Coloratura won both First Place and Miss Congeniality in the 2013 Interactive Fiction Competition. The game was featured on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, and lauded by Emily Short, among others. It has been nominated for XYZZY awards, awaiting voting.
Coloratura wove together music, science, and horror to create a truly unique piece of beautiful and terrifying art. Designing in a text-only medium allowed me to stylistically build an "impossible geometry" of narrative with alien, synesthesiac descriptions. And while it was creepy and unsettling, it created strong emotional connection to players by creating empathy towards all the actors by giving them all realistic and empathetic motivations.
It was my most ambitious project yet, and I worked hard towards its completion. I had to be disciplined with scheduling, flexible to change, and good at networking to get more eyes on the game. I've fully documented all the things I learned about project management, writing, and networking on my game commentary blog.
In the past, I've innovated inside the interactive fiction community with the inclusion of a "commentary mode" where players could replay the game and read commentary as the progressed. In Coloratura, I innovated with a post-endscreen "Epilogue" option, which offered players additional content and kept players emotionally invested in continuing gameplay. Using a post-endscreen Epilogue (as opposed to a pre-endscreen Epilogue) offered a more concrete satisfaction endpoint earlier in the game, which was designed to match the external needs of the competition that has a timed judging period.
Source: The Developer Website.