You hear the sound of a gunshot. What do you do?
andrew.cmu.edu/~mkellogg/ExpGameDesign/Gunshot.html
EDIT 9/23/2015
I updated the game to remove the run away and ignore options as suggested. I changed the link colors in order to create more contrast with the background when there are 3 options.
andrew.cmu.edu/~mkellogg/ExpGameDesign/Gunshot-update.html
Interesting game backed with interesting branches. It was fun to explore and try to find all the endings, and it especially helped that already found endings were blacked out (although allowing replayability would be nice). However, I wish some of the branches were more fleshed out; many branched out only a single node. I also felt as though I had very little agency and whatever ending I achieved was completely random.
Great user interface. It’s impressive that once you find the endings that option tells you so. Fun idea, not too text heavy so easy to get through with A.D.D. Hilarious that if you are too lazy your character dies from a random stray bullet -_-
I quite like that you’ve allowed us to see all of the possible outcomes/taken away options so that we are able to go through each scenario. The outcomes are often quite sarcastic, but I like that you are encouraged to go through each situation and figure out how you might proceed. Once you decide to run toward, away from, or ignore the bullet, it seems as though there is little else you are able to control.
It actually plays much better than I thought during the work in progress critique. The run away and ignore options don’t add anything and they seem just to be there to troll the player. I would either remove them or adopt the same device of revealing the story after denying all the context (e.g. turns out that the gunshot was the one that killed Martin Luther King and you are going to regret your indifference for the rest of your life)
This in one of my favourites. I really enjoy the combination of actively telling the player to find every ending, and having all the endings be funny enough that they are rewarding. The fact that each ending can be so quickly found makes all these failures seem fine, which keeps the player engaged. From a visual design standpoint some of the colors (eg. the blue/grey on the first page) make the game hard to look at, although otherwise the layout is sound.
– as an achievement hoarder, at some point it becomes kind of a chore to get all endings
– “all endings hit” is kind of jarring, I want to find out for myself if that would get the same ending as before or whatnot–game telling me what I got and not letting me have it is frustrating as a player who likes to explore
– +1 big text
As a lot of what would happen was random, I felt it would be tedious and unfair to ask the player to keep exploring until they find a thing. This is especially true when considering that I had planned for 30-50 endings.
This was the most satisfying game I played so far. Knowing which endings I’d found and which one’s I still needed to know gave me a lot of motivation to keep playing. I also love how you played with different perceptions of situations and used people’s expectations against them
I loved this, it was very fun to get all of the endings. The only qualm that I have is that I wasn’t rewarded for getting all of the endings. I literally couldn’t click on any more options when this happened, but the game did not acknowledged that I had finished.
I really enjoyed how quick all of the branches where. I tend to be somewhat of a completionist when it comes to games, but with interactive narratives it’s usually too much effort to replay the story to encountter every possibility. This format allowed for really easy and compelling playability and completion. I really enjoyed the tone and humor of the piece as well. I also thought it was a really good idea to use randomness, since usually interactive narratives are pre-scripted. This was a refreshing and playful use of the medium.
You really play on the trope of a gunshot in fiction. It’s used so much, that it’s virtually ubiquitous. If one were to piece the sound of gunshots from various films, it would be very hard to tell them apart from just from listening – after all, it is just a loud “bang.” I’m not sure if this was your intention, but your piece got me thinking about a few things: Guns are used by both the bad guys and the good guys. Just from the sound, its impossible to tell them apart. Heck it doesn’t even have to be a gun. The sound of a gun has become so ingrained in culture and we see them everywhere, and in the event of a real gunshot sound, one cannot determine whether the threat is real or not, and that’s a scary thought. (On a side note, well done with the achievement scripting!)