Postmortem

When starting this game I believed that creating it and actually making it come to life would be a more trying process but I would say that was the smoothest thing. Getting into Twine and starting to write and create pathways went better than I had expected. Twine very much helped with it being easy to run and understand how to start working it. The idea for the game thankfully came very quickly after deciding against using narrative game ideas I already had since those would likely be way too long to write in such a short amount of time. I decided to use Twine’s basic look for the story and use that, making it play into my story.

I would say that there are a few more things that went wrong than right. I did want to make a simple story from the beginning but as I continued thinking and developing the idea I realized that it was starting to become more complex than I wanted it to be. I did fall a bit behind on when I had planned to write due to working on other projects. There were some important endings that I really wanted to add but didn't have the time to so for now the game is incomplete.  If I'm able to I would like the chance to be able to include them later on. I realize now that I should have planned out the idea more than just the few lines I had written down for the main parts. In the next time I make a narrative game I would instead break down the story into smaller pieces. I was worried that by planning it out too much I would fall further behind on really getting started to write so I did rush that process a bit. I think by now understanding the pathways and getting a visual on how my story branched out I could make myself a visual graph with bullet note details on how I’ll get from point A to B. Filling out the in-betweens rather than just the ideas for beginning and end would have helped. I also had wanted to put at least a few visuals and draw them up but that fell to last priority and ended up being unfilled. If I wish to add my own visuals next time I could draw up some thumbnails as I create the narrative’s visual graph. My final issue was that towards the end of development, Twine was no longer letting me test or play my game on my laptop so it was difficult to tell if the link towards the next path was working or not. I will likely continue to look into this issue to get it fixed.

Twine was very interesting to use and learn. I liked the simplicity for what you could start off with and how from that point on you could develop it into something greater. Most other tools/engines feel difficult to wrap your head around at first and I find that you have to dive into various videos or tutorials for information just to start. With Twine it was simple to do that and made the process more enjoyable, allowing me to focus on what I really wanted to do which was just a basic narrative game. Had it been any other tool/engine I would have likely had to do more coding or workaround which would delay the writing process. Yes, there was some coding but it was just one line. Which was to remove the back button so the player must return back to the start rather than being able to undo their action. Yet, how to do this was easily found just by relying on others’ solutions with Twine. I had intended to also use the Story Stylesheet to center images but I was making it more complex than it was meant to be. In the end it used Twine’s alignment tool a lot to make the storytelling more understandable in terms of thought vs. text in game/program. Overall, as I mentioned in my devlog, I believe I will be using Twine again later on for help on other projects and maybe in the process continue to learn it so I could make some more games within it that are more visually appealing.