5 Things I Learned From Playtesting My Interactive Fiction Game as a TTRPG

The Hollow Mirror is a gothic horror interactive fiction game I've been working on for the past six months or so. I wrote a little more about the work I've done for it on my games page, and I released a small teaser for it on itch.io a couple months ago.

I wrote the first act of my game directly in Ink, but for acts two and three, where the bulk of the gameplay is, I decided to outline it first and run it for a few friends individually as a live role-play, like a TTRPG without the dice. While I only ran a small part of my game, I learned significant lessons about what does and doesn't work in my game, and I now feel significantly more prepared to write the game itself. I couldn't possibly summarize everything I learned, but here are five things I took away from the experience.

1. If you give your players choices for their character's name, they're going to pick the coolest one

Early in the game, I offer the player three name choices: Violet, Florence, and Georgina. Each of these names have relevance to the story in their own way, and ideally the players would be fairly evenly split between the three choices.

Instead, every single one of my playtesters chose Violet. In retrospect, this isn't surprising. Violet is undeniably the trendiest name of the three. When we look at the most popular baby names of 2024, Violet is number 16, Florence is 412, and Georgina didn't even make the top 1000.

So what am I going to do about it? Well, the names themselves aren't as important to me as their connections to the story, so I'm fine with changing them. I could keep Violet and pick two other names that are perceived as cooler by my target audience. There's lots of trending names that still make sense for my vaguely Victorian setting, such as Charlotte or Eleanor.

But I won't be doing that for one particular reason: the protagonist is not meant to be "cool." She's an elderly woman in the Victorian era, and I want her name to feel appropriately antiquated. So will I change Violet to a different name that isn't popular in the modern day? Probably, but I haven't settled on one yet.

2. Players just weren't interested in some of my plot hooks, and that's okay

I loaded up the particular segment of the game that I playtested with plenty of plot hooks and points of interest to draw my players in, but they consistently chose the same few and ignored the others. The instinct at first was to punch up the neglected hooks to try to entice the players, but I soon realized my players were doing me a favor: they were cutting my scope before I'd even written the game. With a little massaging, I incorporated the important parts of my neglected plots into the ones the players were actually interested in. Ultimately, that made those plots feel more rich and complete, and saved me from having to write out the scene before realizing it wasn't interesting for players.

3. It's hard to get players to buy in to a new character

For this playtest, I didn't just recruit any old friends. I brought in the friends who I play D&D with. Friends who I knew were comfortable and experienced with improv and role-playing. But they were all used to playing a character they'd created themselves, not a pre-determined character.

For my playtest, I had them run through what I've written of act 1 to get an idea of the character they'd be role-playing as, and then we dove in. Of the four friends I playtested with, two of them attempted to play within the bounds of the character I'd set up for them and two, to put it simply, didn't.

Now, obviously, the actual game will require the player to play within the bounds of the character. Every choice I write will reflect something that character would reasonably do. But the playtest reminded me that, for those choices to feel satisfying to the player, they have to buy into the character they're playing. I now know that I need to make some revisions to the opening of my game to help the player thoroughly understand the protagonist.

4. Give the players a little chaos, as a treat

The protagonist I created for this game is not very chaotic. In fact, she's fairly reserved. But all of my players, including the ones who tried to stick to her character, had moments where they just wanted to cause chaos. To test the boundaries of the game and see what would happen. And studying the moments where they felt drawn to chaos was extremely valuable. I've started to really interrogate my understanding of my character in order to create the best experience possible for the player. Are there moments when she could be pushed to cause chaos? Those moments could serve two purposes: heightening the drama and throwing a bone to the little gremlin who lives inside players' heads who just wants to blow things up.

5. Keep it short

I set up a ticking clock for my playtest; a series of events that would happen over the course of the session that the player could interact with. It culminated with a significant event at the end, but to my surprise, none of my players even made it to the end. They either completed the objective early or we'd been playing for so long that we decided to call it.

This led me to re-evaluate the sequence of events that I'd created and find a way to condense them down. As a result, I have a tighter story that the players are more likely to actually get to appreciate.

In conclusion...

When I started writing this post, I hadn't actually started writing the content that I playtested for my friends, but I'm now finishing the post after having written a decent amount of it. I've taken a bunch more lessons from the playtests into my writing that I hadn't even realized when I first made this list. I could add a bunch more items to this post, but I think I'm going to call it here. Time to get back to writing!