I had never used Twine before I made this choose your own adventure game but it reminded me of a game I used to play on the old iMac computers back in my elementary school. The game was called Hypercard and although it was not connected to the internet (I don’t think we had the internet on our school computers yet) it was based on the idea of hypertext. The game had you create stacks of cards and you were able to link card together. I remember I made a presentation on Canadian explorers using the program, I believe the year would have been 1995. Twine has a similar feel, it is very paired down and simple to use.
My strategy was to go for a fun sort of dark comedy. I wanted to make the game easy to follow and short enough that you might be willing to go through all of the possibilities. There are many dead ends that lead back to starting over if you like in order to give you a chance to select a different path. If I had more time to dedicate to this game I would have loved to find a way for your “money” or “distance traveled” to be tracked a long the way.
I found little difficulty creating the links and I enjoyed the challenge of adding images. I ended up drawing all of my images on paper and uploading the images to imgur in order to host then. Imgur also has the added bonus of supplying the code for the image in whatever size you like. I wanted to include music but I was worried about copyright so instead I included lyrics, hoping maybe the user would hum the tune to themselves when they read the words.
I tried playing through my story and I was happy that I didn’t have any dead links. While it isn’t the most creative story (I think you will find that it is remarkably similar to Oregon trail) it does have a touch of imagination. I think these kinds of “old school” basic platforms have the advantage of showing you really how complex and intricate any modern game really is. I found it a fun challenge and I could potentially see the benefits of Twine for a fun class project with some of my more gifted students, those who often finish exercises early and might be curious about coding. Wild Wild West.html
DeirdreDagar
February 11, 2021 — 12:06
That was a lot of fun. I don’t mind having the ear worm stuck in my head at the end either. Rich Girl is a bop!
Did you create the visuals yourself too?
olivia marin
February 11, 2021 — 13:29
I did create the visuals myself, I didn’t want to run into any copy write issues and it seemed like an easy way to make it more dynamic. Thanks for the positive feedback