Digging A Hole

This month I am creating a game for NaGaDeMon 2016. You can follow along from the beginning.

It's halfway through November now, and I should probably actually stop researching, planning, ideating, etc., and just got on with it. Getting to the point of making something is always a hard transition for me. Luckily, I'm far from the only person to have to deal with this. Em Short has an excellent post on how to get from idea to implementation. The method that looks the most doable is to actually, in your chosen medium, implement the most basic but complete and working version of your game.

This reminds me of advice in other fields to make a working prototype as quick as possible and then iterate it. Applies in any time of game, any kind of art or design project, any kind of experiment--no theoretical plan survives contact with the real world, so get it into the real world as quick as possible. I hope I get better at doing it quicker with time.

Anyway, this begs the question: what is the minimum viable version of my game? I think an almost totally linear version of the story will do for this. Here's the answer I'll implement (it doesn't have to be right or good or accurate because the whole point is to add to it and change as I go!):

ONE:
     newspaper. town name, family names, suggestion of bad things, suggestion of investigation.
     always goes to TWO

TWO:
     newspaper. corpses are being dug up. flesh out bad things. information on ritual. reveal that protagonist is NOT investigator, but perpetrator.
    goes to THREE

THREE:
     graveyard. look at specific graves, epitaphs. dig up some for ritual.
    goes to FOUR

FOUR:
     graveyard. confronted by real investigator.
     CHOICE: kill investigator--go to END1
                     kill self--go to END2
                     give up--go to END3

all ENDs are a final newspaper page.
END1: ritual completed. bad things avoided--but at what cost?
END2: ritual completed? (interesting idea for full game--depends on how many/which corpses dug up, state of relationship with investigator?) ambiguous/unclear.
END3: ritual incomplete. bad things happen, but conscience clear?

Righto, let's get cracking!