Twine reminded me of the Goosebumps books I used to read as a child. It was always exciting to be able to “choose your own adventure” and see what different endings you could have. It is definitely harder than I thought to actually create your own. I enjoyed the combination of storyboarding and coding and definitely see myself trying this with my students. The hardest part was thinking about what to do the “game” about, but since it is almost Halloween (and continuing the Goosebumps idea) I decided to go for a bit of a spooky feel. My husband and I bounced ideas off each other in regards to the plot of the story and what I wanted to happen. There were a few main things I noticed in the process:

• There was no option to “undo” something. I found this to be a bit of a challenge, I would test something that didn’t work and am so used to being able to just hit undo but instead I had to go back in and edit whatever I had done.
• I would search for tutorials or “how to” as I went when I wanted to do something, for example – how to add a photo. I learned the code <img src=”LINK” /> which enabled me to do so. I thought it helped to add to the story to add some images to set the scene.
• I found that learning the keyboard shortcuts was easier, for example adding links to just use the square brackets instead of utilizing the “link” button.
• I tried some of the other story formats but noted that some of them were definitely more advanced than my understanding so I stuck with the standard one.
• The main frustration I had was trying to figure out how to create a link that went to another option within my story. For example, when you went through the green door you ended up in the foyer but I also wanted to have the path from the front door join up. I never was able to find out how to make these connections but in the process of trying, I discovered other features such as text animation.

Overall it was a fun process and I could see how it could quickly snowball into quite an involved adventure so I tried not to get too big too quick. I hope you enjoy it and good luck!

Rickly’s Manor