A Dangerous Trek
Project Type
Twine Game
Skills/Tools
- Dialogue Writing
- Branching Narrative
- Choice Design
- Worldbuilding
- Twine
Project Overview
A Dangerous Trek is a Twine project that I created to hone my prose and branching narrative skills. It shows my abilities with dialogue writing, choice design, and branching narrative. The follows the Player as they travel through a forest with two companions, both of whom possess strong, impassioned worldviews. The Player interacts with both characters and forms relationships with them, while facing a series of tough decisions. The story makes no judgement on which actions are “good” or “bad”; rather, it is up to the Player to decide that for themself. Keep reading to learn more!
Character Development
To narrow my focus and make a better final product, I developed 2 key characters for the player to interact with during the story. I fully realized both of them as characters, creating them to be opposites in a lot of ways to serve the purposes and themes of the story. Many of the choices that the player makes relate to the fundamental conflict of Idealism vs. Pragmatism, so Oskar and Janus were made to further examine that conflict.
Oskar is a gruff, vulgar, but affable man. He represent Pragmatism, and has been hardened by intense grief and loss in way that can lead him to make harsh and utilitarian decisions.
After finding that players often saw him as villainous, I changed his character and actions to make him more likeable, prompting players to be more open to his often harsh opinions on what they should do.
Janus is a kind, optimistic young man eager for adventure. He represents Idealism, having admirably lofty ideals about the world and how people should live
Janus is the character that players typically like more, which reflects how people typically gravitate towards idealistic views. However, the story forces both the player and Janus to confront their own naivete.
Branching Narrative
For this project, I developed an elaborate branching narrative complete with 7 unique endings and dozens of micro-decisions. Not every choice is consequential, but the player has a reasonable amount of control over the resolution of the story. I also deliberated added a lot of small-scale or entirely inconsequential decisions to give the player a consistent source of agency throughout the experience.
I used short, small branches to allow the player to make meaningful choices in the moment without majorly expanding the story's scope. This creates a strong sense of narrative agency in the moment-to-moment beats of the story.
Additionally, these smaller choices were written with the larger theme of Idealism vs. Pragmatism in mind, making bigger decisions surrounding these themes more powerful when they appear.
I also developed a couple of major branches at the end of the story. These are big moments where, after grappling with several different scenarios that force the player to make either a pragmatic choice or an idealistic one, the player must make a similar decisions but with far higher stakes. This can lead them to one of 7 endings.
I put a lot of work into making sure that the story had a climactic showdown at the end regardless of the player's choices that reflected the decisions they had made to lead them to that point.
Choice Design
Choices are the heart of what makes branching narrative so engaging and powerful. I put a lot of thought into how I designed the choices in A Dangerous Trek to make them feel important and interesting, without needing to create a sprawling web of hundreds of nodes to handle a few potential plotlines.
Important Small Choices
I made an effort to make less "important" decisions feel distinct in the moment with a small, but immediate consequence to keep the player feeling like their choices matter.
Unexpected Callbacks
I added in a few long-term surprise effects for certain decisions. This makes all decisions feel more important to the player, since they never know when a seemingly small decision could have huge effects later.
Telegraphed Big Decisions
When big decisions showed up, I made sure to make it completely clear to the player the magnitude of the choice they were about to make so that it would not come as a surprise and create frustration.
