When creating the twine story, I aimed to connect with the player. I was inspired by this party trick/joke/conversation starter I enjoy. I don’t know its origins or if it’s based on any theories, or where I even got it from, but I’ve been reciting it for decades. It seems to entertain and most of the time people relate to it. The original joke has funny more questions, but I chose to remove them to give the game a mysterious feel.
Achieving this feel was very challenging: I am new to Twine and any form of coding and tagging. I had to change my “wysiwyg” (what you see is what you get), mindset and learn how to enter text precisely to obtain design elements. I was too far in by the time I realized it was ambitious and I would be limited creatively.
After perusing Twine basics, I needed to understand how to work with open-ended answers and variables; these were important in creating a tailored experience for the user. This was a challenge in itself as rather than instructions, I find it easier to reverse-engineer an example similar to mine. I was grateful to find forums for Twine users which could provide these. This was evocative to Engelbart’s belief that “a community of users… collaborated in pilot trials and lessons learned that then fed back into future requirements of the evolving processes and tools (paras. 4–5).”
Another major and very time-consuming hurdle was achieving that mysterious feel with limited images. Besides actual wording, It had to be done using the text variables: style, font, colour. As stated by Bolter (2001):
Like computer icons, medieval illuminated letters functioned simultaneously as text and picture… Medieval illumination embodied a dialectic between writing and the visual world; it was a means by which writing could describe or circumscribe the world— not symbolically through language, but visually through the shape of the letter itself (p.65)
After many hours and failed attempts, I gave up on trying to add google fonts to the style sheet. By incorporating colour, style and spacing via Harlowe, I somewhat achieved the “dark” feel I was aiming for. I hope this feeling is conveyed via text and engages the player.
Let me tell you who you are (1)
References
Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing Space. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781410600110
A Lifetime Pursuit – Doug Engelbart Institute. (n.d.). Www.dougengelbart.org. Retrieved October 18, 2021, from https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/183/153/