The game was made in Twine inspired by a playthrough of the Quiet Year. I took some liberties with the story to better fit the game but the major ideas behind it are the same. During the Quiet Year session, a mysterious black box found in the ruins is able to feed on souls and a man confesses to sacrificing children to it but he eventually abandoned it in the ruins out of guilt. This game takes a look at the other choices the man could have taken as well as the ones he actually did and what his rationalization for making such decisions were.
The crowdsourcing aspects are from how the story of the Black Box developed. In the Quiet Year, another person in the group was the one who pitched in the idea of a man who sacrificed children to the box. We even did a whole plot point on how the box was dealt with and how containing it failed.
I used charNG, n+7, the Otter transcript, anagram generator, and botnik to make the dream sequence sections more incomprehensible in order to reflect how the narrator wasn't able to understand the knowledge the Black Box gave him.
My Oblique Strategy cards said "Go outside. Shut the Door." which I literally did when a fire drill happened while I was working on a project. Another implored me to "Not be afraid of cliches" which I implemented by using typically sci-fi esque font to convey the alien and technological natuer of the Black Box. "Be less critical" was helpful in silencing my inner critic. It's better to have a finished product rather than something half-finished. "Move towards the unimportant" made me examine more closely what I did and didn't need and get rid of variables that weren't of much use within the game. "What wouldn't you do?" made me consider my limits and just how far I should push my ambitions.