I had an idea for a card game that would combine several of my favourite things: storytelling, improvisation, and Articulate-style games. Originally, this game was going to be more aggressive: having two players try to compete to tell the same story two different ways. Or, each try to tell their own story while the other player tried to sabotage it. But, I discovered this concept was difficult enough without those additional features. Just trying to get the English language to behave in a somewhat randomly drawn arrangement, was quite difficult. There really is a somewhat rigid structure to English that resists randomness more than I expected. English being quite hodge-podge compared to many other languages.

Initially, I prototyped this game using physical cards. Actually, strips of paper before cards. And, in its early stages, I experimented with making the cards individual letters or pairs of letters, etc. like Scrabble. But this left too much open to chance, and made it more of a word game than a storytelling game. Although I love word games, my intention with this game was to get a flow of a story going. Ideally one that became funny as it continued. I've somewhat sacrificed the overt comedy for the sake of other game elements but it's certainly still possible to make it funny if you play with comedy in mind.

I transitioned to HTML for the game when I realised the iteration process would be much faster and less wasteful than continually ripping new pieces of paper or erasing dry erase cards. I wanted to strike while the iron of my imagination was hot. I also transitioned to HTML when I discovered that LLMs could help code this game very quickly. The fundamental rules, flow, source words, etc. still had to come from me but the rules of expressing it in HTML code were now a mostly non-issue. It felt much like the unspoken rules of grammar, punctuation, line spacing etc, were being applied for me as I developed the game. But in HTML terms rather than in a Word doc.

The other challenge was trying to make the game doable. Playable. Not incredibly difficult, verging on impossible to win. I'm still not sure what this game's final form should look like. But this is a representation of one of its major possible directions.

I liked the couch multiplayer angle, too. Or, in this case: two players on one PC. It reminded me of the old days in which some PC games were only playable with two friends sharing one keyboard. "You take the WSAD keys, I'll take the arrow keys."

I hope you have fun with 'The Undead Poet Society'. Please let me know your thoughts.