A Dark Place (2023): Presentation in Minimalist Text Games

By John Thyer

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I had the idea for A Dark Place bubbling in the back of my head for about a year. I wanted to write a story about a reluctant murderer, someone deranged enough to kidnap a person and tie them up in their basement, but who hesitates when it comes to making the first cut. I thought it could make a good short story, or maybe a tiny visual novel. When I saw friends participating in the Only One of Any Asset jam, I read the ruleset, thought of my little murder story idea, and got to work.

I drafted the whole VN, assets and all, in a couple hours on a Friday. This is much faster than I'm used to working; I've only drafted entire games in a single sitting a few times. But I was generally pleased with the result. I liked the script, the lightbulb, the sound design, the aspect ratio. I liked how the text fit in the negative space of the image. I particularly liked the instant text-scrolling with the dull noise channel sound effect, a style borrowed from Freya's Super Videotome stories. 

The game was essentially done. The problem is that it didn’t feel quite right.

This was an unusual situation for me. Usually I start "liking" a game I'm making early on. I find something that works, and I build on it. When the game is done, I’m very confident in it. But here I had an ostensibly finished thing that was busted in some way I couldn't diagnose.

I sat on the game for a few days. I also got my partner to read it and give me feedback. I wound up making a few small changes over the weekend. These changes tightened up the whole project and turned it into something I was excited to release – even though I made few changes to the actual text of the story. They all had to do with how I presented the text itself. 

The first change: the wannabe killer turns off the light near the end. I like the characterization this adds to the narrator. Looking their prospective victim in the eye is too much pressure for them to handle, and it's keeping them from making the first cut. But maybe with the lights off, they'll be able to do it. It adds a pleasing symmetry to the game, where it both starts and ends in darkness. The change also adds a cool new tension to the scene; after spending most of the game listening to an electrical hum, silence is scarier.

The second change: during the final countdown, the lines of dialogue move down a line at a time. None of the other text boxes work like this. It's a neat change that makes the last lines feel special and climactic. It was also purely my partner's suggestion, something delightful I wouldn't have arrived at reworking the story on my own.

The third and most sweeping change: I added "blank" text boxes between many of the blocks of text. I'd built the game without any timed presentation tricks. I wanted it to progress solely based on the player’s mouse clicks, with all the text appearing instantly. (I'd recently played a visual novel with no text speed options that moved agonizingly slowly, so this choice was definitely fueled by residual spite.) But as a result, predictably, the draft felt rushed. It moved from line to line too quickly.

The empty text boxes were the solution I arrived at. Before, clicking the mouse would always immediately move to the next block of text. In the final release, it still sometimes moves to the next line. But other times, it shows a blank text block. Clicking again moves on to the next line. It’s a dirt simple change, but it works. It’s something I wouldn’t have tried if I hadn’t decided to make all text appear instantly. I would have just slowed down the text speed to pace out the presentation, or added timed silences between lines. It’s fun to work with arbitary restrictions, then come up with new solutions to familiar problems within those restrictions.

I messed with the timing on these text breaks for a while. Eventually, combined with the other changes I made, the story felt just right to me.

I wish I could say "why" the pace felt too fast in the initial draft. But issues like this aren't really objective; they're something you feel in the act of drafting a story, in whatever medium you're using. I don’t think A Dark Place's script would work as a prose short story. Reading it in isolation in a text file, the all-monologue/no-description approach feels obnoxiously terse. It's a kind of prose minimalism that depends on being a digital game to feel exactly right. I think a lot of games writing works like this; if much of the story already comes through in the presentation, you don’t need the writing to do redundant work.

The experience of "saving" an entire project with changes this simple (and trivial to implement!) was pretty revelatory to me. No matter how small scale the game I’m making is, no matter how few art assets I’m working with, there's always room for presentation tweaks that can elevate the story.

People have a lot of “advice” for visual novel developers. Offer choices to the player at regular intervals. Change the portrait art every line so the player knows how the characters are feeling. Have dozens of art assets, backgrounds, unique CGs. I think this kind of prescriptive advice is silly; that kind of presentation maximalism can be delightful in the right context, but it’s certainly not something every game needs. At worst, it can result in games that feel desperate and cloying, too eager to jangle keys in the player's face out of terror they’ll get bored.

But if you’re making a digital game, even a 600 word text game with no choices, keep your eye out for little ways the presentation can elevate your story. Because it needs something from the medium you chose to construct it in, even if you don’t know what that something is starting out. It’s frustrating, because it can feel like fumbling in the darkness. But it’s rewarding too. Discovering the innumerable tiny ways we move our stories from almost there to just right is one of my favorite things about making art.