Untitled Space Game: Dev Diary 2

I decided to go with Twine because it's (fairly) easy to pick up, and it reminds me of making way too many text adventures in BASIC on a Commodore +4. I knew going in that it was (in theory) mainly designed for interactive fiction, and you had to sort of bash things into shape in another direction if you wanted to make a game - or at least something people more readily associate with a game.

First time around, I just couldn't work out how to make it do what I wanted.

When I returned, there were now multiple versions galore. The default version, Harlowe, seemed to have more features. I just sort of vaguely assumed it would now be very easy to add additional elements like audio and visuals.

Whoops.

As it happens, I realised about 40 locations deep that actually I should probably be using the version called Sugarcube. Why search desperately for code that allows me to save and load games, which may not even work anymore, if it does this in Sugarcube by default? Why struggle with audio, and install a HAL mod to somewhat give Harlowe a kind of parity with Sugarcube, when I can just use Sugarcube?

Surely it'll be easy to load up my Harlowe penned game into Sugarcube and carry on as normal?

Ah. Well. Nevertheless,


It turns out that lots of Reddit threads told me no, I would not be able to do this. Disaster incoming, all that fun stuff.

Thankfully I'd just sketched out locations, had basic links between passages (essentially the "rooms" of your game), and hadn't added in any custom CSS or JavaScript at all beyond some background colours and hiding the side bar.

Which broke, but it didn't take long to fix.

Trying to figure out Sugarcube was a whole new ballgame. It's designed to make your narrative fiction a bit more gamey. With this in mind, it should be plain sailing from here on in, right?

Ah. Well. Nevertheless,

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