Inspiration
Vast Arcadia was (very broadly) inspired by Corru Observer and This is How You Lose the Time War, as well as webfiction and interactive fiction in general. The idea of a future civilization sending agents back in time to ensure their own existence is really interesting to me.
What it does
Optimistically, Vast Arcadia is a piece of (very short) interactive fiction about being a time traveler deployed across time to prevent the climate crisis.
How I built it
Vast Arcadia is built entirely with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, no external libraries or tools were used except for Webpack.
Challenges we ran into
This was my first web project and my first piece of interactive fiction. While code development was mostly smooth, figuring out how to configure Webpack and GitHub Pages, tools I'd never used before was somewhat annoying. Additionally, many of the more narrative elements had to be stripped away, leading to a final product that serves more as a proof-of-concept than an actual story.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Overall, I managed to keep scope reasonable and regularly reassessed what needed to be done and adjusted accordingly. I learned how to use keyframes in javascript to make some components animated, and was successfully able to implement every system I wanted to, even if some of them weren't fleshed out as much as I might have liked.
What we learned
Research and writing takes just as long if not longer than actual programming.
What's next for Vast Arcadia
I really enjoyed working on this and I genuinely see myself continuing it and pushing it into something fully fledged. I'll need to rewrite the codebase because it is a MESS, but I think it could be a fun project.
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