When deciding the best way to return to the site after nearly a month away (I was in England for a week and a half, and there was some other travel in there too. England was lovely as ever, in case you were curious, and Wales remains near and dear to me in a way that few other places could ever hope to be. I even had nice weather!), I figured something new should mark my glorious return, so here we are.

I woke up in my Aberystwyth hotel room one morning with the idea for a game, or at least the beginnings of one, and having no programming knowledge beyond the year of Java and year of C++ I took in high school that were both mostly just excuses to play Quake deathmatches with friends, I figured I needed something easy to start with to get the skeleton of the idea down.

Twine's been getting a lot of attention these days, in that it has allowed tons of people to make super-interesting pieces of interactive fiction, and some have been games, and all of them have got plenty of people whining about how they don't think they're really games but fuck those people.

Twine 2 released...not too terribly long ago (maybe earlier in the year?), and I'd bookmarked the site with the intention of checking everything out at some point when I found the time. Which I found, as it happens, on a Monday in Aberystwyth. Once I had the initial idea down, I spent the remainder of the week picking at it, and today I put the finishing touches on what is, basically, the beginning of a possible game thing. I like the idea of a game like this, so I made one (or the beginnings of one, anyway), and it took about a week to do so. That alone makes Twine a neat thing, if you ask me.

The programming part of Twine is basically knowing how to create links to other sections, which you can get the hang of pretty quickly. You can also create text and sections that only show up once particular variables have been tripped, but that was slightly more involved than I was willing to get for a brief experiment (also I didn't think to make anything dependent on variables until much later, and by then I didn't feel like going back to re-work everything to implement it, although I might later?).

Oh, yeah. You can play my game here. It's not long and ends... abruptly, with me telling you it's over because it was only meant to be an experiment. I am tempted to put more planning into it and continue things, but for now it's a good little experiment.

One last word of warning: Under no circumstances attempt to use Twine's web interface in Internet Explorer. I was on my work laptop when I started, which only has IE, and it was a fucking nightmare to work in. Changes were not always saved, the cursor wasn't in the right position, and anyway IE is a piece of garbage anyway--but you knew that already.

EDIT: I should probably link to Twine 2.0 too, huh? You can find it here.