Time To Die

Narrative game

Skills

Narrative Design
Writing
Coding (Twine & Ren’Py)

The Challenge

I wanted to create a dialogue-focused game that gave the player a high-stakes goal (choosing which soul gets to take over your body after you die) and no clear “right” choice.

In Time To Die, medicine becomes so advanced that human bodies don’t die or even deteriorate, so the only sensible way to keep the world in balance is to cycle souls in and out of the same bodies. You must choose which of three deserving souls gets to inherit your body and experience all life has to offer.

I created a design doc for myself and began filling with the ideas for tone, rules of the world, characters, and the systems that would make up the actual gameplay. Each character would have a hidden compatibility meter that would rise and fall based on your dialogue choices.

I chose to make it hidden because I didn’t want the player to focus on min-maxing, I wanted them to answer as organically as possible to see if they would choose the soul that best aligned with their roleplayed personality in the end.

I mocked up a prototype in Twine so I could get feedback on the writing and story before committing all the time to art, programming, and sound. This was immensely helpful, as it allowed me to get something playable to my playtesters, who then helped me hone the rules of the game and how I communicated them.

Through this I learned that there’s basically no such thing as “too obvious” and if you want a player to understand something, you need to tell them.

Repeatedly.

Next was a lot of time spent in Procreate making the art, followed by my first foray into a game engine. I chose Ren’Py to make the final game in because the systems I needed were perfectly suited to those of a standard visual novel. Since I have a background in web design, it wasn’t hard to pick up Ren’Py’s python-lite syntax and before long I had an actual playable version of my game.

Then came a lot more playtesting to catch bugs and hone the numbers. There are nine different endings depending on your compatibility score with each soul and the choices you make, so I had to do a lot of tuning to ensure that players were given an ending that felt fair. There’s also a cosmetic choice at the end where you get to choose which inanimate object will store your soul for the rest of time (the Spiderman doll is a particular favorite).

The Result

In the end, I’m really proud of the funny, quirky, sentimental game I made. I think it shows off some of my strengths as a writer and it’s been a joy to hear from people which ending they got and why.

If you want to check it out, you can finish a playthrough in 10-15 minutes depending on your reading speed.

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Copyright 2023 by Micah McFarland