Candy Necklaces
The game starts off with you, the main character, trying to uncover the disappearance of your girlfriend. With only a candy necklace left from her and her old diary, your intuition tells you that something might have gone terribly wrong. Having a gut feeling that you don’t have much time to figure out what happened to her, you resort to scanning her diary and utilizing the candy necklace to reveal clues. Each clue gives you new access to new diary entries, some being somber and intimate. As you race against the clock, you will experience the ups and downs of one’s life and how individuals cope with tragedies within them with each candy piece breaking and revealing new diary entries based on the song’s progression.
You can play by visiting this link: slopezlucas.github.io/Candy_Necklaces.html
Why a Narrative-Based Game? (Technical stuff here)
This was originally a project for my new media course where we used Twine to create a narrative-based game. Twine is a tool for interactive fiction using hyperlinks built on web programming. It uses HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, interacting with each language differently depending on the engine. Harlowe is widely used for its simple syntax, but is limiting. Other engines like SugarCube have more functionality. We were encouraged to use Harlowe, but I knew the mechanics I envisioned weren't feasible, so with my web development knowledge, I used SugarCube to control JavaScript more. The timer, typewriter effect, custom font, and passage variables were initially in Harlowe but I moved to SugarCube to get the results I needed.
Concept & Design
Given the interactive fiction medium, I found it challenging to envision what game concept I wanted to explore. The concept for my game Candy Necklaces originally came when listening to Lana Del Rey’s Ocean Blvd album track titled Candy Necklace. It is a beautiful song with strong lyrics that creates a somber experience of a tragic love story, exploring the ups and downs of a relationship through the metaphor of a candy necklace.
Del Rey uses varying piano tempos to develop the concept and relationship urgency culminating in a climax. I wanted to create a similarly immersive experience and opted for a typical murder mystery setup of your disappeared girlfriend. However, the ending and diary entries reveal more intimate, somber experiences of living as a queer individual that I wanted to highlight. To pay homage, I used the candy necklaces to access diary entries. As the piano progresses, more candies break to reveal intimate entries the player didn't initially see. At the song's climax, all candy is broken, providing a full set of new diary entries. The game has five phases timed to the piano, rotating random entries. With only five minutes total, you can't read everything, encouraging replays to see more and adding urgency from the song. While I wrote the original passages, they were rewritten by Lulu Zhen.
