How to Make It Home - interactive fiction made with Undum

[bodypoetic]

How to Make It Home

Neocities | itch.io

I made a piece of IF for Welcome to My Home Page! Here is the blurb they wrote for it:

How To Make It Home is a text game in which the player navigates an urban landscape at night. It’s about alienation, cities, wildlife, and helplessness. The world is dark and you are a misanthropic type, not fully human, beast, or spirit but some amalgam of them all, seeking to carve out a home in a place that feels unfamiliar. Your decisions illuminate your path, as you traverse the grease and heat of the city’s intestines, writhe in the grass, hiss at glaring streetlights, and wonder at mysterious creatures. Take a journey or two and see what you become. The night is calling, time to go.

Perfect for fans of poetry, interactive fiction, nighttime walks, idly picking at scabs, or coding with Javascript frameworks. This project was made using Undum.

It is rougher around the edges than I would like (please let me know if you encounter any bugs!) but such is always the way of finishing things to a deadline. I'm getting more and more okay with having projects exist as works-in-progress rather than single, polished releases, though - I can continue tweaking it, that's fine.

Undum was a struggle to learn, especially because it's a bit outdated by now - I had to manually fix a bunch of deprecated jQuery functions and Raconteur (a framework designed to make Undum easier to use) doesn't really work at all. Someone who's more comfortable with JavaScript than I am would probably get on better with it. That said: I really like it. Very flexible and intuitive once I'd figured it out, but clunky enough to make for an interesting challenge. Feels like it's very much working in the tradition of early text adventure games, which I think is neat.

EDIT: Whoops, completely forgot to say: content warning for violence and gore in some routes.

[Melooon]

I've always been curious about the Welcome to My Home Page residences, so it's great to see you were on one! The project seems like a really serious and comprehensive thing to produce as part of any residency, so you should be really happy with it.

I liked the description of the graveyard and the birds - I got ending Ending 5/6: WORMS - which was mildly worrying.

Also my stats were:
UGLY 1
STRANGE 4
LUCKY 2
MASKED 2

Although I'm not really sure what they mean 

[ThunderPerfectWitchcraft]

This is great! I enjoyed the writing - the earnestness and the poesy of it - a lot.
I shall write a few lines about it somewhat soon! (Edit: I did)

I first got:

Ending 4/6: PEREGRINE

UGLY 1
STRANGE 2
LUCKY 3
MASKED 3

then, I wanted to try what happens if I go vile; the result was

Ending 3/6: SCAVENGER

UGLY 5
STRANGE 1
LUCKY 1
MASKED 2

I'm not sure to what degree, but I'm pretty sure that some of the options lead to different results :).

[bodypoetic]

I've always been curious about the Welcome to My Home Page residences, so it's great to see you were on one! The project seems like a really serious and comprehensive thing to produce as part of any residency, so you should be really happy with it.

Thank you!! I really recommend WtMHP - it was an incredibly positive experience at basically every step of the way.

This is great! I enjoyed the writing - the earnestness and the poesy of it - a lot.
I shall write a few lines about it somewhat soon! (Edit: I did)

Oh my gosh, thank you so much! It means a lot that you took the time to engage with it in such depth and thoughtfulness. I really appreciate it, and am so glad you enjoyed! Also, that's an incredibly well-written bit of critique and I definitely need to read through the rest of Arcane Cache at some point.  


Fun fact: each ending is associated with (if not locked by) two stats - hence six endings, for every possible combination. One of many tiny post-release changes was making each ending's associated stats visible to the player. For the endings listed in this thread, that's strange + lucky (WORMS), strange + masked (PEREGRINE), and strange + ugly (SCAVENGER). So congratulations to the MelonLand forum for 100%ing all the strange endings, I am pleasantly unsurprised.

[ThunderPerfectWitchcraft]

The joy was all mine - glad you enjoyed, in turn, the review :).

I already had assumed that the stats lock/unlock specific endings, but hadn't figured out that it was a combination of two. When playing yesterday, I also found the "Doppelganger" and the "Worms" ending - but I'd say that I enjoyed the Peregrine ending the most.