the One Game a Month Challenge in January. https://shellyalon.itch.io/recipeforlove.

- Cover Image © Possum Creek Games