The theme for this year’s Write a Game (WAG) Challenge was announced to be “Down the Rabbit Hole” earlier this week. They’ve also selected the three optional subthemes: empathy, mistaken identity, and birth. Overall, this is a really solid topic with plenty of room to work with and I think I have an idea that will both appeal to my target audience (gamers and industry professionals) as well as anyone that happens across it.

The Basic Summary

The quick and dirty of it is that it’s an exaggerated and sarcastic parody game about the life of a small-time independent game journalist as he covers a large gaming convention. Instead of E3, I called it G3 (Global Gaming Gala) among other such clever stupid puns. Things will eventually start to escalate and get more and more out of hand on this journey and build up to some type of big conclusion at the end…that I haven’t really decided yet.

It can only be a 10-20 minute long game, so that puts a pretty hefty limitation on what I can really do with the story, but it’s an enticing challenge that I’m excited to tackle.

I Have Art!

And one of the more exciting developments is that a super-talented artist friend of mine has agreed to help me out with this. She will not only be checking out the story as it progresses and offering feedback, but producing artwork that can be used as still-images to accompany and enhance the story.

This Challenge is judged 100% on the story and writing alone, but going beyond the scope of this challenge, this will help make this short little Twine story stand out more as a portfolio piece.

Twine is Pretty Awesome

Growing up, I always really loved Choose Your Adventure books. I especially remember reading a few of the Goosebumps series that had that feature and loving how immersive it was to actually choose what happened. Twine lets me create a digital version of that, except it automatically tracks things like variables and decisions so I don’t have to. Once you learn the syntax and formulas, it’s super easy to put something together. Of course, there are tons of things you can learn to make it even more customized, but the basics are fine for me right now.

Has anyone reading this ever made something in Twine? If so, I’d love to check it out!