The Dragon, the Princess, and the Gold.html

I’ll relate how I created the game first and then reflect on how the ideas in the unit provided insight into the process. The requirements of the task were the starting point as I knew I needed a minimum of 15 screens. Also, to add interest and to experiment with Twine’s features, the protagonist needed to make some decisions so I added places for branching in the plot. As preparation, I outlined this on paper with 15 boxes and labels like a storyboard. My plan was to fit the story into this structure, so the next step was to think of a story. I decided on a very simple plot and one character as I wasn’t sure if there would be technical or other problems with Twine and I wanted this part to be stress-free. I sketched the story out on paper in the boxes and then started setting it up with the program. Everything went fine for about a third of the story but I found that, as I saw how easy Twine was to use, I relaxed and starting modifying the story to make it a bit more fun. This occurred at the point where the protagonist started to make decisions. I soon found my original diagram didn’t reflect the new story so I just discarded it and starting improvising. When I had a first draft finished, I went back and started editing the text to improve it. This was fine for monologue and exposition but then I changed some of the bracketed text and found this broke the link with the next passage and created an entirely new one, so I had to figure out how to fix this which turned out to be quite simple. There were a couple of other minor problems, but after about half an hour or so, I was satisfied with the result. The next step would have been to add audio/visuals but I didn’t go any further.

I expected my pre-built little diagram would contain the story but it soon became clear the story would have a life of its own. This happens with all creative writing but textual linking  facilitates it by removing the necessity for a single fixed ending. The story can grow organically in many directions, diverging and converging as the whim of the author or the internal logic of the plot itself dictates. These stories are non-linear and can have multiple paths and conclusions depending on which route the reader takes through them. I also found that the further a strand of the story progressed in a certain direction the less willing I was to change it, even if I wasn’t entirely satisfied, because I didn’t want to rewrite the whole development arc. As a result, some of the endings were unexpected even to me, so in this sense, the linked structure of the story actually deterred me from making changes.

Although greater familiarity with the program would have largely overcome this practical difficulty, the larger point is that a series of linked elements becomes in itself an element with its own meaning and integrity. The fluid linking among textual elements to create relationships is what Bolter has called “the rhetoric of hypertext”. (Bolter, 2001) This illustrates that technology that uses associative linking to impose structure will not only create a product that reflects this but will also define the design process itself.

Reference

1. Bolter, Jay David. (2001). Writing space: computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. New York, NY: Routledge.