The Spring Thing has been going since last week, it has tons of cool IF works including mine named Evita Sempai about a woman who falls in love with Eva Perón. I made the game in Twine, it was a joy to prototype, but hell to polish because Twine it’s not programmer friendly. This translates to a system that just flows with anything text related and gets really cluttered when you add code and css stylesheets in your passage.
I will probably move to something like Twee2 or Raconteur. Twee2 seems like the smaller leap from my current workflow, but hasn’t been updated in a while, so I might make a fork and improve upon it. Twee2 is also what will make the slow going translation of Evita Sempai into Spanish a little easier, I wish I had found before I was done with the game.
I did a good work with story layout, feedback implementation and scopes, but I wrongly assumed that if any player didn’t catch the historical bits of the game, I could make them care enough to google the things they missed. I failed in that respect, but as Emily Short points out in her review, you can still understand what’s going on in the general sense. I feel like it was a solid piece and I’m planning to incorporate all the feedback that I got into future games.
After my experience with Twine I want to give you two valuable pieces of technical advice. The first is about character escaping. The “" suppresses line breaks, this means you can write any function as follows while the text only takes one line of space:
(live: 2s)[\
This trick makes the code easier to read while keeping
a decent format in the final story.
]
The second tip is about css, you can use tags to add a css class in your passage without creating divs. This thread on the twine forums gives a detailed explanation and contains code examples. While the example covers the ’.html’ class, you can also apply the technique to other classes.
Finally, I recommend that you play the works at the Spring Thing and do some ribbon nominations of your favorites. I still have a ton to play.
You will hear from me again after Ludum Dare is over and Evita Sempai is fully translated. In the meantime you can head over to mata.juegos and read what me and my friends think about videogames.