Story Guardian

Kaiyin Tan, Spring 2022
Itch.io

For my final project I made a twine game based on a self-designed story about transmigration to the world of novel. I paired characters with images and styled them in CSS. The story of my game is inspired by my habit of reading Korean Manga, which tells lots of stories about transmigrating to a parallel world and live as one of the characters in that world.

In the story of my game, the player, a person who belongs to the reality world, got hit by a truck and then get transmigrated to the character’s body living in the world of a novel. In this way, the players will interact with different characters in this world and choose to live their life according to the script or act on their own. For most of the events in the story, I get the inspirations from crowd sourcing: I asked lots of manga reader about their favorite or most memorable manga story events, then I randomly assigned those events to different characters in my story. The crowdsourcing contributes to the variety of my game contents and choices. N+7 is a tool that I used to re-write the letter from Villain to Villainess. After processing I edit the contents. For all of the passages for my Male lead character, I designed his story and then read everything using Otter.ai and then edit the transcription.

On the other hand, the Oblique Strategies Cards are of great help to my story development and idea inspirations. I picked five cards. For the first and second cards, “ The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten” and “ Don’t stress one thing more than another”, remind me of how the supporting characters like villainess or sometimes villain are treated like ignorant character that have no many distinctive characteristics and are always used as stepping stone or victim of protagonist’s happiness and fortune. So in my story I plan to assigned more complicated and interesting characteristics for my villainess, who are sometimes get easily forgotten by the readers after acting foolishly for the sake of female lead. The third and forth card is “Once the search is in progress, something will be found”, for this inspiration, I plan to plant some surprising ending for my story, so I set various endings for my characters. The forth card is “In to the impossible”, after inspiring by it, because I have various open ending, so I decide to make villain to defeat the protagonist in some endings. “Question the heroic approach” is my fifth card, I think it would be great if I can let readers doubt about protagonist’s personality, so in my story, there is no perfectly kind-hearted figure or extremely evil person. No one dares to say that what protagonists do are 100% right. On the other hand, I use Anagram to get a new name for my character, for example I change it from Lucas , the villain to Lacus.

I also use the Voicebox - Predictive Writer for the “You decide to follow Lacus’ plan” passage of female lead. I generated new words, replaced The old words and then edit them. In the “ You plan to give up on your… …” passage of the Villainess, I use CharNG to process one of my paragraphs and then I edit it to make it somehow match the storyline.