Woken Post Mortem

Post Mortem

For our final game project assignment we were tasked with creating a game where the UI/HUD contributes a significant role to the players experience. The game i create is called "Woken", an interactive storytelling game where you must find your way out of a dark mysterious building. While the game is based on making choices that affect the game's narrative, you are also given an inventory system in which you equip /select items that affect the way the game is played. For example you may have a place to enter (I.e. secret room), but you are unable to do so due to  not equipping a certain item that needs to get through, so you must find alternate means of access. 

I made this game on twine, because I believed it was the best software to use for a narrative game such as this one. 

For the most part I am happy with how the game came out, and I do feel like I was able to give the Inventory system its own game play system, there are still things that can always be improved upon, starting with the inventory system itself. I do believe that there could have been more done like adding a health counter that showed that the health pickup in your inventory was actually working as opposed to telling the player that his/her health has been gained back. I would have liked to add more to the game's UI, such as a timer for a certain section, as if there was a countdown and you had to pick one of the rooms to go in before it’s too late, unfortunately I was not able to look into implementing that. Due to time constraints.

While I am satisfied with the game's story, I believe that more could have been implemented into it, just for the sake of telling a layered story. Throughout the process, I was thinking more about the game play and I only thought of the story  afterwards. 

Another aspect that I believe could have been improved upon, was the visual aspect, there isn't any imagery to add any visual interest to the game, from start to finish, it’s just a pitch black screen. There isn’t any visual interest to the game that holds the player’s attention, and because of that, the game relies more on the story.

The inventory system works in the form of a bag in which you gain early on, your bag is going to be where you store all your items such as weapons, health pickups, and armour.  The bag/inventory system was implemented through simple coding where I used variables that would be triggered (ie, set $HasRock to true) at a certain passage,  so if the statement was true, it would appear in your bag, this was the way I went by to make make sure players knew what was items they had. Though the player can only access their  inventory at certain points of the game.

Overall, as stated prior, I am still happy with how the game turned out, but I believe more could  have still been added to enrich the players experience.