Saturday! an introduction

Hi there! 

My name is Matthew Parsons, and I want to introduce a project I’ve been dreaming of for years, and which I’m finally in the process of making. Saturday! is a game about being a latchkey child in a city full of wonders. It’s made with Twine, and consists entirely of text. The first version (0.01) which is available as of this devlog is perhaps five percent complete. If you are curious enough to play it in its current form, my warmest thanks (especially if you’ve got feedback). A little context might be helpful. 

When I played games like Pokémon or Zelda as a kid, I always loved the bits where you found a new town. Weird people to talk to! Side quests to explore! Signs to read. I always preferred this part of a game to the parts involving combat (turn-based combat, action combat – whatever combat), and I dreamed of a game that was just one big town. I really feel that exploration, and the ability to accrue knowledge of an environment at your own pace, is the most exciting thing games can do as a storytelling medium. I love all kinds of games, but if a game gives me this one thing and nothing else, it’s more than enough.

As of 2025, the game I dreamed of as a child has been made many times, at least nearly. Night in the Woods is nearly that game. Disco Elysium is certainly that game, among other things. Beeswing is almost exactly that game. It is not a unique idea to make a game where exploration is the sole focus. All the more reason to make one: the pressure’s off! Mine can just be one of many possible ways to have this experience in a highly concentrated form. 

There’s an obvious difference between Saturday! and any of the games I just mentioned. Saturday! is a Twine story, and an austere one at that. It contains only text and audio, with no visual assets at all. I had originally envisioned the game exactly the way you think I did: top-down view, retro SNES/GBA aesthetic, text boxes, etc. I’ve gone a different way for two reasons. Firstly, indie games are already oversaturated with that particular flavour of retro. And as much as I love it, I think it’s hard to justify unless you’ve got some kind of novel mechanic at your game’s core – which I’m afraid simply isn’t the case for Saturday! If this game were presented in that format, it would be even more straightforwardly nostalgic than it already is. And I do have more in mind to address here than shallow nostalgia for old video games. 

The other reason I’ve gone in this direction is even simpler: I am not, or at least I haven’t been up until now, a game developer. I’m also not an artist. I make my living as a writer, mainly for radio, and I’m a reasonably capable musician. I realized at some point, if I was ever going to make this thing, I’d need to do it in a way that utilizes skills I already have, or it just wasn’t going to happen. I have a little bit of experience with Twine from a project I made at my workplace a billion years ago (which is now mercifully unavailable), and the incomplete game you can currently play is my attempt to see what Saturday! would be like if I made it with the most approachable tool for me, personally. 

I’m a big fan of Brian Eno. He likes to point out how interesting and unexpected things often occur purely as a result of your creative process: little miracles that might not have happened if you hadn’t been forced (or inspired) to impose limitations on yourself. An interesting and unexpected thing occurred when I started making Saturday! in Twine: it became a screenplay. I found myself describing things not in terms of what the characters in the game’s world are actually experiencing, but in terms of what a theoretical “player” would be seeing on a theoretical “screen.” This introduced a bit of tension – a bit of distance – that I really enjoyed. It makes the experience analogous to reading a play, with its direct references to “stage left” and “stage right,” etc., rather than seeing the play.

Your mileage may vary on whether this is actually interesting or not. Another metaphor could be that it’s more like reading the recipe for a cake than like actually eating cake. But I love reading plays. I like that they’re complete and incomplete at the same time, and that they make a director out of the reader by default. You can read a play and feel a deep connection with the characters, while also being forced to acknowledge the author’s hand in the work. When this quality unexpectedly emerged in Saturday! I decided to lean into it. 

So, what we have here is a self-described “screenplay for a game.” Does that mean that a hypothetical, years-down-the-road, complete version of the game made in Twine would still be a sort of prototype? I don’t know! I’m not completely putting aside the notion of a graphical version of this project, but I think that even if that were to happen (or even if this Twine version comes to accommodate visuals in some way), there would still be validity in a version of this game that is solely composed of text. 

(And of course, music. I am composing and recording all of the music for Saturday! myself, on three old digital keyboards of varying degrees of brokenness. There is currently only one track in the game, but I’ve written several more. The OST is on Bandcamp, and will grow along with the game itself.) 

There’s a part of me that feels odd about using Twine for a project that is such a (small ‘c’) conservative, old school adventure game, given that I discovered it through iconoclastic works like Howling Dogs. But I’m very happy it exists to make game development more approachable, regardless of what kind of project it is. 

The world of Saturday!

So, what am I actually making here? 

Saturday! takes place in the fictional coastal city of Shoresage, which I created for a homebrew D&D campaign that I ran for around two years in the heat of the pandemic. The fact that I originally created this setting for the benefit of a handful of friends, and that it has accrued a deep corpus of lore that is meaningless to everybody but the eight or ten people who periodically took part in that campaign, is one of the big challenges. Shoresage is one of many cities in the larger campaign setting (the whole region is called the Tarragon Peninsula), and you’ll read vague references to many others even in this opening snippet of the game. 

My hope is that anybody who plays this game who was not part of my D&D campaign (I hope there will be a few of you!) finds these references tantalizing and suggestive of a larger, unknowable world. But I’m aware that there’s a fine line between succeeding in this and being completely insufferable. A D&D campaign is like a mass hallucination that makes absolutely no sense to the sane people on the outside. So, I’m trying to hold myself to the standard that Shoresage should stand alone as a compelling place to explore. Saturday! is set in the aftermath of some fairly significant Heroic D&D Geopolitics, but truthfully – I don’t even definitively know how those geopolitical events shook out. And I don’t think it’s important. I subscribe to the Doctor Who/Stephen King school of worldbuilding, where there’s no such thing as a plot hole. The protagonist of this game is a child. They simply don’t care about this stuff. 

One final note on “themes,” such as they are: I am very interested in the way time works in games, and life. In subsequent versions, it will be possible to advance time from morning to afternoon, and then to evening and maybe even into the night. There will never be any pressure to do this before you’ve accomplished exactly what you want to, because this is a game about childhood. The defining quality of childhood is the sensation that time is nearly infinite. It follows, then, that adulthood has arrived when you finally feel – in an emotional way beyond mere reason – that time is finite. I have a postgame in mind that will explore this, and it’s possible that the “point” of the game will not be obvious until I get there. That may be years from now. I beg your indulgence. 

What’s in this version

This first version of Saturday! contains one of Shoresage’s ten distinct neighbourhoods. It’s a suburb called Birchwood, which is named after and vaguely inspired by the neighbourhood in Fort McMurray, Alberta where I grew up. It also contains elements drawn from Vancouver, B.C., where I lived for ten years, and Kitchener, Ontario, where I live now. It is a feature-complete vertical slice of the game, pending many inevitable changes. Saturday! is built around a standard open-world quest system, where you discover story threads to pull on one at a time. There are eleven quests available in this version of the game, but only two of them are completable. The others require access to other neighbourhoods, and in some cases to the later times of day. (The resolution of the “buy the drum kit” quest is technically coded into this version, but it’s impossible to reach at this point because there isn’t enough money in the game.)

Several things need work. Currently, there is only music in the outdoor environments, and it fades when you walk indoors. (This may or may not change in later versions.) Right now, certain actions trigger an unwanted snippet from the audio during quiet moments. Audio is evidently always a challenge in Twine, but I suspect that there is a way to improve this somewhat. 

Also, the questlog is currently implemented as a mechanic called the “thinking tree.” The player has to navigate here to see their inventory and open quests. I now know that there’s a way to keep this material in the sidebar that is always visible in Twine stories developed in the Sugarcube format, like this one. That’s obviously better, so the tree will be chopped down in one of the next couple updates. (Which also means my reference to “Ombra mai fu” by Handel in the thinking tree’s tutorial dialogue will have to go as well. Alas.) 

I have no clear roadmap for the future of this project. Truthfully, I have one or two other personal projects that might take precedence in the short term. But there will be more of this! It was too much fun to make to quit now. I hope you enjoy what there is of it. 

See you next Saturday!

Matthew Parsons