My 2023 Interactive Fiction Competition (IFComp) entry was not ranked very highly by players that year; the interface mechanism I built for it was a formal experiment that many found disorienting, and bugs plagued its initial release. Now, after having revised the technology, the story is easier to see, and the systems easier to appreciate.
The result, “Out of Scope,” is a thematically complex branching narrative about which forms of love and violence our society condones, and which it condemns. It follows the downfall of the Carnation family, and your effort as one of the family’s star-crossed scions to put it into perspective.
I had a great time building this game’s systems. There is a lot of intricate space transformation involved in getting the camera’s frame to animate to and from the right place so text is always equally legible, to resizing the frames to fit the text nicely, and subtle, stateful logic when choreographing each sequence of interlocking events (especially when dialogues are interrupting each other and returning, as often occurs in my favorite scene at the dinner party).
My goal here was for the engineering to serve as a platform for the freeform exploration that’s possible with text and impossible in any other kind of digital game experience. I think, after much rumination and contrition, that it succeeds in proving the concept, and that the game’s themes of self-defeat even benefit from this unique presentation.
You can judge for yourself on Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android.
