I was drawn to this fairy tale as a starting place for building a Twine game for one big reason - because unlike many other fairy tales, it provided a male AND a female hero. In most tellings, the siblings act as one and don’t show much differentiation in their decision making, but after thinking about it a bit, I realized that this fairy tale I’ve heard since early childhood fell into the same category as a lot of other stories for me. I always assumed the male character to be the more active and interesting of the two. This thinking pervaded my own writing until late in college when I realized almost all of my main characters were male. So with that, I decided that my version would be decidedly in Gretel’s POV.

There was a second aspect to the fairy tale I knew I wanted to adjust for my own voice. Hansel & Gretel has a distinctly European flair to it - from the description of the woodcutter living near the dark woods, to the historically problematic depiction of the witch. I wanted to relocate the story to a time and place that felt more “at home” for me, that would allow for some reinvention and surprises, and also support my initial goal of subverting assumptions by putting Gretel at the steering wheel. So naturally…Dust Bowl era Texas. A time and place distinctly Americana, distinctly patriarchal, and for many people (for me, at least), rich in imagery. This supported Gretel’s need to prove herself against the odds and the reason why her family would be struggling to properly motivate her to seek out this strange fruit tree.

One last thing - why not make the “witch” an alien in the desert. 

“I thought it made sense dramaturgically” - Jeremy Strong

The first thoughts that might come to mind of a Dust Bowl era teenage girl are probably close to the same for just about everyone - dusty, sad, beige. Fighting against this idea was really exciting for me. If I was around during that time period, I’d be pissed, and so too is my Gretel. Her twin brother is not only generally more liked and trusted in town and by their father, but on top of that, he’s just generally easing into adulthood a lot easier than her. But he’s not the villain in this story, in fact I hope players don’t even dislike him. He’s Gretel’s partner in all of this, and I hoped that keeping them close would just continue to juxtapose their realities and drive home the theme. 

So what would make a player WANT to play as Gretel?

Well, for me, mischief. Player fantasy is a big anchor for how I think about PC creation. I wanted to ratchet up Gretel’s devious side, subverting that stereotype of who she might be in this story, in this world, and having a shit ton of fun with it. I had this vision (that shows up early in the game, if you choose the right memory!) of Gretel sitting on the stoop with her dad’s pipe, watching with a psychopathic calm as the dry fields go up in flames. Like Tiny Tina in Borderlands, I loved the idea of this physically small and frail child being capable of intense destruction. Alien-witches beware.

I get very excited about the things that make games games. When I play an RPG, I also get VERY intense about my builds. I knew I wanted to create a simple skill tracking system, and it took me no time at all to decide on the first skill option - brutality. I wanted players to be shocked at what their PC was capable of, and maybe even seek out those options just to see how crazy she could be. The second one was something I had been turning in my head since the beginning of my brainstorming, but then realized it needed to be a tangible skill - observation. It doesn’t sound active, does it? But I thought about Violet in A Series of Unfortunate Events. She’s bloody smart, but mostly her brilliant ideas come from just being calm enough to look around. In a world where my Gretel wouldn’t be invited to join in conversation very often, it made a lot of sense to me that perhaps observing, and leveraging those things she observed, might be a really mighty tool for this kind of game. Lastly, for a sprinkle of chaos and delight, troublemaking. She is still a kid after all. At the end of the day, I decided that if someone wanted to index all the way into any of these three, they’d see this pattern - that brutality was the way to go if you want to brute force your way out; that observation was the way to go if you wanted to “solve the puzzle”; and that troublemaking was the way to go if you’re the kind of person that smashes all the buttons just to see what happens. That first player choice of picking the memory that gives you your first skill point is like picking your starter Pokemon - you can build your party however you want after that, but whether you go with fire, water, or grass kind of says something about you, doesn’t it?

An earlier version of this game was very different. I had an idea that there would be a “hunger” variable. The more you refused to eat, the hungrier you got, the less options would be available to you as Gretel loses her mental clarity. After having a peer playtest a rough draft of the first act, I realized that A) that was an overscope for me personally to design the playability of that mechanic, and B) that I was more interested in telling a much fuller story than I was in that mechanic. That’s what spurred me on to decide on other variables - the skills. It was important for me to challenge myself to track variables in the game to teach myself how to balance the challenges with the skill levels, and to elevate the game beyond a choose-your-own-adventure novel (no disrespect, I love those, too) while keeping it within a range I could confidently execute.

Once I reset my goals around the variables, I essentially made a vertical slice of Act 1. I wanted to go as in-depth as I could with the world building and ambience, and then playtest it to see if all of the preparation I was working on for the back end would even resonate with players. I had a few friends play it, and there were a handful of moments I distinctly remember across all of them that I leaned into (the delight of realizing you could skill up in “brutality” or “troublemaking”; the creepy tone). A hot topic of discussion was the cheeky text you get if you select Hansel. I wanted off the bat to signal to the player that playing as Gretel was important and not accidental, and that if they paid attention they’d learn why. One playtester told me it was “funky,” and while I recognized the irony of that feedback coming from him specifically, it did make me realize I needed to double down on getting the theme of Gretel as the less popular choice across throughout the game so that even if someone did feel rebuffed in this early decision, they’d eventually see that the game was just establishing its voice and theme through and through. And hopefully, they’d want to continue to follow Gretel beyond the story’s end. This was a lesson in itself - that feedback could at times be directly constructive, but other times it illuminates the things that are important to you that you as the developer just need to refine.