KEY SKILLS USED:
- Game design
- Scripting
- UI design
- Writing (dialogue)
- Sound design

This project had two main goals from the outset: 
1. Design a game that directly adapts an existing story without being too derivative.
2. Design a game to run entirely within the browser and build the gameplay around that limitation.
​My other projects have usually allowed for some degree of creative freedom, and I wanted to work under creative constraints this time. Moving into industry-level game development means I wouldn't necessarily have the creative freedom I'm used to, and I wanted to prepare myself for that.
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I chose to adapt Jonathan Ball's Proposal as, while the SCP wiki itself is massively popular, this one specific story tends to get overlooked and overshadowed by contemporary stories. Many modern reviews and comments look at it as a simple product of it's time due to it's simplicity, and it's rare to see it get much acknowledgement unlike some other far more popular legacy articles on the site.
I wanted to adapt the story in a way that would allow people to view it under a new lens, exploring it's ideas in a deeper way that the short story couldn't.
I also knew it would be a fun challenge to keep it recognisably based on the source material. Most SCP documents aren't written as typical short stories, and especially not Jonathan Ball's Proposal. It's odd and fairly meta, poking fun at tropes that were common in SCP stories at the time it was written, and it has nothing resembling a traditional narrative structure. I wanted to maintain these elements and lean into having a odd narrative structure too, encouraging the player to not just play it once and see one ending, but to replay it multiple times and pick apart what their actions might do to the story similar to how the format of SCP articles encourage re-reading to better grasp their concepts.
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A concern I had with adapting an existing work was avoiding reliance on the established conventions from other adaptations. Many adaptations of other SCP works, such as the popular SCP: Containment Breach, take a survival-horror approach to gameplay, and have a hard sci-fi aesthetic.  I wanted to avoid these, as I felt those genres had been already explored enough.
My take on the world of SCP ended up much more low-tech and analogue with a typewriter paper aesthetic for the UI and sound design, so I believe I've ended up with something that isn't derivative of other creators' aesthetics.
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As for the gameplay, I knew it would need to be mouse only to best fit the browser-based nature, which led to the simpler interactive fiction gameplay angle. Being able to influence the outcome of the story based on the object the story is centered around proved to be an interesting gameplay hook, so I tied it with a branching dialogue system (plus some hidden morality meters) that ensures that all of a player's actions will change the story in some way.
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You can see the end result of this project on this very page, if you want! (Unless you're on mobile.) 
Or you can download the non-HTML5 version with enhanced graphics and audio.