Post LD Jam Roadmap for Postcards

A Brief Retrospective

Hello, thanks for taking an interest in my Ludum Dare submission, Postcards. Or maybe you just clicked this link by accident - but if you did, stick around and see if this game is of interest to you.

Postcards was an experiment for me: my first Twine game, first attempted (and completed!) Compo submission, first time writing something that might be described as Interactive Fiction, and first time in a while writing something to share with others. In spite of all the newness,  the game did better than I could have expected. People have been leaving very kind and positive comments over on the game's Ludum Dare page here.

Making Postcards over the 48 hour Compo period felt great, even with some technical hiccups (always to be expected during a game jam), and needing to learn things on the fly. In the final hours of the jam, it was amazing to go back and look at passages I'd written and coded toward the beginning and see how much I'd improved in such a short time. And I know there's still a lot more I can learn and improve on.

So, I've decided to continue development with 4 expected updates, outlined below.

Update 1: Post Jam Polish – by 10/20/23

• Proofing and Polishing. The Amsterdam passages need it most: as the first passages I wrote, they are definitely the weakest.
• Readjust the presentation and flow of passages. The biggest point of critical feedback was about the presentation of text being overwhelming at times. I completely agree and I'll be tackling that and a few other stylistic things, like whitespace inconsistencies.
• Additional graphics – backgrounds for different cities, and images for postcards and letters.
• Updated Cover Art.

Update 2: Story Adjustments – by 11/20/23 (but hopefully much sooner!)

• Prose Tweaks: I want to do a bit of editing around the references to Ludum Dare (for instance, making it clear that is a game jam, and what a game jam even is), so that readers from a more general audience aren't alienated from the story. My goal is to change the original prose as little as possible in this regard, while still making certain things easier to understand.
• Venice Rework: While I don't want to make significant changes how the game ends and the possible endings, the final section definitely suffered from the time crunch of the 48 hour development window, so I want to go back and give Venice its due with a modest expansion of the city and certain final choices.
• Minor changes to various passages and options. During the compo, there were a few instances where I meant to incorporate a previous choice later in the story and simply overlooked it. Oops!
• Additional editing to help maintain stylistic consistency and improve the flow of the overall story.

Update 3: Snowman Port – By end of 2023*

• Port the game from Twine 2.7.1, in the Harlowe 3.3.7 Story Format to either the Snowman 2.0.2 Format or (as a fallback) to Twine 1.4.3. A short explanation why: I'm new to Twine, and during development of this game, I noticed some limitations in using the standard Story Format (if you aren't familiar with Twine, think of these as you would different versions or pipelines of a game engine). This port is meant to address those limitations, the primary one being the presentation of prose and images on screen, with another major reason being that I'm looking for more flexibility in what I'm able to achieve when making a game with Twine.

Here's some additional explanation: While figuring out Twine before and during the Jam, I figured that, as the latest default version, Harlowe would come with the most recent features and plenty of support. While this was generally true, I quickly came to understand how much a proper knowledge of web dev languages (HTML, CSS, and JS) would help me when developing in Twine. As such, it's my goal to learn these languages and port the game into Snowman, the version of Twine which uses them directly, rather than Twine specific syntax like macros. There's a chance I'll discover Snowman isn't performing how I expected, in which case I'll explore porting the game to an older version of Twine, 1.4, which is an option kanity pointed out to me over on the game's LD page.

*This port will be more for my benefit in learning coding than for the sake of this game specifically, as such, the date is more of a suggestion, as I'm not sure how long it will take to develop a basic understanding of HTML, CSS, and JS, and then adjust the game to use them.

Update 4: Epilogue Expansion – Sometime after U3.

• This final update will flesh out the different endings of the game in which you either explore Malta or return Home.

I'd originally wanted to include these in the game, but they got scoped out, so this expansion is meant to tie up the game in a way that leaves a lasting impression and final thoughts on the story's main themes. While some aspects may be developed in the Story Adjustments Update, I'm leaving as much new epilogue content as I can until after the game is ported so I can make use of the new tools available to me at the backend. As such I don't want to set a date prematurely, just know I am driven to see the game through to this point.

If you read this far, thanks! I hope you'll stick around to see these changes as they are implemented.