Polaris, Idaho

Some folks just become scenery

What this is

A short interactive-fiction piece written in Twine and my most personal piece by some distance. The story is relatively linear, largely due to time constraints, and there are a few game elements that are vestigial from larger, more ambitious narrative objectives.

You play as Colton Lane, an employee of Mulgrew Wood Reclamation in the small town of Polaris on the outer edge of the Treasure Valley. Polaris, like a number of its real-world analogue communities, is in a period of long and slow decline. Your role, as a wood refurbisher, will be to speed up that decline by dismantling the abandoned buildings of the town and shipping whatever usable lumber you can find to feed the booming construction sector in Boise.

This game was produced as part of a class assignment for a course on Interactive Fiction at Concordia University.

What I did

I wrote, programmed, and designed the game in its entirety. This was my second ever Twine project, and a bit of a departure from my approach with Descend. The writing is much more verbose, and more explicitly personal, but the game still retains (and even intensifies) the former’s 3-act structure. This was my first attempt at polyvocality à la Disco Elysium, though with a different mechancial justification.

The game is playable in any order, which, along with Colton’s diabetes, is a holdover from a more systemically-driven narrative as I had initially conceived it. I was struck by how Citizen Sleeper effectively used the player’s use and rationing of Stabilizer as a narrative tool and wanted to try something similar, while also trying to convey a part of the world with which I’m deeply familiar but which I had not yet tried to depict in a game. This ultimately didn’t pan out – the degree of branching implied by these systems was just too much to scope out in the time frame I had allotted for this project. The result is, if I’m being honest, a main character who has just a few too many things going on for his own good. Ah, well.

All of this said, I think this is the game I’ve written with the strongest prose writing and characteriziation in my career thus far and there are little flourishes in it of which I’m still proud. It’s a learning experience, like any other endeavour.

Where to play it

The game is playable in your browser its entirety on my itch.io page.