Title: Will You Have Time for Your Assignment Today?

Inspiration: This is based on my life every day, juggling work, kids, family, and study. I can so relate to this interactive story because my life is full of making choices to complete my daily tasks successfully. There is also a true bitter lesson at the end of the game if you fail at completing the assignment.

Goal: To make time to work on your assignment and complete it today so you can spend the weekend with your family.

Reflection: I had a whole week to complete this task, creating an interactive game using Twine, but I really procrastinated on starting this assignment this week because creating an interactive game using an unfamiliar program was very intimidating. I did not feel confident and I had to read several introductory how-to tutorials on the web. I also browsed through many interactive fictions created by Twines as examples to get a good sense of expectations of this week’s task. These are my “excuses” for dragging myself until this weekend to do the assignment, but to be honest, I was too intimidated that my game would be too simple and silly compared to those games that I found on the Internet.

Okay, so here is me sitting at a table and jotting down a story line. As I normally write a rough work on paper first before start writing, I started brainstorming the big ideas using flowcharts on a notebook. Once I decided the start, choices, and the end, I started creating the story on Twine, carefully following the step-by-step manual. Creating screens, linking them using hypertexts and manipulating functions were not as complicated as I had thought they would be.

While completing the task, I have found a few things that could be improved.

• Spell checker was not available on Twine. I noticed several typos when executed the game and I had to edit, re-save, re-upload the file on an external website, and then re-embed the link on my blog numerous times. If I had to create another Twine game, I would create a flowchart on MS Word and then copy and past the text on Twine to save time for spellchecking.
• Word counter on Twine would be helpful to display the text on the Twine game screen. When testing my game, I noticed several pages were not displaying the full text. Some hyperlinks were not displayed on the screen because of word count limit, so the game could not be continued to the next page. To resolve this problem, I divided the long text into two pages using a hyperlink such as “Next Page” and I think that it also helps players follow the story easier, not overwhelming them with too much text to read on one page.
• Twine is case sensitive so if I use the words “You” and “you” then they will not link to the same page. I do not think that it is something the program needs to improve, but it is something that Twine users need to be careful. Make sure to double check your links.

Overall, I really enjoyed this week’s challenges in learning to use Twine. I just wish that I had more time to make the game more complex and learn to modify the appearance of the game. And again, stop procrastinating for the next week’s task!