Devlog : Using Twine and the Story Idea

Oftentimes when I think of narrative games I picture big lore packed games that involve lots of playtime. Obviously, those games take many years to develop and I only have 3 weeks to complete this game. Our class was shown the open source tool - Twine - and after gaining some understanding on how it works, I decided to use it for this game.  Compared to other tools we have used to make games Twine was way more easy to understand which made it simpler to start on the game . 

After thinking for a while on what sort of story to do I decided against choosing from ideas I had thought long about and instead go with something created right on the spot. Since the prearranged layout of the document/game is very basic, like a notes page, I wanted to somewhat lead into that idea. At first it would seem simple, boring, and basic but then further on in it would turn into something more interesting in terms of both visuals and narrative. 

I liked the idea that to maybe any person who'd look at the game would believe it's a test to see if a mechanic works for a bigger project that has yet to be released. This is how I came to the idea of just naming this game "Game Test". As I started to think on it more I began to write the story as if you were selected to test a game that was still in development and needed help with finding multiple bugs.

At first, I did want to make this game not have that many pathways, but as I continued to write I realized it would probably be more enjoyable if you could fail easily at getting the "better ending" and also have more of a choice on your end rather than being swayed into one. I also added a bit of morse code to play into that kind of tricky part and make the player more involved and reflect on their actions. Hopefully it will catch on after a bit of time as I don't wish to make the kind of game where you get fed up and quit. Some of the morse code is just some bonus reading for fun anyway. 

To end, I just want to say that so far Twine has been pretty enjoyable to use and making branches/pathways to lead into the next part of the story is so nice and easy to use. I really would have liked to have been introduced into this tool or discovered it earlier because for someone who wants to just begin and make the most basic (narrative) game it feels like a really good place to learn and start. 

Bonus:  Twine also just seems super helpful if you have a bigger adventure-like game with a branching narrative and just want to get the story down so I might use it later on for that.