Diane Wang
Writer, Narrative Designer, Solo Dev
About this game...
It was the second month into my game design MFA program, and everything I read about was why linear gameplay was bad in game design.
But what about narrative? Well, let's find out.
So we adapted Susan Glaspell's play, Trifles, into a walking sim. As we watched our playtesters interact with the game, however, nobody was exploring the murder scene in the order we intended, so the narrative could not proceed.
What you are about to play here is a kuso game I made with my classmates, but it was the kuso that taught me so much about narrative design:
Linearity probably is not generally a good option for narrative, and players get upset when they are given a list of items that they have to do in order.