RED LOOPS
To set the mood, I recommend playing this game with some backgound music.
For the best experience I recommend playing the game from my itch.io page.
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Red Loops is a Twine game based on the classical story of Little Red Riding Hood, but with a twist.
Play the game by interacting with the window in the red frame above.
This was a solo project where I developed the narrative design, wrote the script, implemented the design and illustrated the experience. I got some additional support with polishing the game from the ever helpful Pablo Lopez Soriano and Guillaume Chevrier.
My goal with this project was to create a short and satisfying looping game with multiple endings using the classical story of Little Riding Hood. But this time you can choose to not end up as a damsel in distress.
The game is set in a familiar story framework for it to be easily accessible to anyone.
This way, players can easily jump in and understand the stakes without much exposition.
But the different routes introduces unexpected characters from other folklore
to bring something new to this otherwise famailiar story.
The main verb I focused on for the player is the power of saying no, choosing your own path,
and perhaps even outwitting the big bad wolf. The image above shows the initial plan
for the branching structure and different endings.
The game evolved as I was developing it (as games often do!) and
peer feedback helped improve the experience a lot.
The different branches started intersecting and inspiring each other,
making the experience feel more coherent, and I started playing around with the form and
specific formatting of Twine for some subtle storytelling details through text animation and
background colour. Once I introduced illustrations to the experience, it gave me another
vector to play with the pacing of the story and emphasise specific story beats. And by
connecting all endings back to the start, I invited players to give the game another go
immediately and find another path for themselves.
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My main takeaways for this project were how much I improved on the design of the experience while
implementing it, and that the specific affordances of the medium that help re-enforce and tell the story
became more apparent the more familiar I became with the tool.