Twine task
My Twine task: Journey to Greatview Mountain.html
First, I tried the Temple of No game (Johann & Pugh, 2016) and I was reminded of some of the interactive Netflix shows where you can decide where the story goes. For example, You Vs. Wild (Buchta et al., 2019), the Bear Grylls series where you help navigate and survive the wild. It is almost completely visual, whereas Temple of No relies solely on text. While playing, I was reminded that every option moves you on to another page, or brings you back to the previous one, which helped me think of what I needed to look out for when creating my own Twine.
Next, I thought I would explore the application, map it all out on a paper and then start on Twine. However, I got a little bit carried away with trying out different codes and creating buttons. For the story itself, I was inspired by Jack and the Flumflum tree (Donaldson, 2011) where the main character packs objects they end up using throughout their adventure, and Fortunately (Charlip, 2017), where a man keeps facing alternating fun and disastrous scenarios.
I enjoyed learning as I went. When I faced a problem, I watched parts of the Five College Digital Humanities (2016) video. Later, when I wanted more specific questions answered, I found videos like DigitalExposureTV (2017) where they show you how to change background images. One bigger challenge was to ensure the text was legible. I found that I couldn’t make changes to individual parts of texts that already included coding.
I haven’t had many opportunities to create something like this and it made me think about how quickly new tools are created for us to interact with the technologies around us. It also highlighted what Bush (1945) emphasized about instruments giving us access to unlimited knowledge.
References
Buchta, R., Grylls, B., Shoopman, D., Buckley, D., Grant, C., Owens, H., & Silverman, B. (Executive Producers). (2019). You vs. wild. [TV series]. Bear Grylls Ventures; Electus.
Bush, V. (1945). As we may think. The Atlantic Monthly, 176(1), pp. 101-108. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/
Charlip, R. (2017). Fortunately. Little Simon.
DigitalExposureTV (2017, October 28). Twine 2.0 – How to add background images / Tutorial #11. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2xl9JaGqpM&t=290s
Donaldson, J. (2011). Jack and the flumflum tree. Macmillan Children’s Books.
Five College Digital Humanities (2016, June 30). How to use Twine to make your own text adventure games! [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M41FFlLqu_M
Johann, D., & Pugh, W. (2016.) The temple of no. Crows crows crows. https://crowscrowscrows.itch.io/the-temple-of-no