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 is the first piece I published in 2024, written for Shufflecomp 2023. To be honest, it's one of my least favorite IF works I’ve made. I had been wary about signing up for Shufflecomp because the conceit—receive a random playlist of songs submitted by other participants, then write a game based on one or more of those songs—didn’t seem like it would work for me. But I have FOMO, so I signed up anyway, deciding it couldn’t hurt to try. 

Turns out… it did not, in fact, work for me. I didn’t get any good ideas, but I didn’t want to drop out, so in the end I wrote this game based on a literal, surface-level combination of my two favorites of the songs I’d received. I put in branching, customized the appearance, and polished it up as much as possible, but I was not happy with it, and in the comp it got a deserved 10th place out of 15 games. It was a good learning experience, though: when Shufflecomp 2024 came around, I did not sign up!