MS2K
As the world braces for the Y2K apocalypse on December 31, 1999, the last remaining member of a paranormal TV show makes the journey to Mist Springs to film their final episode. Tensions reach a breaking point when they realize the "haunted" town’s secrets—and its ghosts—are terrifyingly real. Will they survive the series finale and make it to the new millennium, or will the curtain close on their lives before the clock strikes midnight?
Project Overview:
Mist Springs 2000 (MS2K) is a one-player horror/mystery text adventure inspired by Infocom text adventures of the 80's, with a focus on experiencing the world, collecting items, and figuring out the root of the mystery.
Platform: Browser based HTML
Date: 2024
Designer: Zach Ritter
Role: Game Designer, Concept, Characters, Story, Programming
Intent:
Mist Springs is an urban fantasy setting I brought to life as a role playing game for my regular circle.
This game is a condensed, single-player experience version of the original introductory adventure, a sort of standalone prequel to the main story meant to introduce the town of Mist Springs as it would appear to an outsider, on a date which became significant to future events.
Already having made multiple pieces of documentation during my original session planning, I rewrote the story to be playable as a standalone game which I tested with the players of said tabletop campaign, informing a lot of details that helped refine and streamline the more bounded text adventure version.
Gameplay:
MS2k is a choose-your-own-adventure style text game. Some choices are atmospheric, some are informational, and others drive the plot. There a couple of possible endings, and also potentially fatal consequences which end the game.
Blue text is links, which the player clicks to explore and make choices.
Major choices or links you have to click to progress are Bolded to make sure the player has the chance to explore all the other bits of lore and prose they care for. Most aren't necessary for the core of the game, but provide additional context and enhance immersion for those who care to explore every nook and cranny of the world, while also being skippable for players who don't care for them or future playthroughs.
When a branching path appears, the options are preceded by ">", to indicate the potential importance of the choice.
The game keeps track of these choices, and uses them to make or prohibit potential future choices and endings.
Conclusion:
Ultimately, this project was made on a time crunch. The fact that I had existing documentation to work off of was incredibly useful, but my investment in the world made me want to include a lot of interesting details and choices that ultimately had to be scrapped for the sake of brevity and comprehension to a player unfamiliar with the world.
(Which is going to be most of them, unless you're one of the five-ish people in the world who were part of the tabletop group at the time. In which case; Hello, and thanks for playing! This wouldn't have been probable without you!)
I think that if I was to put my full time and effort behind a project without such a strict deadline, I would've spent a lot more time fleshing it out and polishing it, maybe add some new branches and endings while rewriting others to be less abrupt and maybe do the setup for future events like happened in the original one-shot.
For what it is, I'm pretty happy with how it came out, but wouldn't rule out an eventual remaster if I create more games or published works in the setting.