What making a two-minute text adventure taught me about cold starts, emotional priming, and the quiet anguish of watching your son deliberately skip every story branch you worked on.
Petulance or reluctance — either could explain the narrator's voice in a small experiment to make a two-minute text adventure feel worth playing.
The End starts literally with those words, and three options to change it:
On screen you see the revised text, and you know immediately this is not a serious story-building exercise. The choices map to:
Games popular with streamers — the ones designed around chat engagement — often use a narrator's jibing voice to lead players through an experience, baiting them into wanting to beat the system somehow. That energy was what I was after.
After reading about cold starts in story writing — where you take the main arc and play it out in micro format at the very beginning, so the reader knows exactly what they're in for — I gave this annoying little exchange the pedestal of the opening lines.
Our cold start is a bait and a smart-ass response. If the player has an emotional reaction immediately, they're already opening up for more.
When you sit down in a cinema, the lights dim and the crowd hushes — but instead of the film, you get trailers and adverts first. The booming speakers, the selection of content — it's there to prime you. To flex your emotional muscles before the main event, make sure the neuron gates to feeling are already open when the film starts. The crowd is already in the zone, hushed, waiting, already oohing and aahing. It's why concerts have a pre-act too.
Occasional rambling needs a build-up. Annoy the player first, give them a short window of heightened attention to act in, then open the door.
While play-testing, my eldest son began choosing options specifically to annoy the game back — and in doing so, skipped past carefully laid branches into scenarios where a player might receive a letter suggesting they were about to attend magic school, or be faced with the dilemma of where to find coins in this digital age, or any number of other things. The good stuff was skipped entirely by choices that short-cut the story.
Anguished — at least, I was — we played through a few more scenarios together.
It clarified for me the particular angst of writing choose-your-own-adventure games. You don't kill your darlings here. They're scattered everywhere, out of sight, watching as the player makes a single choice that skips them — never knowing they existed.
The solution, in Inky (the software behind the game), is something called a gather. It adds structure and forward momentum while still giving the player choices. Instead of each option branching into its own rabbit hole, you can have colourful exchanges that all funnel back to the same line of text:
The * characters are choices. The text beneath each is the response. The - is the gather — where all choices converge, no matter which one the player picked. Even if every scattered scatterbrained snippet of story is skipped, they cannot escape the gather.
Ha!
The game closes on what might read as complete waffle from unrelated characters — but played out with enough insane whimsical charm that, hopefully, the reader reads all the way to the… conclusion.
This micro-experiment's process taught me more than I expected, which is what this post is really about. I already have the next experiment lined up to try.
Will you join me for that breakdown too — or is this… The End?