Past Lives
I began work on Freelance Fortune Teller at the beginning of 2023, but the concept is one that I’ve played around with a couple times over the past few years. I initially thought of making a game where you play an inept fortune teller at a house party during the first course of my MFA in 2019. I was new to making games and had previously only worked in Twine, so that’s what I built my prototype with at the time.
The play experience was straightforward and pretty clumsily executed. Players were shown a series of images related to different kinds of fates and could give fortune readings to characters from a few pre-written prompts.
After finishing the fortune telling phase, the player was presented with different simple scenarios and asked to select an action in response. A fun concept, but difficult to build out in depth. The prototype showed me that my game wasn’t going to work in Twine the way I wanted it to. I moved on to other projects and began to learn more tools, tabling the concept for a rainy day.
In 2021, I decided to enter IFComp with an updated version of the fortune telling game I had previously prototyped. Even though I was starting (much) closer to the deadline than I would have liked, I was determined to submit something. I made Unfortunate, a text based parser built in Inform7, over just five sleepless days and nights (dang ADHD). I’m honestly proud of what I was able to accomplish in such a short time period, especially using Inform7—a relatively new tool for me at the time.
But of course, five days really isn’t enough time to make a great game (at least not the great game I was trying to make), and definitely not a game without its bugs. Unfortunate turned out to have quite a few bugs and other issues. Predictably, it didn’t rank very highly in IFComp. I did, however, receive some excellent feedback. The main takeaway seemed to be that people really enjoyed the concept, but were disappointed with the execution. I was bummed out that my project ended up with such major run problems but was buoyed by the engagement I saw with the idea itself.
You can play Unfortunate here, by the way, but again…it’s super buggy.
So why am I sharing all this anyway?
Well, even though the earlier iterations of my fortune telling game could be described as failures, they marked major milestones on my path as a game developer. I believe that it’s important to talk about all of the elements of the creative process, even those parts that are mildly embarrassing.
I think that one of the most difficult problems I ran into in the past was that my idea was more complex than my technical skill set. A fortune telling interactive fiction game built in either Twine or Inform7 could be really great. However, the elements that I wanted to include in the game weren’t well-suited to those platforms. Luckily for me, I know a lot more about game-making tools and design in general than I used to, and I’m confident I can make a version of my fortune telling game idea in Unity that I will be excited about. Hopefully one that other people will be excited about, too!
Next time, I’ll be digging into the development of one of Freelance Fortune Teller’s major mechanics: fortune telling itself. Stay tuned!
