The Weary Traveler — Now on itch.io

I've returned once more for yet another game dev post! This time I'll be writing about the making of my TikTok meme trend-inspired game The Weary Traveler which entails the world of dabloons and thievery. 

Should you wish to play my whimsical little text-adventure game, click here!

The Original “Dabloons Cat” Meme

If you haven't heard of the trend, it is essentially an algorithm-based game created by TikTok users where videos with talking cats will gift you dabloons and offer you items. You can encounter merchants as well, be robbed, and be given special items. The gameplay is essentially based on an honor system and there are some community-made laws such as you're not allowed to take more than 100 dabloons at a time (even if you're offered more), as it will break the dabloon economy. 

There are a lot of quirks in this trend that make the game charming. So, for a school project, I decided to write some interactive fiction in a CYOA format. I'm happy enough with the finished product and I might honestly get back to it sometime in the future with updates and better endings and interactions. I have things I want to tinker with, but for now, this will do for my portfolio.

Especially as this game is legitimately the largest scale of interactive fiction I've worked on in Twine thus far. I have to admit that the larger the scale a project is, the more you have to remember to edit and fix it. It can be stressful and genuinely annoying sometimes. But I always love the feeling of “I finally finished this!” when the project is ready to be shipped. 

On the other hand, I am a perfectionist. So I tend to end up tinkering with the same thing for hours because something looks wrong. But truthfully, when it comes to art, there will always be something to fix or change. You will always see flaws. But the people who have never been a part of the process of your work will never really see the flaws, because they're not in your head and so they don't know the thoughts you've had when working on the game. Unless it's an obvious bug. Then yes, people will notice. 

Regardless, I've had a lot of fun writing for this project and it has given me insight into that I need to learn more of the Twine-programming aspect. Because it will help. Unfortunately, the bugs do scare me. 

Until next time...

// Monica