lostBeach: The Postmortem.

lostBeach is a jam project I did for 48 hours beginning on Friday, October 27th to Sunday, October 29th. This was the first time I used Twine, specifically Twine 2.

I was given a challenge by someone on a Discord server to make something in a few days but then to also make intentional design decisions. One of the decisions I made for this game is to give the game vivid imagery in the writing.

"The sea is a vicious monster. You have been battling against it's currents for the past few hours, pushing further and further to an unknown place."

I think I did fairly well in that regard. 

"You are on dry soil. As the water starts to evapoate from the scorching sun, your clothes start to return to their natural form,

You have arrived on the beach."

However, I don't think I did so well with trying to tell aspects of the story in an implicit way.

"One of them is a bronze-colored radio covered with a mysterious dust-like powder. You don't know where this foreign substance came from, or how it got onto the radio."

The game alludes several times to this "dust-like powder." I was trying, several times, to explicitly avoid the term radioactivity. I wanted to add it into the game after I got the idea from this video. However, I don't think I did well to get the implication correct. Perhaps it would've helped if I added a nuclear power plant instead of a cinema as the burnt building.

One of the other design decisions I wanted to make was to give the story some kind of character development. The character here is a humanoid creature who is in reality a fish. Think Doctor Who but for the sea.

"You are human, and yet you are not human. You are the manifestation of the sea creature in mammal form.

You are, in reality, a fish, in the costume, a shell of a human. You can speak to the humans or other humanoid creatures, yet you can also communiate to your blood relatives."

Seperating the game in to 3 sections in 1 part of the game ensured that the game wasn't focused on 1 thing. The intended experience is that the player goes through all of it and so I added links to the other paths for the first 2 and implication statements "They also contain the particles you found earlier" which encourages players to go back and look through the game.

Looking back, I found the fish-human character somewhat odd and I probably would've just swapped it for an alien.

For the color choices, I went for a light blue during the sea sequence, a beige for the sand sequences, and a dark red for the cinema sequence. I think I did well for that. For the font, I chose Gill Sans Nova. I thought it was an unique font and I thought it would go well with the project.