I found planning an interactive narrative to be both absolutely necessary and fairly difficult, especially as my normal creative process involves discovery writing and figuring stuff out as I go. In many ways, plotting turned out to be a microcosm of writing out the narrative itself. Because the text is nonlinear, this stage required deciding on the overall structure of my game, the major branch points, and their outcomes long before I’d written a word of the actual story. I didn’t want to risk setting myself up for choice bloat that could quickly escalate out of hand. Early in my writing process, I had to cut out an entire half of the story (which previously had included an alternate mother character) because I hadn’t realized just how much extra work it would be to include this element on top of everything else. It would have effectively doubled the already extensive conversations and interactions between the player’s character (PC) and her mother. While this might have been interesting for players, I simply didn’t have the time or capacity to include this entire second element on top of everything else.

Yet even at this stage, it’s difficult to tell whether the branches I’d planned were properly sized or whether even these would turn into more massive of a task than I bargained for. I suspect this is something that will become more intuitive the more branching stories I write, but as a first timer, I severely miscalculated how much work some of these would take.

I intended to follow mostly a diamond pattern to avoid excessive bloat. This only sort of worked, in no small part due to underestimating how much certain story elements would branch within the body of the diamond. The first chapter of my story was mostly introduction; it was straightforward enough, with two major choices that set up later events rather than branching the whole narrative immediately. The second chapter ballooned once those choices paid off. In chapter 1, the player can decide whether their character graduated or quit college, and the outcome of that choice determines whether they work for a grocer or a legal firm. This meant that when they went to work in the second chapter, I essentially needed to write two different versions of the chapter—one at the firm, and one at the grocer. Added to this was a complicated conversation that took place at the chapter’s end, and I was already struggling with choice bloat.

Chapter 3 was the chapter from hell. I wanted the player to have three main choices at the beginning of the chapter: to go to a photoshoot with their controlling fiancé, to attend a Bible study with their peers, or to seek out an enigmatic character who’d shown up in the previous chapter. If the player had decided to keep their job in the last chapter, I also needed to include a confrontation with the fiancé no matter where they chose to go.

Two of these three paths included extensive conversations. When the player can respond to a given prompt two or three ways, conversations get complicated fast, even with only one or two outcomes to the conversation as a whole. I needed to hold all these possible paths in mind and calculate how they might recombine and condense in a logical way to keep from having to write five or six versions of the same conversation. The fact that paths might loop back on each other also added a layer of visual confusion to an elaborate conversation, even with software like Twine that provides a story map for the benefit of the writer. Conversations became spread-out, tangled webs that were difficult to make sense of.

Bringing each of these three major paths to a natural confrontation with the groom was also both challenging and necessary for the narrative. I essentially had no choice but to write four different versions of the confrontation scene, which differed based on location and other characters’ presence. Simply changing the scene description was not enough and would have required lengthy, confusing chains of if/else statements, so, believe it or not, writing multiple versions of the same scene was actually the simpler option. On top of this was a mess of variables keeping track of the groom’s feelings towards the PC, the PC’s statistics, and the PC’s relationships with other characters in the scene. All of this added up to a very headache-inducing experience that took two weeks to write.

Could the chaos of chapter 3 have been avoided with better planning? Parts of it, perhaps. But the tendency of interactive fiction to bloat is, to some extent, inevitable if one is hoping to tell a story like this. I could have reduced the player’s options by choosing an in-depth conversation without detailed branching, but this risked the player feeling like they didn’t have much input into what was happening (the Paradox of Choice, once again). Conversations are not simple in real life and could split in any number of ways, so if I wanted to have a scene involving a realistic conversation that also gave the player a good range of options to choose from, there was no way forward but a tangled web.

Perhaps a better question—and a much bigger one—is how much time and energy the author has to pursue a story of a given scale. Generally speaking, I found that the more characters the PC has relationships to, the more tangled a narrative will become. Descriptions don’t tend to add much bloat by comparison. A mostly silent story about exploring a location alone will be much less time-consuming and complex to write than a story featuring many character interactions and conversations. The difference is in the inherent premise of the story: one of these will require a lot more interconnected branching than the other. Of course, there is probably a way to make the exploration as convoluted as the conversation, but the premise lends itself to that much less readily. Deciding on a premise that fit my time and energy was imperative to avoiding later complications (including choice bloat).

On the scene level, I also had to decide which choices were worth presenting to the reader/player—a balancing act central to addressing the Paradox of Choice. Part of this was the difficult dance of predicting where a player might expect to have a choice and where I could assume they’d be happy to just follow the story. In some cases, they might expect a choice, but the story required that a certain event happen to progress, and potential frustration about a lack of choice on their part is a tradeoff I realized I would have to make. “Trimming the fat,” so to speak, was even more important in a branching narrative than it is in a linear one, given that the fat could exponentiate out of control if left untrimmed.

I found that there are two main types of choice: aesthetic and consequential. Aesthetic choices can be fun, but they’re an indulgence that takes extra time and energy on the writer’s behalf. In one scene, I gave the player the option to choose between a blouse and a dress, which meant that every subsequent description of clothing had to be tagged with a tedious if/else statement depending on which aesthetic the player chose. This amounted to busywork in the scheme of the story. I also had to beware of choices that seemed consequential but were actually aesthetic. I learned to identify this trap when I found myself writing several versions of the same scene, just with the descriptions and some peripherals changed.

A true consequential choice feels like a different story is being created—something significant has changed that the player would not have encountered in the other branch. It’s also the sort of choice that should be included in high-level planning and plotting, to account for all the directions it might take. The three different paths in my huge chapter 3 qualify as consequential, because each one leads to a unique scenario. By contrast, the quit/kept job choice from chapter 2 has a few consequential elements but, in hindsight, is largely aesthetic.

There are ways I could have made some aesthetic choices consequential. For instance, a choice of what to wear could have had a positive or negative affect on a character’s impression of the PC later in the story, changing their relationship. But these are decisions I would have had to make in advance and not fix as the story was being written. It was very difficult to go back and make an aesthetic choice matter later in the writing process.

A related, side challenge to this complication that I encountered was a mental one: I found it was simply hard to determine if I was being repetitive when I was writing similar scenes that necessitate similar dialogue. Had I mentioned the rain or the dust too many times? It was hard to tell, because different nodes that might not interact at all might still have similar descriptions, and so the repetition was entirely on my end and not the player’s. A similar issue arose with physical gestures and character locations. If paths rejoin after a few branches, and the rejoining node makes mention of a hand on someone’s shoulder, I had to make certain that each of the nodes leading into it included that hand. This was more a small, frustrating wrinkle than a large problem, but worth mentioning here.

From a story perspective, the personality of the player’s character also posed a problem. Because the player controls her actions and responses to in-game situations, the character might act arbitrarily abrasive one moment and incredibly kind the next due to most branching options generally having either a rude/kind choice dichotomy or a docile/proactive one. This led to readers reporting that the character felt inconsistent. While these choices altered variables behind the scenes, their immediate outcomes weren’t visible to the player and mostly just showed up in an “insights” node at the end of each chapter. In a sense, they were frustrated that past choices didn’t push them towards different dialogue options.

This was a hard dilemma to tackle because it poses a contradiction: the players feel that the character is inconsistent, but really, it’s the players themselves who, through their choices, are making her act inconsistently. The trouble, then, seemed to be that the choices offered were inconsistent with past actions, and the apparent solution would be to have past choices affect future available options. For instance, if a player acted rude in the past, then the dialogue options presented to the player in the future would also be ruder, because they had chosen to make the character a rude one.

However, restricting player agency in favor of character consistency that didn’t sit well with me. Orchestrating the game so that a player is literally unable to say something kind because they were rude in the past felt like too far of an overstep on my part, like I was railroading the player down a particular path without recourse even if they’d technically chosen the precursor to that path. If they could say something nice, why shouldn’t they have the option?

In the end, I decided to live with the possibility of character inconsistency. For one thing, I didn’t have the time or technical ability to slowly nudge the story in such a subtle way, where future social choices become more and more constricted based on a cumulative tally of the player’s past decisions. It would be possible, but certainly beyond the scope of this project. But from a more bird’s eye perspective, the question of character consistency in general is a wrinkle of the Paradox of Choice that I don’t have a good answer to.

Almost all the previous challenges boiled down to time management and using my available time as effectively as possible. Time was perhaps the biggest limit on my project—not my technical know-how, not my writers’ block, but time. Just looking at the expanding conical shape of the narrative I wrote, as it became progressively more complicated with each chapter, speaks to a learning process of the role time plays in the creation of interactive fiction.

Of course, time management is an important consideration in any creative discipline, but I’d argue that it’s especially crucial in a medium where any decision I made at the start could balloon into dozens of paths if I wasn’t careful. Once I’d poured hours into making a certain path work, it was incredibly difficult to decide to remove it—even if continuing to pursue the path would lead to more work than I had bandwidth down the line. The ratio of time spent to content lost—and the mental tax from losing that content—is a high one. (This is why, in a professional setting, the game development pipeline is so rigorous and rigid. Time lost to a story that turns out to be irrelevant could mean thousands of dollars lost, as well.)

Looking back, it would have been wise to first start out with small scenes to get a sense of how long it would take me to write branches. It was impossible to know my creative bandwidth without first testing the waters, and my past exploits in writing linear fiction did not directly translate to the experience of navigating a nonlinear story. Tackling smaller projects first would have given me better insight into how to plan a branching plot, keep choices in check, and pick a narrative premise that fit both my available energy and my ten summer weeks.

If I could do this project over, my focus would be this: devoting myself more fully to the pre-writing process and setting myself up for success down the line by doing so. That said, it was more or less inevitable that I had to go through time-consuming trial and error to find my footing and my process for writing this kind of narrative. My stumbling blocks and mistakes will inform any future interactive fiction I tackle, and I feel much more confident in the genre than I did when starting out. So, despite some poor time management on my part, my creative project was doubtless a success in everything I learned from it.