Mists of Ripveil Postmortem

One of my teachers once said to me that "animation is never done, it's just due." I certainly agree with that sentiment, and I think it applies to most artistic projects. My first thought upon building version 1.4 is that I feel like I could've done a lot more. But I'm still quite happy with what I managed to get done, considering the time frame I was working with.

I think the biggest compromise that I made was simplifying the story. Something that my players really enjoyed during the real session was the atmosphere. Granted, part of this came from the pre-made adventure I based it on, but for example, the players are initially only doing the quest after being coerced by the village chief’s advisor. There was a sense of political tension that had my players intrigued, but it would be pretty much impossible to make that happen in such a short game.

Given that my goal was to try and recapture the feeling of playing DND, something else that I hadn’t considered before is how I as a DM can respond to what the players are expressing the most interest in, and likewise I can cut stuff that they don’t seem as interested in. I wouldn't have expected myself to try and create some kind of dynamic player engagement/feedback system, but it does make me wonder if such a thing would be possible. But that's a philosophical question for another time.

I was very pleased with the rudimentary class system I developed. When I started the project I was unsure if it would even be possible, but not only did it turn out to be fairly simple to implement, I think it's the best feature of the game. In my view, it makes each player's experience with the story feel unique. Sure, choosing one class over another will lock you out of certain paths, but I have no problem with that. I think if there were obvious grayed-out buttons showing that a certain player was not permitted to follow a certain route, it might lead to some disappointment. But as the game is now, the player doesn't need to know everything that's going on under the hood. The story simply is what it is, and that's exactly how I want it.

If I were to do it over again, I think I might try and make more use of Harlowe's dynamic text systems. The Harlowe documentation explicitly says it is not well suited to make simple branching passage trees, and is at its best when creating dynamically changing text within passages. I definitely did not make full use of that, and there might've been lots of cool opportunities I missed out on.

It's also a bit funny to look back on my initial flowchart sketch. It ended up having almost no impact on the final build of the game, but maybe it was never meant to. Maybe it was enough to just get me started? In the past, I've rarely actually planned anything in advance for the exact reason that I know plans always end up changing anyway. (This habit definitely drives my wife crazy.) But I did this paper sketch anyway because I kind of felt like I was supposed to. At first, I was going to say, the sketch was pointless and I'm definitely not going to do it next time, but maybe that's short-sighted. Maybe there was a lesson in that sketch about how to get the ball rolling. I'll give it a try for my next game.