Wild West Blood

Hi there! If you’re reading this, it means you managed to find my interactive story and I hope you enjoyed playing through it as much as I did making it. I thoroughly enjoyed this creative process from beginning to end. Twine is a very user-friendly platform once you get to know the basics. I didn’t realize how much you can do! “Don't write what you think people want to read. Find your voice and write about what's in your heart.”-Quentin Tarantino

            For my Twine I used a few of my favorite movies as some inspiration and direction. Quentin Tarantino’s, Inglorious Bastards, George P. Cosmatos’ Tombstone, and Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk ‘Till Dawn. With these all as a reference or examples if you will, I managed to come up with “Wild West Blood. As far back as I can remember I have always been a huge fan of zombie/horror films of all kinds. War movies and good westerns have always been a close second. Thus, I wanted to have some zombie Nazis fighting the sheriffs of the wild west. Works, right? I know, crazy mix of a few characters that you would normally never see together, and that was the best part for me. I focused more on the concept of groups of characters, if you will, instead of one or two main characters. Afterall, zombies always travel in packs and just one zombie is never really that scary. On the other side of that fight of course you’re going to need more than one sheriff, obviously, to take on this monstrous horde of Nazi zombies. Sheriffs need to protect the population as much as the zombies want to eat and destroy them!

            Moving on to the decision points and branches I thought that it would be awesome to have the zombie horde decimating various cities all in Texas, while the sheriffs were on the other side saving them and defeating them one city at a time. This allows the reader to choose, without knowing the outcome, who survived and who didn’t. Once you find out what city has been destroyed or saved you can move onto the next chapter to see who will finally be victorious, or not. I did choose to make it even across the board on which cities the zombies took over and which cities were saved. I enjoyed finding the code for the “coin flip” which changes which side the reader picks each time they go back to a certain point in the story.

            My concept stays the same throughout the entire story, I wanted it to be as user friendly as possible that way the reader didn’t get lost in all the branches. I also wanted it to be funny as much as it was scary and still give the reader plenty of opportunity to pick and choose at any point what character they wanted to follow. The beats of my interactive story were completely left up to the reader at any point in my story, it was almost like the zombies were chasing you or you were the sheriffs chasing them through the Texas cities I hand chosen. However, the reader will not get to pick which cities made it and which ones did not. I wanted the reader to make not just one or two choices throughout the story but to have multiple choices that went either way at every junction.

            One of the hardest things for me personally during this creative process was just coming up with a story that flowed all the way to the end. I had my mind made up from the very beginning that I was going to do a zombie/horror story of some sort and the more I built off my favorite movies the easier and clearer that the story became. I can say that I wish the coding to change the fonts/colors were a little bit more user friendly. When you are doing anything creative that requires you to build something from nothing it’s important to remember to be true to yourself. The ideas will become clearer the more that you work on it. This was my first time ever using Twine and I found it to be very user friendly. The coding can get very complex but for a beginner its very easy to manage, and the wiki page was also very helpful. It is an awesome platform for various stages of programmers/story tellers alike to put something together that the entire world can run read through. Twine allows you to be expressive in any way that you can imagine, and the sky is the limit once you figure the ins and outs of the coding aspects.

            I know there are probably a few of you that are reading this that were just as interested or intrigued by Nazi zombies as I was. I strived to give the reader very clear choices on which way they wanted to go based on whomever they chose to follow. Both sets of my characters were highly motivated to exterminate the other, its an awesome journey that leaves you with plenty of endings and choices based on your wants and needs. You also get to see a few cities in Texas that you may or may not have ever heard of and that was also intended. If there were ever to be a “Wild West Blood II” I can say that I would go international with the concept. I didn’t want it to be so gory that kids would have nightmares, but I also wanted adults to be able to enjoy the adventure. I didn’t have a target audience in mind when I started so I can say that anyone who can read and understand what zombies are or what sheriffs are would enjoy this thoroughly.

 

I made it this way because most games only allow you to be either the good guy or the bad guy, but rarely both. Well future lawmen/zombie hunters, or the walking dead you are both welcome.