#ifcomp 2017

The story is about a mute (possibly autistic?) 12-year old boy named Bird, and his father/guardian, Ty. Bird can only communicate in gestures, interpreted here as generic symbols. Your dialogue options consist of choosing some number of symbols to indicate your thoughts. Part of the puzzle is in recognizing what the symbols represent; it’s often unclear what particular symbols will mean. There’s another layer of indirection, as the only clue we have as to the symbols’ meanings is Ty’s reaction to them. It could be that Ty doesn’t know what Bird means either, and he’s just guessing as well.

Actually there are several layers here: the player, Bird, and Ty’s reactions. As the player, we pick the symbols that Bird gestures without fully knowing what they mean, while presumably Bird (the character) does. Sometimes this leads Bird to make further gestures outside the player’s control. And all of this is filtered back to the player through Ty’s responses. (insert some theory about interactivity or agency whatever here)... Do the choices actually matter? Is any character actually honest? Is Ty ever telling the truth?

The writing itself is rather charming, with some dark undertones. I still don’t have a clue what Ty’s neck injury was all about. And the gang mugging? Was that really a gang mugging? Or did it represent something else?

So, as the about says, it had two main inspirations.

The first is the second half of Delightful Wallpaper (which I'd recommend playing if you haven't). Delightful Wallpaper has two halves, and reviews are largely divided between people who liked the maze/logic puzzle first half much more than the emotion-focused second half, and people with the exact opposite opinion. For me, though, the way the second half felt timeless, as you manipulate events from a position outside the time the events take place in, which I found quite interesting.

The second inspiration is Garnet from Steven Universe, because it and she are awesome.

I guess in some extent this was also inspired by the cycle, in some text adventures, of there being some sort of constrained endgame where you have to figure out the exact right way of negotiating a dangerous situation with death or failure if you mess up. The stakes are, of course, ameliorated by having save and restore functionality to give you as many tries as you need. In some sense, Future Threads evokes the same sort of "try as much as you need to figure out how to survive the endgame", without that meta-level save and restore cycle.

A lot of the game fell out from this premise or the restrictions of the medium. Why was Kayla mute? Because good conversation systems in text adventures are hard. What's the deal with the obelisk and the "poisons of this world"? It's just an excuse for you to only be able to influence the future with setup but not actually be there when it happens.

The details of the backstory are deliberately underspecified and left open to interpretation. I didn't feel like more exposition would be satisfying or relevant. Why is Kayla so important? What sort of creature/alien is the protagonist? Dunno. I enjoyed seeing people come up with theories/interpretations.

I tried to make the environment based on a pseudo-African environment because the generic vaguely-European fantasy worlds so many games are set in are overdone and we could use more diversity. Also, because I'd watched the recent movie adaptation of The Little Prince recently when I started writing this, so baobabs were in my head. I decided to use the cover art to establish Kayla as black rather than put that in her in-game description because it didn't seem like the sort of thing the protagonist would call attention to.

I also tried to make the solution focus on Kayla being a badass to try to avoid making Kayla too much of a helpless damsel in distress. I also liked the image of Kayla as being easily distracted and being into weaving grass and such but also competently killing enemies a lot.

It does seem a bit reckless to not have, like, much in the way of actually useful equipment around if Kayla's so important and her guardian can't be around all the time. I didn't want other magical or complex stuff in game to distract from the main mechanic, and I guess I sorta liked the feel of scraping together a solution from random seemingly useless stuff, and using logic and your environment rather than discrete obviously-useful objects. (Though the logic that makes sense to me is not always the logic that makes sense to others, alas…) Some of the stuff should’ve been cued better, probably.

I was never completely happy with the title, but I also never came up with anything I liked better. The concept was that the protagonist's time magic and weaving barriers fit together because the branching paths of time can also be seen as woven threads. I didn't actually remember to include this metaphor in the game anywhere, though.

People like my maps! More games should have maps! It's not that hard and it removes a big barrier to people playing parser IF. For reference, the Inform extension I wrote for the map, and other Inform extensions I wrote for this game, are available at the i7 extensions github. (I tried to put as much of the playtester feedback/failed commands that were generally applicable into extensions so that I and others can take advantage of them in the future.) And I'm happy to chat with people about them or take feedback.

I think the biggest change I’d make if I were doing a post-comp version would be to the hint system. I had this concept that since puzzles are less location-based than they were in my previous Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist, it made more sense to have a single hint track instead of doing it based on location. But since this game isn’t linear the way Bobby and Bonnie is, this didn’t work so well, and a lot players expressed frustration that the hint they were getting wasn’t relevant to what they were trying to solve. Location-based probably could’ve been made to work somewhat, or maybe I should’ve gone full InvisiClues-style.