Postmortem: Structural Integrity

In 2021, I self-published a novella called Structural Integrity. It’s about a messy queer relationship that ultimately (spoilers) has a happy ending, with the main characters addressing their issues and deciding to stay together. Some readers, though, didn’t fully buy the ending, or felt like it wasn’t earned. The contrast between those reactions and ones who felt the ending did work got me thinking about the idea of the story as a game, where the reader/player could have a direct hand in where the two main characters end up. When I discovered Twine, I realized I could actually make such a game myself.

Adapting my own work was an interesting experience. I quickly realized I’d have to change a lot of the story’s details and the timeline, and while there is a path through the game that sticks closest to the novella, even that one has some significant changes. A few lines in the game are verbatim from the novella, or only lightly edited, but most of the writing is brand new. It was an entirely different approach, requiring me to write the characters in second person and come up with multiple possible in-character actions or lines of dialogue at each choice point.

While some of the choices simply determine what happens next (do you have a drink or go to bed?), others increment or decrement a core stat for each character, and those stats are what determine the overall course of the game. The goal was to make the characters responsive to each other, so that things you said/did as one would affect the actions of the other. So for the most part, no one choice has significant consequences on its own—it’s the accretion of choices that matters. When Yaan wakes up on Day 2, Kel will either still be asleep or be out on the balcony. Which one you get is determined by how the player, as Yaan, treated Kel on the first day.

Releasing Structural Integrity in the 2023 Spring Thing Festival was an amazing experience. It blew me away that people took the time to not only play my game, but write thoughtful, in-depth reviews, and I appreciate all the positive feedback as well as the constructive criticism. Regarding the latter, echoing the response to the novella, some players felt the game’s happy ending came too easily, and another theme in reviews was that players found themselves taking on a “director” mindset rather than roleplaying as each PC. I took this feedback and used it to shape my much shorter game Cycle (written for the 2023 Anti-Romance Jam), in which repairing the core relationship simply isn’t possible. I wrote Cycle in third person instead of second in order to deliberately create the feeling of directing, rather than playing as, the PC, because the PC is rather unlikeable and I wanted to put some distance between him and the player. I’m happy with the way that game came out, and I have the Spring Thing reviewers to thank for that!

I’m not 100% happy with Structural Integrity. I originally meant for it to be longer, but I was running up against the deadline and had to scale back (at one point I thought I wasn’t going to finish it in time—so glad I did in the end!). I also agree with the reviewers who said Kel was a less developed character than Yaan. I initially had thought about making a revised/expanded version, but to be honest, I haven’t even really wanted to look at the game since releasing it; I got a bit burned out on it, and I think I’m happy just moving on. I also haven’t tried to make anything that ambitious since—even though it’s pretty short, it was a lot of work (partly because I was still learning Twine at the time, but also because there’s so much state tracking going on that it just got overwhelming). But I have another short game featuring Yaan and Kel slated for release soon, and I do hope I can make something else like Structural Integrity someday—I’m happy with how the character interaction mechanics worked out, and I would love to use that model again in another work.