Overview:
Climbing Tartarus is a 2D point-and-click adventure game developed in Decker, a low-code creative toolkit for interactive art making. The game was developed in a week for a game jam with the theme "Freedom, but at what cost?" Additionally, the color palette was restricted to exactly three colors for this jam.
Achievements:
Designed and developed a full adventure game with 4 areas, 5 characters, and 37 story nodes using Twine.
Gathered 90 players on itch.io, with 9 leaving comments of praise on the game's jam submission and main pages.
Gathered 90 players on itch.io, with 9 leaving comments of praise on the game's jam submission and main pages.
Achieved 9th place out of 75 entries in the gameplay category, and was awarded a Judges' Choice award.
Design Process
Working Within Limitations
Decker lacks many traditional game engine features, so I played around it's strengths. It shines through it's built-in UI buttons and mouse interactions, so I decided to make a point-and-click adventure game with visual-novel elements to leverage these simple mouse interactions and Decker's dialogue tools.
Narrative Design
Twine Graph
The genre I chose relies on engaging narrative design. I used Twine to develop a graph of story nodes, allowing for branching paths in the narrative and dialogue.
I synced the mechanical and narrative design, by using dual-purpose design to impact both at once.
For example, the player has the option to kill NPCs to gain coins, which can be used to make their character stronger. Most NPCs provide some sort of service to the player, forcing them to make not just a moral, narrative judgement call, but a mechanical tradeoff between the services that character provides and the worth of coins.
What Didn't Work
The BODY/stats system doesn't have as much impact as intended due to a lack of content. With how short the game is (and how forgiving it's "loss" state is), there isn't much of an incentive to spend coins other than to save a bit of time.
Opening Scene
I would also revisit the dice rolling system, which currently is designed so all die rolls of the same stat have the same chance of success.
I'd like to explore a system that would increase the target number based on the difficulty of the challenge to give more of an incentive for players to spend coins on upgrades.