You Are A Turtle
A Twine game
Aims
- For the narrative driven game, I wanted to create a game that would draw attention to issues such as pollution, climate change and overfishing by using the journey that baby turtles must go through to survive their first year of life.
- I wanted to create a narrative that has consequences for actions the same way that one mistake for a baby turtle could literally be a life-or-death decision.
Coming up with the concept
I knew I wanted to create a game that is informative and brings attention to ecological issues and to do so I decided to use the journey that baby turtles go on to survive their first year of life. This idea requires a great deal of research into the issues turtles face and how humans’ impact on the planet has further challenged their survival. I also needed to research turtle species, their endangered status and how they fit into keeping the oceans healthy.
Below is a document with some of the research done and why I came to the decision to use the Green Turtle over others.
The Game
The game consists of a branching narrative that is designed to give the player choice in their decisions. The game can be difficult, this is by design, I wanted to convey the helplessness and the very precarious position turtles’ lives are in and how little choice turtles have but to make their way into the ocean as quickly as possible and even then, they are not safe.
I wanted there to be distinct challenges and so I separated the narrative into section starting with the escape from the beach to the escape from the shallows and finally surviving the deep. Below is a visual representation of my planning. This helped to separate out the challenges and allow the player to feel as though they are progressing in the narrative.
to represent the time of day and the mood of the environment the background colour changes to reflect this. Most notably the three different options for when the player chooses to leave the nest have different colours to reflect the heat of the sun. For example, hatching right away has a very bright yellow to reflect the intense heat of the sun, waiting for a bit leads to a orange tone to represent the sunset and waiting further you emerge at night and so the background is a dark blue.
Play testing
Summary:
- Some players felt a bit of sadness while playing the game.
- Some of the choices felt like there was no context behind them/no power over the choice.
- Players liked the colour changes for the background that set the tone.
From play test it appeared that players felt ‘sad’ or ‘depressed’ while playing the game, however I do not consider this a bad thing as one play tester put it ‘I think it’s the right amount of depressing to get people to care or want to know more.’ This was one of my intended aims was to draw attention to these issues and to do so I used the story of a turtle trying to survive so naturally I think the game would draw out emotions such as sadness from players.
Some play testers did not like some of the choices, they felt there was little context to them. Most notably the choices that gave the player only the option of going left or right. I can see that these options do rely on chance and a random outcome, and for a narrative driven game I now do believe that it is best if the player has the chance for as much context to their choices as possible. There can still be challenging parts of the narrative, but there should be a degree of context behind the decision they make so its up to the player to work out and deduce the correct choice.
Changes after the play test
Summary:
- I added more context to some of the decisions that use the ‘go left’ go right’ options.
After the play test I felt it important to reevaluate some of the choices to provide some clue as to the correct decision by adding some context, while not making it too easy. I still want the player to feel ultimately helpless in the situation.
Looking again I found two narrative points that use the ‘go left’ ‘go right’ choices. I decided to add some context to the choices. For example, I decided to hit at the possibility of danger in certain directions but again I didn’t want to be too obvious.
Conclusion
I have made a successful Twine prototype game that I believe conveys the challenges that baby turtles face. I know this as during play tests it was clear that players felt emotional towards the struggle. However, I do think that most of that sadness was focused on the turtles struggle rather than the human impact that has made turtles chance of survival worse. This is understandable as the game appears to mostly focus on the turtle and the turtle is the one for which players are meant to identify with.
What I would improve
If I were to take the game further, I would like to allow more branching of the narrative and so each player has a unique play experience. Ideally, I think every time the game is played the player should have the ability to take a slightly different path.
I would also like more focus to be placed on the ecological impact humans have on the ocean as I felt that perhaps this was lost on players or certainly not a focus for the players. This could potentially be done by having challenges directly linked to the impact humans have. This is already present in the game, for example there is a section of the game in which the player is presented with an option to eat a strange looking jellyfish, which is meant to be plastic without saying this explicitly. I didn’t want anything to be explicit as I was attempting to write from the perspective of a baby turtle that does not know what plastic is. Trying to convey this effectively is something that should be explored further.