Blue Ridge Buddies

I wanted to create a narrative adventure based on an amalgamation of my own experiences hiking and camping in the blue ridge mountains with my dog Juno. Now that I live in New York I often find myself longing for these excursions into nature, even when they weren’t crazy adventures (though some of them were). I wanted this narrative to reflect that everyday connection to the mountains and the woods that I once had. I began creating my story by creating arcs that had commonplace and relaxing storylines, the choices creating very small ripple effects. I included a few tense moments, but made them few and far between.

I wanted the player character to be whoever they were in real life as they were going through the narrative. The goal was to have them create their own personal connection to my dog and the life I had in Asheville, North Carolina. The way I told this story was designed to transport the placer into my slice of life, even if that player is sometimes myself when I find myself missing my mountains. My inspirations and contexts come from this place, these trails and the life I lived on them. I even went so far as to create a branch that recreated a favorite spot of mine, a shady bank by a river that I would often go to when I wanted to relax, though this existed away from the trailhead that coexists with it in my story, but it’s fiction in the end.

I began creating this process by coming up with a focal point, my dog Juno. The way she interacts with the world and the possible choices is the driving force behind the narrative. When I was writing each section of the story I would simply think of what she would do, and write from there. This allowed the story to write itself in a way. During free time in other classes, I would write short paragraphs of her reacting to different situations and once I felt I had a good amount of these I began mapping them out in a spiderweb fashion. I had to make adjustments so that the story could flow in a sensical fashion, but this style of creation worked really well for this specific project.

I have never written a story quite like this. I have only written academic papers and maybe some first person narratives that I only vaguely remember, so coming up with a dynamic series of events that could incorporate any participant without feeling alien was a distinct challenge. I hope I did an okay job of this, I see a lot of Juno’s personal touch throughout the passages, but not my own (but as the creator I may be too close to this). Still focusing so heavily on the secondary character gave me a place to work from and grounded my work in a way that would have been impossible if I had the person and the dog be anonymous placeholders for the reader to fill in. I did consider this, allowing them to name her and create her as well, but this is too much her story and I didn’t want to leave her out of it.

I experienced some technical difficulties with this project, mainly getting the thing off twine and into itch.io. The file just did not want to upload correctly and it was incredibly infuriating. I had worked on the project slowly over the course of time we had it assigned, but had left this final bit for the day before it was due which ended up becoming the early morning of the day it was due because of some extenuating circumstances. My tired brain made it near impossible to figure out my technical issues and get the thing correctly uploaded, but I finally managed to do it.

I found myself enjoying this assignment a lot more than I thought I was going to. I am not a writer, I love working on games and designing characters and contributing to world building, but I have never been the one driving the narrative. As someone who wants to delve deeper into this field it felt good to know that I could create a story, it may not be the best, but I could actually make one. I honestly didn’t think I could do that before I made this. So I hope you enjoy this narrative adventure and have fun with my best fluffy girl. The one, the only Juno.