OASIS Twine Game

Due Date: 11/11 at midnight

In Ernest Cline's Ready Player One, the characters move through a massive online game world called the OASIS, and the central plot focuses on an easter egg embedded in the OASIS by its creator, James Halliday. Halliday is obsessed with 1980s popular culture, and each of the puzzles he creates for the easter egg are focused on that obsession. In this project, you'll be using a platform called Twine to create your own puzzle game inspired by Halliday's various puzzles in the OASIS.

For this project, you'll work in groups of three or four, and you'll create an easter egg puzzle based not on 1980s culture but instead on contemporary popular culture. So, while Halliday was obsessed with anything from The Breakfast Club to Family Ties, you should feel free to pursue your own interests and obsessions from contemporary culture.

Regardless of what inspires your puzzle game, the goal is to create a game that calls for the player to solve puzzles in order to reach some "win" state. In addition to submitting your Twine game, you'll submit a walk-through document. This will serve as the "key" to your game. While we will be evaluating your game by playing it, these documents will help us if we get stuck.

This project will represent 25% of your grade. When grading these projects, Michael and I will be asking the following questions:

  • Does your game make use of the affordances of Twine, using code to create a dynamic reading and playing experience?
  • Does your game ask the player to solve puzzles in ways similar to Halliday's easter egg?
  • Is the game coherent and clear? Do all of its pieces hold together? Does the player leave the experience with a clear sense of what you are trying to communicate?
  • Are your project and walk-through document generally well written and free of grammatical errors?