TETANUS
You wake up in a bar with no memory of the last two hours. Your friends are missing and your phone is gone. What do you do now?
Tetanus is a 2024 futuristic, text-based puzzle game built in Twine. I was the sole designer and developer on the project. You can play the full game at: https://heistbear.itch.io/tetanus
CONCEPT
Tetanus was built under two constraints:
- Must be built in Twine
- Must be under 8000 words
Given these terms, I knew the game had to be relatively short and use only a basic level of coding. I'd been toying around with the concept a video game centered on being lost in a club for awhile, and wanted to explore the feelings of disorientation and uncanniness of that experience. Further, the limited size of the game meant a consistent sense of forward momentum was necessary to keep users engaged and excited about the story.
INITIAL DESIGN
I outlined the general structure of the game and various tasks in Miro. Beginning the project here allowed me to work out the flow and basic interactions before I started coding.
The full game outline in miro
In Twine, I began by building out the basic components. I kept the focus on the specific actions necessary to progress the story to avoid wasting time on elements I would later need to revise.
Once in Twine, building out the game was more complicated
PLAYTESTING & ITERATING
I went through many short cycles of playtesting and improving Tetanus over the span of a week. These were the keh problems I found during the process:
1 - Bloated. There were too many characters and too many underutilized areas. Instead of having a large cast of people moving around the space, I cut the friend group from four to two, and focused on a few recurring characters in the bar.
2 - Boring. The first prototype for the game was nothing more than clicking around through different dialogue trees. It felt stagnant and unexciting. The constraints on coding capabilities and word limit, I introduced puzzles and environmental clues to give players more tasks and agency without adding too much back-end complexity to the game.
3 - Difficult to Navigate. After fine-tuning the major story beats and eliminating any bugs, I wanted to make sure the game felt good to play. This meant running through dialogue trees and navigation around the map, staying curious about what I intuitively expected to be able to do at each point. Small changes, like being able to exit a conversation at any point (not just the end).
PUZZLES
Playtesting puzzles is always a difficult part of the process. I wanted to create a natural sense of progression from one puzzle to the next.
Early puzzles keep the focus on getting the player to look around their environment for clues. Later puzzles gradually increase in difficulty as players understand the rules and can apply them to more challenging situations.
Puzzle design also forced me to keep my intended player in mind - someone who likes a good puzzle, but doesn’t want to spend ages obsessing over the answers. Many of my friends are quite skilled with solving puzzles, so testing the game based on what they found easy wasn’t necessarily the best metric for good design in this game.
FINAL GAME
Tetanus can be played here.
Planned further developments for Tetanus would improve the narrative flow of the game, add music, and deepen the experience of being in Tetanus through more NPC interaction and environmental details to discover.