because we all like showing off our pretty twine layouts.
first off, 10pm
a bit of a monster, innit? far left is utilities like javascript and css. the huge green stack next to that is all icons for bird’s speech. then we have a thin white/blue strip in the middle, which was my original roadmap for the game.
the game itself is the yellow/dark blue sprawl on the right, which, as you can see, expanded considerably from its original lil roadmap.
now, The Second Floor
a well-organized mess! if you’ve played the game, you can see that the twine layout directly mirrors the hotel hallway in which the game takes place. each set of orange squares represents the physical map tiles of the hotel room, and the dark blue squares beneath them are item descriptions for that room.
next, So Your Crew Found Out
a much simpler map! each area corresponds roughly to a ‘level’ in the game, with Abram (Level 1) starting at the middle top, and Fourth’s level in the center.
the long leftward line is when Ty took a timeout in his room. then we have the more complicated fight with Gin to the bottom left, and the many branching ways you can flirt with Mouth in the bottom right.
more behind the scenes, this time from The Second Floor. the top sequence shows the very first words i wrote for the game, most of which were retained for its opening scene. (there’s also a hotel... sketch... abomination?? sure.) openings are a major weakness of mine; often i scrap and redo them multiple times, but this one survived somewhat intact.
the bottom sequence has item/inspect descriptions from one of the hotel rooms. not too much editing from paper to twine on those.
perhaps more interesting are my notes about game mechanics. here’s my original thoughts about room design and items to include... (along with a sterling 10/10 title mmhm)
!!! !!! GAME SPOILERS AFTER THIS POINT !!! !!!
and here’s a full map of the hotel floor. i had forgotten that my original ideas for the game included a nausea system that would slowly make the screen blurry and/or shaky as the player encountered more corpses. to alleviate the discomfort, the player would have to visit windows for fresh air and clean sights.
i decided against it because i wanted to encourage exploration of the deaths, not punish players for looking at them. it also takes a great number of clicks to get to a window at any point in the game. i figured it would be obnoxious to make players repeatedly wade through all that, so i cut the nausea system.
(to the uninitiated: The Second Floor is a zombie apocalypse text adventure made in Twine -- and the natural outcome of me watching way too many horror games on youtube. you can play it here or here.)
The Second Floor is a zombie apocalypse text adventure made in Twine -- and the natural outcome of me watching way too many horror games on youtube. you can play it here or here.
final statistics
6,615 words (including visible text + code)
219 passages
64 tracked variables
45 unique inventory items
what is balancing
setting the weight of each inventory item was a fair hassle. i went through and redid all the weights twice after playtesting. i think they're finally low enough that you can collect a satisfying amount of items while still making difficult decisions about what to drop.
pro-tip: why the fuck do you need the bath towels?? get rid of 'em.
visual design
i knew very early on that i wanted the rooms to be grids, so that was a quick enough decision. initially i conceptualized the glow of the flashlight to be strong enough to illuminate some items in the next square over... but 1) the squares ended up larger than expected and 2) the items consequently farther apart. so i decided it wasn't worth the extra hassle.
using single letters as markers of interesting objects hearkens back to my deep love for A Dark Room and its old-school world map. for more about the game’s overall aesthetic, see this post.
shoutouts
Chapel for creating awesome inventory systems that were easy to adapt and for giving me pointers on using them.
The Second Floor is a zombie apocalypse text adventure made in Twine -- and the natural outcome of me watching way too many horror games on youtube. you can play it here or here.
original vision
i wanted to work on something more gamelike and less storylike. for that reason, The Second Floor has only one ending: the interactivity is in the journey, not the destination. i'm not overly fond of text-based combat, so i avoided that and focused on inventory.
there aren't any puzzles in the game (another favorite game mechanic of interactive fiction), unless you count the 'puzzle' of piecing together the identity of each room's guest(s). the game is structured so that you can start at any room, and take any path through that room, and still be able to get an idea of what each ex-survivor went through.
main influences
The Second Floor was directly inspired by two things: the Silent Hill series (esp SH2) and A Dark Room. SH guided the overall structure of the game. as in many sequences of SH2, you explore a narrow hallway marked with blood and check out doors on each side, leading to equally bloodstained rooms with some potentially useful items in them.
visibility is limited, and, inevitably, at least one door is blocked. (hey, at least there's no key hunt, right??? i didn't hit all the indie horror cliches)
the SH comparison falls apart in terms of combat. The Second Floor has no combat system nor health system, so the picked-up items have only theoretical value. the use of pop-up dialog boxes also hearkens back to SH, with the narrator providing a brief commentary on the item before offering the chance to take it.
ADR's influence slithers in with the visual layout of the rooms themselves. the rooms operate on straight lines, much like ADR's world map, and notable locations/objects are marked by single letters.
The Second Floor is a zombie apocalypse text adventure made in Twine -- and the natural outcome of me watching way too many horror games on youtube. you can play it here or here.
the outbreak
The Second Floor takes place in my zombie apocalypse universe, affectionately termed 'zombils'. i'm really good at names.
the zombie outbreak there was truly apocalyptic, obliterating an already vulnerable population. a flu-like epidemic had hit much of the populace a few months prior to the outbreak. the fatality rate was higher than that of most modern diseases, but not world-ending.... except as it turns out, the great masses of people who contracted that disease and easily survived it were still carrying a latent form of it in their bodies. this fed into the actual zombie apocalypse and blah blah blah MEDICAL STUFF everybody died and died hard.
the outbreak ripped through the States pretty damn quickly. urban areas took only a couple days to settle into despair; the most rural areas, naturally quarantined from the world, lasted for a few weeks after that. The Second Floor picks up in mid-February, about a month after the outbreak, and follows a lone survivor.
the hotel guests
here there be spoilers; consider yerself warned.
the guests represent a pretty standard array of responses to the outbreak:
suicide, out of desperation & to avoid infection
not quite suicide but panic-induced self-death
bloody struggles, probably with loved ones
confused and rushed evacuations
abandoning loved ones’ corpses in their hurry
only a couple rooms have rigid narratives. the others, i leave to your able imagination... but i'll confess that i have a particular headcanon for Room 208 (the one with DONT OPEN on the bathroom, female clothes, and two rings on the desk). the note beneath the rings is written in Spanish, and, imo, not by either of the room's occupants. i'd like to think that they were married women, both of whom were lethally attacked.
one woman was killed (either by the attack itself or in self-defense by her wife) and her corpse locked in the DONT OPEN bathroom. the other woman survived for a short time and dragged herself down the hall -- perhaps aiming for the elevator. after she died and turned, someone must have locked her in Room 201 (or she went in there voluntarily to die), and there she remains, to this very day~~
