Double Shift – Final Blogpost

Play the game here: Double Shift

What is Double Shift?

Double Shift is a text based decision game I made where you play as a student athlete in Cairo, Egypt. You are 17 years old, playing for Zamalek Academy, studying IB at an international school, and trying to keep up with your family and friends at the same time. Every choice you make affects 4 stats: Football Performance, Academics, Well-being, and Social. There is no perfect path through the game.

How it changed from the first draft

The first version of the game only had 3 stats and 10 basic scenarios. The choices were simple and the consequences were not that serious. You could make bad decisions and not really feel them.

After feedback, I made a lot of changes across three drafts.

The first big change was adding a Social stat. The original game completely ignored the social side of life in Cairo which honestly is one of the most important parts. Family gatherings, Friday lunch, your friends texting you and getting no reply, these things matter a lot in Egyptian culture. Once I added the Social stat it changed what every scene meant. The locker room scene was just about football before. After adding Social it was also about whether you are slowly disappearing from your own life.

The second big change was the color scheme. The original game had a dark background with dark text and people could not read it properly. I switched everything to a white background with dark ink which made it much more readable.

I also added a full consequence system. Before, bad choices just gave you a small penalty and the game moved on. After feedback saying the consequences needed to feel real, I added full interrupt screens that stop the game and tell you exactly what happened. Things like being dropped from the squad, or your grandmother stopping asking about you because she already knows you will not come. These screens made the bad choices actually feel bad.

The last big change was the verdict system. After every choice the game now stops and tells you if it was a Best Decision, Not a Bad Decision, Bad Decision, or Worst Decision. It also explains why it was bad and what the upside was. This was important because players needed to understand what they were doing, not just see a number change.

What I would do differently

If I had more time I would have made the branching more real. Right now most paths go back to the same central scene which makes it feel like the choices matter less than they should. I would want early choices to actually change which scenes you see later.

I also would have added audio. Cairo has such a specific sound, the call to prayer early in the morning, the Ring Road traffic, the noise of a match. Even simple background sounds would have made the game feel much more alive.

I would also have done actual research. I based everything on general knowledge but it would have been much better to talk to real student athletes in Cairo, actual IB students, people who play in youth academies. Their real experiences would have made every scene sharper and more honest.

What I learned

The biggest thing I learned is that mechanics are not decoration for the story, they are the story. When I added the Social stat it did not just add a bar on the screen. It changed the meaning of everything. Every choice that ignored family or friends now had a visible cost. That is what game design actually is.

I also learned that writing bad consequences is harder than writing good ones. The temptation is always to over explain or be dramatic. The most effective consequences in the game are the quiet specific ones. Not “you feel terrible” but “your last message to Ziad was eleven days ago.” Specificity does more than emotion.

Accessibility was another lesson. The original dark theme looked good but was genuinely hard to read. Checking color contrast is not just a technical box to tick, it is part of making something that actually works for people. I checked every color pair against WCAG standards before finalizing the design.

The last thing I learned is that feedback is the actual process, not an interruption to it. The game improved more between draft one and draft two than it did during all of the original build. You cannot know what a game needs until someone who is not you plays it.