Identity Crisis was created for the 2018 ADL Game Jam for the theme of Identity.
It was organized by Rachel Sima and hosted by Drexel University, and was my first in-person game jam I took part in!
The team I ended up joining was comprised mostly of artists and writers who wanted to create a visual novel. We chose TyranoBuilder as the tool to create the game in as it was specialized for creating visual novels.
Identity Crisis is a short visual novel where a player wakes up in a new city, and meets a variety of different people who are facing different struggles, and tries to learn and grow along the way.
Working in Tyranobuilder was interesting because it was my first time working with a mostly visual programming environment. It has a simple interface and built-in components for most of the things you would need in a graphical environment.
The biggest issue I ended up having was that its conditional branching logic was entirely built around the visual equivalent of a Goto statement which is something that I was tought in school to be a dangerous tool but had never dealt with it directly.
In the course of developing the game the various jumps became unweildy and difficult to reason about. I understand that they are useful in the case of visual novels because you may need wildly branching and interleaving narrative, but working with it still gave me a deeper appreciation of if statements.