Introduction  介绍

Do you have any memories you wish you could change? A moment of peace can be intoxicating, but the vague uneasiness deep inside never really goes away. Maybe it’s okay to not be too clear-headed once in a while. After all, what makes a perfect story isn’t necessarily doing everything perfectly.

《One Way》is a pure text adventure/interactive novel game. The story is inspired by real life. It is recommended to download the game for the best experience.

Number of endings: 6

How to play: Play with your mouse. Click on dialogues or actions to move the story forward.

 

About the Development

《One Way》is the happiest game-making experience I've ever had. Because my coding skills are weak, it always took me a lot of time to just make the game show what I imagined. Sometimes, I even had to cut down my ideas just to be able to finish the work. This time, I used Twine, a tool recommended by my teacher. It almost completely removed the coding worries. I could focus only on the game’s content — the story. When my production finally went smoothly, I deeply felt: why didn’t I start earlier? It was really fun. It brought me back to the original joy of making games.

At the beginning, I tried learning Inkle. I wanted to write the story in Inkle and import it into Unity. But soon I gave up, because the testing process was too slow and made me feel very anxious. After that, I started learning Twine. I found it very easy to use, and it let me enjoy building the story without worrying about other problems. I used Word and Xmind to organize the story, used Twine to build the engine, and asked my friends to help me with testing. That’s how I finished this game.

The engine is very simple but can easily achieve small features. After learning from Bilibili tutorials, I added a simple credits page at the beginning of the game, changed the background, and added some effects to the pictures I drew. These small improvements gave me a big sense of satisfaction.

Also, to insert the pictures I drew, I learned about “image hosting” for the first time. As a designer, I always need to upload and move a lot of my work. I was really surprised that I just discovered this useful tool now.

 

About the Game

In this visual novel, I made six different endings for players to explore. Some are serious and complete; some are surprising but still logical. I wrote a lot of text to make sure players would feel the differences between the endings. The process was very tiring, but also gave me a great sense of achievement.

I have always loved creating stories. Many ideas float in my head, but most of the time I don't have a chance to organize and realize them. Through this project, I finally finished one of my recent ideas — a story based on real life, mixed with my personal thoughts and questions.

Still, there are some regrets. To make the endings rich enough, I had to give up a more interesting overall story structure. I couldn’t accept an unfinished or unpolished work.

During the process, I realized that making a visual novel is very different from writing a novel. At first, I had many romantic and creative ideas. But as I realized this was a "game", my writing had to change.

For me, a game means something fun and unknown. Although there are many great RPGs with only one or two endings, for a short project like mine — without polished art, original music, or a big world background — just telling a story isn't enough. It needs more choices, more endings, and more chances for players to replay and experience different paths. Only then can it really feel like a "game."

The theme of the story became narrower. I focused on a structure that could easily create many different branches. That’s how One Way was born. The name fits the theme — even if you could start life over and over again, even if you could choose or experience many possibilities, in the end, you still only have one road. We are not characters living inside a game world. There is no "good ending" in reality. Maybe this story is not very fun, but it reflects a period of my real life, and the many futures I once imagined.

 

About the Design

After finishing the full game (ending 6: "Bubble"), players will realize that "I" and "003" are actually two sides of the same person. There are also hints during the gameplay: usually, the choices players click represent "my" actions or words, but later in the game, the clicked content secretly changes to "003's" answers. I am very happy with this design, because my writing style often makes it easy to confuse perspectives.

I often spent a lot of time testing small details. Maybe it’s because of my slight perfectionism and a little OCD. Even though it’s not wise to spend too much time on polishing details in the early stage, I just couldn't help it.

The default black and white interface felt too boring to me, and the default jump arrow broke the game's immersion. I changed both of them.

If I have the chance, I still want to add more things in the future, like background music changes, save points, different background colors, and maybe try using a "printer style" font. I also hope to add a seventh ending — the one that I will be most satisfied with.

 

About the Challenge of Translation

During the whole process, the hardest part was the translation. At first, I wrote everything in Chinese, but when changing it into English, my English level affected the results. Also, I found that some Chinese expressions didn’t have a direct match in English, which made the translation process more difficult.

 

Conclusion

In short, this was a very fun and new experience for me. It opened the door to a new world of making games. Now, I can already imagine a future where I combine my skills — art and storytelling — to create my own interesting games.

 

References

Twine Documentation. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://twinery.org/

Bilibili Tutorials on Visual Novel Making. (2023). Twine入门教程，从零开始做一款游戏

Anthropy, A. (2012). Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-outs, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form. Seven Stories Press.

The Twine game（大鱼） made by the author of the bilibili tutorial：https://zhuobinggang.github.io/game/bigfish.html

Some game test records