As the Fire Dies - Narrative Design

Role: Designer and Programmer
Team Members: Alex Carey & Deborah Chantson
Duration: 3 Months, Released April 2025
Tools: Twine

Idea

As the Fire Dies was created for the 2025 Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction. I had wanted to try out Twine as an engine for quite some time so I was really excited to give it a spin. The game idea itself came from playing The Long Dark and thinking how in that game their was an interesting opportunity for narrative exploration when the player slept by the fire. The player could have dreams of the previous day's events or visions of unseen locations creating interesting quests and objectives. The very first thing I did was wildly cut down the scope of the idea so it actually could get made. I then teamed up with the amazing Deborah Chantson to help with the writing and off we went.

Process

The core loop of As the Fire Dies involves stoking a fire and dreaming. As you move about in your dreams the fire dwindles affecting the dreamscapes. You must manage the fire as a resource as well as use the changing temperature to solve puzzles.

I worked alongside Deb to scope out how many areas we would have and what puzzles and theme or aesthetic each space would have. We landed on four areas each with its own unique wrinkle to the core mechanic to keep things fresh. As we went through ideation we collaborated in a Google sheet to work out what text would go in the game as well as puzzle structures. Additionally, we decided with the time we had to keep the game to one ending but have a series of branches and bottlenecks in the hopes the player didn’t feel railroaded.

To keep the project within scope we limited ourselves to three levels of changing text as the fire reduced in strength. As we did early playtesting we quickly realized players were not noticing the change in text as the fire got lower. To address this we came up with an escalating ‘hint’ system. After a few deaths the changing text would italicize and if the player continued to die the text would change to bright orange.

The escalating hint text was helping but also introduced an unintended effect where players would visit the same area over and over thinking things were changing due to the changing hint  text. To combat this unintended behaviour we added a fourth (whoops little scope creep!) text level that overtly stated if you had been to a location before.

Takeaways

Overall I had a great time on this project. I learned a lot about Twine and narrative design. With more time I would have liked to explore multiple endings and blending the narrative and puzzles more but that will have to be for the next project!