KEEP SWIMMING:
Little Fish in a Big School

Nina Wolf, Spring 2022

For my final project, I made a Twine role-playing based on my group’s game of The School Year. I chose to create my narrative/game in Twine because its functionality of linking passages together made it the easiest option to use when formatting my game. The School Year was my source of inspiration for the final because I wished to create a more humorous narrative and the setting of an underwater, religious school for fish was a great setup for this. Once I decided on using my The School Year game setting, I came up with a concept based on the awkward, embarrassing, and funny events that often occur during high school and wanted to make a role-playing game following a fish’s experience. I came up with my title, then plugged it into the anagram generator for name ideas for my fish. I got the phrase “Timekeepings Film Whilst,” which actually ended up inspiring my decision to keep track of time in the game and give the player a time frame to work within. Next, I used Otter.ai to transcribe my thoughts about a basic narrative for my project. I used this transcription and edited it moving forward. I used crowdsourcing to help in the development of ideas for high school events and drama by reaching out to my high school friends. For the Oblique Strategies cards, I employed them when I encountered writer’s block. Below are the five cards I drew and how I used them:

1. “Ask people to work against their better judgement”: I used this by including scenarios that gave the player the option to pressure their fish to do things that went against its instincts, such as leaving the school assembly.
2. “Listen to the quiet voice”: This card helped when trying to figure out the fish’s interactions with Brett. It inspired me to have him whisper and be a bad influence.
3. “Tape your mouth”: I used this card in the same event, when I gave an option for the fish to ignore Brett.
4. “Question the heroic approach”: This card inspired me to introduce a situation for the fish to be heroic and befriend the nerdy, lonely fish. I also introduced an option for the fish to question this action.
5. “It is quite possible after all”: Since my school setting is a religious school, I thought about this card in relation to religious beliefs and developed a cult that considers that “surface beings,” or people might possibly exist.

The Botnik Predictive Writer helped me to figure out what to have Brett spray paint on the St.Clam statue. The sentence I created using Attenborough’s Blue Planet library was: “The reef has found prey buried into shallow.” The idea of “prey” made me think of the cult I developed and how humans are predators for fish and we use hooks to catch them. This is where I got the idea of using a hook. CharNG and n+7 were a bit more difficult to get something useful out of, but I ended up pasting in a paragraph of my story and CharNG gave me an output of “her eyes applying” and “I’m let answer eye.” This simply inspired me to include language where the fish’s eyes deceive it and answer more truthfully than its words. I used this in the fish's faceoff with her old bully, Ryan. In n+7, I noticed the word “noise” changed to “nomad.” This helped me to develop endings where the fish got lost on her way to school and traveled too far away, as a nomad does. Lastly, I used CSS to style my project and give it an ocean and high school inspired look. I gave a nod to the ocean with my color palette and a nod to child-like qualities with the handdrawn display fonts I selected.

I believe that I deserve an A on this assignment because I checked all of the boxes on the final project checklist and put a lot of time and effort into it. My goal was to provide a lot of options for the game and I believe that I achieved a widely branching and engaging narrative. I also think that I displayed a sufficient amount of my HTML/CSS skills in the final project and created a visually appealing game.

As for the entire class, I also think that I deserve an A because I committed a lot of time and effort to learning the material and demonstrating what I learned in the homework and projects. With each project I made, I worked to fulfill all of the requirements, but also go beyond and make the work aesthetically pleasing with my graphic design skills.