Mentorship: Miyoko’s Story
Screen shot from Where Do We Go From Here
Congratulations to Miyoko Conley who has completed her mentorship programme, working with Chris through lockdown and beyond! Here Miyoko gives us a retrospective on the work she did on her piece, “Where We Go From Here”:
When I applied to the Talespinners Mentorship Programme, my goals were to develop a strong piece for my portfolio and (hopefully) get better at games writing. While I think I have achieved those goals – or at least, I am proud of what I have made and feel I have learned a lot – the process did not go the way I expected, mostly due to the many surprises life threw my way during the mentorship. However, I found every part of the process to be invaluable, and I am grateful to my mentor Chris Tihor for committing to the process longer than we initially planned.
First, to briefly explain my game, Where We Go from Here is a text game set in a post-apocalyptic world that focuses on empathy and kindness. The story follows Kazu as she navigates life after the world ended with her companion Darkness. The idea for this came from my interest in apocalypse stories – or more specifically, an issue I had with the apocalypse stories I had been engaging with. While fascinated by questions of what would happen to us after cataclysmic events, I could not help but feel that all the answers being given were violent, and that even when presented with the choice of violence or non-violence, violence would somehow always win out. I wanted to explore the opposite of that – to put my main character in an unrelenting, challenging setting and focus on the ways she could help people with compassion, even when it was difficult.
One of the first things I learned when developing the game was how helpful it was to have a guiding question (or questions) for the narrative. These are basically the themes, but when talking them through with Chris, I found turning them into questions made me get more specific with the ideas I wanted to explore. When I needed to rescope the game, having these questions helped me to figure out what parts I could condense, cut, and rewrite and still retain the core of my ideas.
Speaking of rescoping, that was another lesson. Even though I thought I had plotted out a reasonably sized narrative that fit within the goal of the mentorship, once I had completed a vertical slice of one scene, I realized that my story was simply too long, especially when factoring in all the narrative branches. With Chris’ advice, I decided to cut the story down with the goal of making a completed game for my portfolio, but something that could be expanded later into a longer game. To be honest, the game is still a little bigger than I initially planned, but overall, I learned a lot about simplifying and balancing narrative branches and characters moments to keep the game within scope.
The part of the game I focused on the most was the player choices. Chris emphasized to me not only making sure that the choices were not simply binary (“good or bad”), but also the different ways choices can function for the player and narrative. The choices are not always about affecting the narrative in a big way, but sometimes give different valences to Kazu’s personality, affect relationship building, or allow the player to choose what world-building details they would like to explore.
Spending so much time on the choices also gave me a lesson in the practicalities of writing a game and how every branch adds more work to the process, so ideally, they should all serve a strong function.
The concept of choice was important thematically for the game as well. My intention was for some of the choices to be difficult narratively, as Kazu is figuring out how to live in a post-apocalyptic world. Some choices reflect the challenges of working with a group of people with varying opinions, and some characters will reject or dislike what the player chooses because of who they are rather than it being a “bad” choice. Some characters are difficult – I remember one tester greatly disliked one character because of how they react to a choice you make, while another tester connected with that character for the same reason. While I initially worried about their different reactions, after re-examining the scene, I decided that having a polarizing character who challenges the player’s choices was in keeping with the goals I had for the game.
Perhaps the biggest lesson I learned was that finishing a game from start to finish takes longer than you think (which is a lesson that has been taught to me repeatedly in life, no matter the project). I suffered the loss of a close family member during this mentorship, which halted my progress for a while. I cannot thank Chris and the folks at Talespinners enough for being so understanding and allowing me space to process, especially since my game deals so much with loss—and ultimately, the game grew alongside my own experiences of grief. The experience also showed me how having support can make a huge difference to a creative project.
While my mentorship has come to a close, I have already begun to implement what I have learned with Talespinners in an unannounced game I am working on and am excited for future projects.
Miyoko can be found online via her website at miyokoconley.com, on X/Twitter, and on Bluesky. Her mentorship game project can be found at “Where We Go From Here”.
