One year later postmortem

I've been reflecting on the IF I wrote in 2024, which inspired me to write short postmortems for several of my games. This one was written for the 2024 SeedComp; I immediately loved the “change POV every link” seed, and got an idea for it using pre-existing characters, including Yaan and Kel from Structural Integrity as well as several of their antagonists. 

When I published the game I was quite happy with it; I’d put in a lot of work—doing many rounds of editing on the writing, spending a lot of time on the UI (I don’t want to think about how much I had to fight Twine Harlowe to set up those big names at the bottom of each page…), and getting feedback from several playtesters—and I was proud of the result. But… the game bombed in SeedComp. For one thing, the comp didn’t get a lot of attention, so not that many people actually played the game or voted in the award polls. But most who did play it didn’t particularly like it, and I'll be honest, that was super discouraging after how confident I had felt. 

But! Two people who played and reviewed it did quite like it, which has saved it from feeling like a total failure. I haven’t revisited it myself since publishing it, but I would like to eventually to see if I think it is a fundamentally flawed work, or just not for everyone. But I don't think I'm ready for that quiiiiite yet.