Precious Things

Seohyun (Yennie) Choi, Fall 2021

The game consists of exactly 100 Twine passages, and they are all styled with one stylesheet coded with CSS. The main character of the story is my autobiographical character created during the start of the semester. I mostly stuck to the story and character descriptions I had come up with for the assignment where we applied the world of The Quiet Year to the character.

I used CharNG to generate text for the mystery ending, and then further garbled the results using n+7. This helped heighten the mystery aspect of the ending, and messing around with the settings was interesting. I used Googlism to generate phrases to edit into the darkness ending. I put in a selection of words that I had written for that ending and selected the most interesting result it gave me. I used otter.ai transcription to write down the passage for the mysterious figure in the “introduce yourself” option. The anagram generator was used to garble up some of the words used in the prophecy in the prophecy ending, to give it an air of mystery. In the passage where the lighter keeps flickering, I used Voicebox to generate phrases for that section.

I crowdsourced the sketches that show up in each ending page. I asked my friends to sketch an object that holds sentimental value to them. Then I took photos of each sketch separately for the normal endings, and then a photo of all of them compiled into one for the true ending. The five oblique strategy cards I used are: “Into the impossible”, “Go to an extreme, move back to a more comfortable place”, “The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten”, “Emphasize the flaws”, and “Don't stress one thing more than another”. I used these cards whenever I got stuck on how to progress the story to give myself a fresh perspective and outside advice.