Something that I’m incorporating in my project is background pictures. Each “passage” will have a background image. Sometime it’ll be the same image as the previous passage, but most often it will change. At first, having backgrounds doesn’t seem like it will have much of an impact in a story that takes place entirely in a desert, but I have a couple plans that will use the backgrounds very well to enhance the story. The first is that the backgrounds can help to set the scene. Sometimes I want the player to feel like they are in the middle of nowhere, hot, and hopeless. For times like this, I’ll use a picture where there is nothing but sand and an incredibly bright sun. To add to this, I would potentially break the text up into smaller sections so that they are greeted by the same image multiple times in a row (which will convey the feeling of hopelessness). I’ll also be able to use pictures of deserts at nighttime to remind the player what time of the day it is.

In addition to giving the player a better sense of where they are and what it’s like there, I may make a couple images of areas of the story that are harder to imagine. There is one point of the story where the main character is talking to a snake in a weird area of the desert. The original text spent several paragraphs (most likely just to make “The Longest Joke in the World” longer) describing this area. It would shorten the amount of text/passages needed in that section significantly, which would be welcome since I don’t want my game to be unbearably long.

These are just a few examples of ways I’d implement background images into my game to enhance the experience.