Devlog Two

Project Plan

I’ve settled on both a subject and a method for my class project. I’ll be making a game in Twine exploring the Shiners in Ottawa, a gang of Irish immigrants that allegedly terrorized the early city of Bytown (now Ottawa) in the mid-nineteenth century. A graphic novel on the subject was released in 2018 year, but there has otherwise been little in the way of popular knowledge that these old gangsters even existed. To that end, I decided that a text-based game would be a great idea to raise awareness of not just the Shiners and their war, but question that can be applied to the modern era: questions of immigration, rebellion, revolution, policing, violence, and coexistance.

A fully-fledged, three-dimensional game is far outside the scope of what I’m capable of completing in the ~2 months I have to work on this project, since the visual assets, images, and graphics would take far too long for me to cobble together, and the end results wouldn’t exactly be pretty. Instead, I’ll put my English degree to use, and make a text-based game. Despite being focused on actual, factual events that occured in Ottawa almost two hundred years ago, the story will be fiction - this should allow me to use my background in Creative Writing to its fullest and lighten the research load, allowing me to focus on writing and fleshing out the game itself.