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Reflection
This was a really fun activity for me. As someone who has experience with programming, I was excited to try out this new tool and see what I could be able to make it do! My approach for this task was to make a dungeons & dragons-style encounter where they player “rolls a dice” to determine the outcome of their decisions. I thought that this would be a great way to leverage the abilities of using a digital platform. Although there were pictures in The Temple of No, I wanted to pay homage to the retro text-based games while focusing on immersing the player in the narrative. As a dungeon master – I felt like I wanted the story to stand on its own without the help of visual aids, and this is the result of that decision.
In exchange, I implemented more complex logic and made used of multiple variables, and spent a bit less time on the colors and visuals. Even after spending hours creating and testing this Twine, I still enjoyed playing it from start to finish.
I think that Twine is great at pushing the limits of how we can use text to communicate. For example, the animations are a really effective way of communicating context and emotion, and the color and weight can also add additional information for the reader. I found that this reminded me of Cinelli’s (2020) proposal for additional punctuation and visual inflection. These animations allow us to add this sort of inflection to the writing, which greatly assists the reader in connecting with the text.
References
Cinelli, M. (2020). Speculative characters for visual inflection. Core77 Design Awards. https://designawards.core77.com/speculative-design/94899/Speculative-Characters-for-Visual-Inflection.html