Dear Diary

For my obsession, I decided to use my obsessions of journalling and letterboxd/slice of life romcoms to create this really corny and cliche, YA romcom. I purposefully incorporated slang and slight moments of incorrect grammar to capture the essence of a teenage girl writing in her diary.  The overall format was informed by the tree method from "Branching Infinity".

The thematic argument I am making with the reader-player is how would they react in a case where someone else could potentially ruin their future career? Moreover, is it worth putting your heart on the line? Again, this was set in a very cliche realm and was intentionally written to reflect as many romcom tropes as possible. Most of these craft elements are seen in my choice of options, a mix of being fight/flight reactions essentially, and also the overall format of the game also influences the experience - the hot pink text and "Courier" font add to the likeness of teenage high school dilemmas (very 90s/Y2K romcom coded). 

I engaged with our working definition of a game through being heavily influenced by the concepts of structure. Being new to coding and gaming in general, starting something from scratch was a difficult feat. As, I found myself becoming frustrated if I couldn't fully translate my vision in the programming. However it made me curate choices that I believed would make players want to be engaged, regardless of my programming skills.

I play tested the game through my younger sibling and friends. Majority of them are not into games, but are similar to me in the sense that, of their gaming knowledge, they typically would be "choose your own adventure" plots. That being said, the structure of my game helped their enjoyment as it is kind of related to that. Though, a common feedback I got during the original run was that it was too wordy (diary entries aren't typically a whole page lengths long, according to my sister). One thing I remembered from our Nat Mesnard talk was to consider the environment in which it could be played and how many people could play it. I understand this was more in reference to the one-page TTRPGs, though it reminded me of the concept of an audience. There definitely is a certain crowd this particular storyline is written for, but I just hope that as many people could have fun (or at least be able to make quick quips out of how ridiculous and generic these characters are).