Throne
Ink | Interactive Fiction |
Solo | ~ 5 minutes
A kingdom suffering from rebellion. Your allies, deserted. Your palace, abandoned, save for you. Basking in your throne during the twilight hours of your empire, you’re feeling nostalgic.
Demonstrated Skills:
Choice Design
Environmental Storytelling
Tone Writing
Constrained writing
Design Goals:
Create a story that adheres to a 500-word limit, ensuring concise storytelling.
Tell a story that sets the scene for larger conflict, while still telling a contained story.
How I made Throne:
Limited Locations
Working with such a strict word limit I couldn’t afford to have too many locales for the player to explore. But at the same time, I wanted to paint a picture of what this world and the King was like.
I started by hand drawing a bubble map representing each location and listing out each possible action the player could conduct, aiming for about two per location. Centering all the locations around the throne room felt natural and provided context for what was important to this king.
Varying Text
Ink’s sequence feature allowed for me to include a lot more diversity to the text within a given scene, even if it was just a matter of adding a few words. This was an effective tool in allowing me to provide more depth to the world without drastically bleeding into my word limit.
Tracking Variables
Utilizing variables that monitored where the player has/hasn’t been proved to be an essential resource. For starters, using an action count allowed me to create a sense of time flowing. After the player does x amount of actions, a tunnel is called regardless of where the player is that will display a paragraph telling how far the revolutionaries are from the player and therefore transitioning closer to the end of the game.
The way certain locations in the game changed based on the king’s action allowed me to show more of the world without having to add too much text to the overall word count, such as the coin bowl on the balcony for example.