Mikayla's Phone - Mikayla Corolik

Does anyone know if there’s something that has to be done to unlock an ending? I read the notes, listened to the memos, and now the photos have disappeared.

Checked the source code andthere doesn’t seem to be anything after that necessarily, but I feel like I might be missing something.

Yes - there is an ending…

Might be a bug. If you read all the notes, look at all the photos, and read all the wootpod poetry, you should get an ending.

I have posted a review here: blog.templaro.com/review-mikaylas-phone/

  • Jack

So this “work” was conceived, written, and designed by my sixteen year old daughter Angeline. I implemented the user interface.

Angie had a ton of poetry and notes from middle school, a lot of which is pretty typical teenage angst. Some of it is more than that. A little over a year ago, I recognized that the anxiety was more than the usual teenage stuff and offered to introduce her to a therapist. She agreed and has been going regularly since. She’ll tell you it has immensely improved her life and as her father I can say it has immensely improved her disposition. She will always have anxiety (and depression) issues, but she’s building coping mechanisms, understanding triggers, and learning that she’s a pretty amazing person regardless.

She came to me in spring and said she wanted to learn how to make a video game. I asked what kind and she told me about her writing and the basic idea of a lost phone of a seemingly dead teenage girl. I told her she needed to outline everything first. She did that. I showed her Twine and explained how to put everything into a tree of choices. She did that. I did try to adapt Twine to a mobile phone look and feel, but I felt I’d need to learn way too much about Twine. So I just used basic html and jquery.

As we were putting this together, we looked at ways to put it in front of people. We thought about submitting it to SubQ, but I suggested the IFComp and after thinking about it, she agreed it was the best way to go.

We completed the game (it has quite a few rough edges) with 6 minutes to spare.

When I hit the Upload button, you could see the relief in her eyes, almost as if a weight of the past had been lifted. She really had a bad time in middle school. She could finally (mostly) let it go.

We were not expecting anything from the voters, but the reviews we’ve read are accurate and appreciated. We both laughed out loud at “wads of morose poetry” in one review. She read it and said, “He’s not wrong.”

There’s no doubt we could have cleaned up the interactivity quite a bit, possibly added some humor, and made it more of a game. But that was not the goal. It was meant to relay what it’s like, from a real person’s perspective, to be in middle school, to be a young girl, and suffer from anxiety and probably have some spectrum social issues.

Maybe someone will “play” it and realize they’re not alone and that seeking and investing in therapy is a real solution with tangible benefits.