A Little Twine Here and There

Interactive Fiction Projects for Game Jams and Personal Fun 

Lately, I've started using Twine again to make interactive fiction games. It's not much - just a little goofy fun here and there - but it's been a nice way to write in little tidbits, which is a lot more manageable for me at the moment. 

It's also a little more challenging. Interactive fiction utilizes a lot of choice-based gameplay (I'm not making the kind where you enter commands). Choices have to mean something; they have to take you down another path or change something significantly enough that it matters in the story, either immediately or later on down the line. 

That's where the challenge lies: the choices - and scale. I'm working on it best as I can, but I have a default setting in my brain that makes it so that even if I try to keep a game small, I end up creating so many choices and decisions and paths that it quickly blows out of proportion. 

I sat down this time around and made a web of all of the major plot points in the game's story, and then highlighted all the end-points (the different endings that you can have). It's split into 4 chapters because working on sections will probably be easier and I can keep the plot from getting away from me by using a diamond-formation for the structure of the routes. 

Hard at work on my gothic/cosmic horror piece... But it's quickly getting out of hand!

While players/readers will end up funneled through the same plot points between chapters, the decisions they've made throughout their playthrough will have an impact on what options will be available to them as they go through the story. In other words, being really mean to Character A in chapter 1 might mean that in chapter 3, when you need their help (a plot point you can't avoid), they won't be available. 

I also recently played some interactive fiction and visual novel games just to get back into the zone, and while they were really fun and creative, I realized as I was playing that I wasn't really making decisions I wanted to make. I was making decisions that I knew the characters I was "speaking" to would react best to. 

When you're playing as a character who is pretending to be someone else in order to get close to a character, this works really well. Something like a game where you're undercover or trying to infiltrate a group that knows nothing about you is a great example here.

When you're playing a character whose personality you can drive, this can also work well, because the options can be less about what the other characters like and more about the kind of personality you want your main character to have. From there, the game will funnel you towards the characters who will be most aligned with that personality.

But if you're playing a character who has a personality, the options that are provided have to be aligned with that protagonist's personality. So, sometimes, when done not quite right, the options that help you proceed in a game can feel a little off-tune relevant to your protagonist's personality.

I want to make sure I don't fall into that trap. 

What am I making in Twine?

So, there are actually three Twine projects I'm working on. 

1. One is a fun, wacky fantasy RPG where the narrator is unreliable and a little tricksy. It's fun to make a game that gets really meta, and which breaks the fourth wall consistently. Not only are you playing the game, you're playing the narrator, too. Alas, this one I'm making as a birthday gift. Lots of inside jokes that nobody else would understand. Some funny GIFs. Just a crazy, funny adventure. Maybe afterwards, I can replace the jokes and try to make it more enjoyable for the general public.
   
   
2. The second is a gloomy, gothic cosmic horror (Poe + Lovecraft-ish) featuring the last survivor of an aristocratic family who delves into forbidden knowledge to try and save his town from a plague and ends up connecting to a slumbering beast buried deep beneath his family estate. Insanity and grotesqueness ensue, and it's a tragedy all around. I'm having a little fun with keeping the timeline of this fictional world vague. You're never really sure what year it is, and it's deliberately anachronistic.
   
   
3. And the third is an undercover detective game where you infiltrate a group and try to find out the real identity of their dangerous leader. 

Game Mechanics across the 3 Twine Games

All three of these games have different game mechanics when it comes to progression. 

The first game - the wacky RPG with the unreliable narrator - gives you more chances to circle back if you make a bad choice. That's because it's supposed to be a lighthearted game, where you're meant to go out there and see what happens if you choose different options. I want my player to enjoy exploring the game and uncovering all the little inside jokes and funny references, and I don't want him to have to re-play the game from scratch or a previous save to do that. This game will have a super simple inventory system, and even though you need to talk to people to get info from them, there's no running relationship/affection tally - just ask the right questions and you'll get your answers.

The second game - the moody cosmic horror gothic thing - is more definitive and restricted. Choosing something means not being able to return. Choices are turning points in your story and your character's sanity. And since there's only, like, one moderately "good" ending, it really doesn't matter, anyway. (But I guess the player shouldn't know that?) This game also has more that comes into play with its background mechanics: things like relationships with other characters, doubt/trust counts, and the player's Insanity gauge.

The third game is in its early days. Well - all the games are. I started working on them in the past few days, but I only started working on the third game today. I wanted to play around with that thing I mentioned before about choices: 

When you're playing as a character who is pretending to be someone else in order to get close to a character, this works really well. Something like a game where you're undercover or trying to infiltrate a group that knows nothing about you is a great example here.

With that in mind, I decided to make a game that was just that. Pretend to be someone else to get in with the group and see if you can find the information you need. Mechanics will include relationship building and suspicion count. The obvious good/bad endings here include figuring out who the leader is/not figuring it out, taking down the organization/not taking it down, and surviving/dying. I'm actually really excited fro this one because it's less story-focused and more dialogue-focused, with interviews and conversations being the heart of the game.

By the way - if you haven't checked it out already, the most recent issue of Scrittorio Magazine had a lot of great stuff about Interactive Fiction, so you should definitely check that out!

Final Thoughts... and Concerns

I've been focusing mainly on story and not so much on mechanics so far, mainly because I don't feel much like coding and testing. I'm jumping from project to project. I finish a game's introduction, where these mechanics aren't being used, and as soon as I reach a point in the game where the mechanics do come into play, I'll skip to the next game on the list and work on its introduction, and so on...

I know, I know - I really shouldn't leave that till later. It needs to be built into the game from the start. There's no way through it but through it, I guess. 

It should be really simple: Do I want to make these games? YES! So what's stopping me from putting in the work that they need in order to be good?

To be honest, it's still a bit hard for me to type. I'm trying, but I get tired very quickly. But at least when I'm writing a story or a blog post, I can write quickly. With code, it's a little slower. Numbers, symbols, labels, tags, etc. More opportunity for the discomfort to kick in, you know? And I have to Google stuff because I'm not an expert, and constantly need to test things because sometimes the tips online are out of date, and etc. etc. etc....  

So, while I do want to make these games, and I am working on them, the truth of the matter is that the pain and discomfort has been... a repellent. 

I'll keep going at it, but I really hope that a week, two weeks, a month from now, I'll actually have good news of progress to share with you. I really, really, really hope so.