IFstravaganza Reflection

In the IFstravaganza my group’s multiverse was the “science bird society” storyline that we later named ‘The Rise and Fall of Zephyria’. Aside from the basic framework that was created during the class brainstorm we had minimal elements in the story established beforehand. We decided that the “player” would first be prompted with the dichotomous choice of being born as an upperclassman or a lowerclassman after reading a brief contextual summary of the story. I was responsible for developing the upper class experience in the story. 

Firstly, I determined the objective of my story was for the player/protagonist to reveal a hidden truth about this pseudo-utopian city. I used a branching structure that converged so that it ultimately leads to the same resolution. This was partly due to time constraints and being unable to fully develop more than one ending. I naturally created a 3-act plot structure because it’s what I am most familiar with. I struggled deciding on how I wanted to integrate the interactivity and how much power the player would hold. I decided that the player’s choices would dictate the core characteristics about the protagonist (i.e., a kind hearted hero v. a selfish antihero), but ultimately, only the “correct” choice would lead to the resolution in the story. Otherwise, “wrong” choices lead to cul-de-sacs in the path and redirect the player to loop back to the critical path or simply to the beginning to literally “Try again”. I designed the story so multiple paths could lead to certain critical nodes within the story so that it allowed me to keep the player on the intended plot and also as a time-saving hack. 

A challenge I faced was the fact that our group worked mostly independently (due to unforeseen absences  Because of this I felt that we weren’t able to collaborate on the plotline as extensively as I would have liked at the start. Since there are so many different approaches that could be taken to IF, although it wasn’t necessary for this assignment, I thought that having some consistency amongst these choices would have better unified our story. I also think that it would have been interesting to see overlap between the two main branches but that would have required a lot more coordination. However, I found it really helpful to plan our paths using Miro because as our stories evolved it was helpful to see the progression of other parallel plot lines. Other aspects of the process that I want to explore in the future are in the initial planning stages to create a plot that has more unsuspecting twists. I felt like my story may have been boring because you can usually guess the “correct” option. Or to integrate interactivity in other ways that don’t include the common “option a or b” form. Overall, this was a great learning experience and I’m excited to make some changes for future projects now that I have a better understanding of the genre.