• 5 years ago
• Posted in:Tasks
• 2
• Author: angela beckett

Click here to play my Halloween themed Twine game!

Reflection

The strategy I followed to tackle this task and the creation process was pretty chaotic. I have never used Twine, but I have heard of it and I have seen finished Twines before; this led me to feel fairly confident that I could easily figure it out. I went to the website and opened up a new storyboard and began to play around with the basic options.

I started out thinking that I had a strategy in mind, which was organization first. I created fifteen passages and lined them up like this:

I also initially thought I would have 3 versions of the story, where in the first passage you choose to be a witch, zombie, or cow. I skipped ahead to the ending and created 3 different final scenes and thought I would work backwards; however, I then realized that I would essentially need to create 3 entire stories. If there was a way to use shortcuts and have one main story with only the words witch, zombie, or cow replaced throughout (depending on what your initial choice was), I couldn’t figure it out and I didn’t have the time.

You could divide my process into four different stages:

2:30 – 4:30

Set up 15 blank passages, drag them into an S shape so my linking arrows won’t be criss-crossed, write the opening scene and the ending scene, start to work on the set-up passages (# 3-5), realize my skills are so limited that my final product will look nothing like the “The Temple of No”, drastically scale down my expectations, fiddle around with how to make clickable text more interesting than just taking you from one screen to the next, visit a lot of ‘how-to’ websites to try and learn some coding skills, get intimidate by the coding language and decide to stick to the very basic of the basics, realize I’ve somehow been at this for two hours already and am just starting on passage 5?!?!

4:30 – 5:15

Abandon all hope of creating something ‘good’, tell myself to work faster or I could easily be at this for 10+ hours, finish passage 5 and move onto finish passage 6 and 7, decide I’m in a groove and should try to insert an image now, read a ton of confusing ‘how-to’ websites and watch some YouTube clips, think I figured it out, entered the code into passage 8, test out passage 8 to see if the image appears, Twine suddenly freezes and my browser window goes completely blank, internally freak-out as I realize I haven’t hit the “Archive” button yet, everything is still frozen and I can’t click on anything, refuse to restart the computer out of fear, pray to all the Gods for pity, laptop fan goes into freak-out mode and heats up the device to infernal temperatures, 20 minutes later the laptop cools down and the Twine web-page reloads, immediately delete the passage that contained the image code, hit the “Archive” button.

5:15 – 6:00

Speed through the rest of the story creation, go back and edit some of the earlier passages now that I’ve got the hang of things more, recognize that “The Temple of No” is seriously AMAZING now that I understand how difficult it is to actually code on Twine, and accept that my story will have no sound, no art, and not be anywhere near as fluid as “The Temple of No”, feel my self-confidence take a hit when I realize I’m not as smart as I think I am.

6:00 – 6:30

Publish file to HTML, attempt to convert this into a .zip file by reading a ton of confusing ‘how-to’ websites, try a free file conversion website, successfully create a .zip folder, realize the HTML file within the .zip folder still doesn’t work when you open it, get frustrated and post a “help” question to Canvas, finally find a helpful ‘how-to’ website and create a free itch.io account, success!