Gut Feeling

The character is based off of what I went through when coming face to face with a choice about a guy. I wanted to meet new people that I work with and thought going to a fourth of July party would be the perfect way to do so. I needed to realize that it is okay to not be friends with people in the workplace. It led me to make choices that I look back on and regret, wishing I would have just stuck with my gut feeling. The motivation is just based off of what happens to people on a day to day basis. Having to be around someone regularly, especially in the work place, it is hard to keep your distance with them. Mostly if you want friends and you work all the time, this place is a good choice to have those people that you can make plans with to hang out later, if needed.

As stated in the previous paragraph, my character’s want was to make more friends in the workplace and her need was to know that it is okay to keep friendships out of the workplace. The friends that just come along with ease are the ones that need to be focused on. The others that are sort of forced by yourself are the ones that probably will not stick in your life. I mean, if they did not seem to talk with you or get along with you before then what are the chances that things will change just by hanging out with them? I always catch myself second guessing my decisions which usually leads to me making the choice that does not work out for me in the end. That is why the option to second guess is there for the reader/player of the story. They are able to choose whether to go along with what they chose in the first place or to quickly change their mind and make the decision opposite of the previous one.

The wants and needs for the character differ because one is what the character thinks that she wants in her life. More friends. Who does not want more people to live their life with? Even though she knows that the amount of friends that she has in her life are a comfortable amount, something about her just wanted to explore the option since she does have to deal with these people on a daily basis. The character needs to realize though that when you get involved with anyone around the work place, whether friends or more, there could be tension that could arise with different situations. There is also more of a chance to get sucked into the workplace drama even though that is not wanted by you.

The decision points and branches in the story address these wants and needs by providing both options for the player/reader. The reader has the option to go along with what could seem like a fun time or they could pick up that there is something leaving them an uneasy feeling and they go against what they may feel would be a want by the character. There is one part of the story where it all branches to the same choices, to go to dinner or to not go to dinner. Either way, there is a realization by the character of the feelings that the guy from work has. This then lets the reader decide whether to go for it or to keep the platonic relationship between them two.

I came up with the story beats by replaying what I went through. When it came to what happened based off of the choices that I did not make in real life, I just made up what I think could have happened. This was easy because when someone tells a person that is interested in them “no” plenty of times, eventually they are going to back off and continue on with their life. Some of the options for the reader are a form of “no” but then play on to where the reader can change their mind and decide that hanging out with this person, or letting them get you dry clothes, would not be too bad.

The story itself was not too hard to come up with because it is based on real events. The decisions that are made that were my gut feeling, that I did not follow, was when it came to be hard. It is hard to try and figure out the “what ifs” in life and even harder to sit down and replay the memories of what happened and know that everything could be different if I would have just listened to my gut. So making the story long enough to choose different options was where it became tricky. There were a lot of decisions to be made in the real happening of the event but in order to keep the game at a decent length to where the reader would not get bored, but providing enough back story to help the reader understand the struggles, that is where it became tricky as the writer.

I tried to align the reader’s interests with the character’s motivations by giving the reader a lot of back story in some of the passages. I felt that if the reader knew how the character felt about a certain thing that happened, that they would be interested to find out what would happen if they chose to go for or against something. I had some friends of mine play through this and most of them were interested in going for what would happen if the character said “yes” to everything that the guy from work offered. Some of them did the opposite and chose the “no” option to see where it would take them as the character, or in my case, what I wish would have happened if I just would have stuck with my gut and refused to continue anything.