joshunsworth

[joshunsworth]

Making Stuff in Twine 1.4

I spent a lot of the second half of January wrangling with CSS, a necessary aspect of creating my first Twine game 'If Only We Knew'. It was a difficult process as I was learning the tools simultaneously to making the game. However, Twine has proven to be an excellent tool and so I wanted to share some of the useful links that I found along the way.

Twine is an open-source tool for creating interactive fiction and games. Being completely free to download and use, it is also a great way to start creating quickly. Before 'If Only We Knew' I had only ever dabbled in Twine, using it for visualizing choice paths in game narratives.

Despite this I had never really considered making a game in it; writing is not my strongest skill and I wasn't sure how much variety and customization it was possible to achieve.

Then I played Even Cowgirls Bleed by Christine Love and With Those We Love Alive by Porpentine.

These two experiences are wonderfully interesting and really showed me my mistake in dismissing a piece of software so quickly. They made me start thinking about the possibilities of the engine and so, when starting One Game a Month, I decided that my January game would be made using Twine.

Twine has proven to be a surprisingly versatile tool to work with. Just a little bit of fiddling allows a lot of variation away from the default look. There is also a lot of information out there, however it is spread around and can be difficult to find. Here's my attempt to gather just some of it. 

Starting with Twine

This tutorial by Anna Anthropy is a brilliant starting point, walking through the steps of creating your first story and clearly explaining how it works.

The Twine Wiki has a huge amount of information on the different functions and tricks to using it. There is also an extremely helpful FAQ and list of resources.

Functionality with Macros

The majority of useful extensions can be found on the website Glorious Trainwrecks. Macros extend the functionality of Twine, allowing additional feature such as cycling loops, playing sounds and timed transitions. There is a good list of the best macros on the wiki's list of resources.

Designing with CSS

As the passages in a Twine story are webpages, their design and layout is dictated by CSS. Understanding CSS is the easiest way to gain control over how your story looks and feels.

W3Schools and the Mozilla Developer Network are both great starting points for learning CSS, they are very in-depth and use clear and practical examples.

The wiki Stylesheet page has a list of the Twine-specific selectors that you will need to use in editing the layout, as well instructions on how to implement CSS into the story using stylesheets.

This blog post is a nice introduction, whilst this gives some examples and ideas of what can be achieved.

Using Java

Java can be used with Twine to create advanced functionality and effects. This isn't something I have needed to look into yet, however this lesson seems to be a good overview of where to start.

Hopefully this list proves useful. I will aim to keep it updated, so please let me know if there is anything missing that you feel I should add.

[joshunsworth]

20 Essential Tablet Games

A couple of the others were talking about tablet games the other day and how it can be so difficult to find the good ones in the sea of mediocrity and bad UI that is the app store. 

Here I have gathered 20 of the games that I feel are the true stand-outs.

I haven't included games that are ports from PC games just to keep the list down to 20. Also, again for brevity, I attempted to describe each in a sentence (with varying success). 

So, in absolutely no order...

Super Hexagon - 'Retry?'

80 Days - Will have you packing the suitcase.

Ridiculous Fishing - Just ridiculous.

The Room Series - I'm rubbish at these. Pretty boxes though.

Desert Golfing - Hardcore normcore golf.

Kim Kardashian: Hollywood - Loving being a celebrity and hating yourself for it.

Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP - Fascinating adventure with the best soundtrack.

Fotonica - Rush through a wireframe world.

Fingle - Uncomfortably close fun with another player.

Bounden - (Try to) dance like the Dutch National Ballet. Beautiful.

Friendstrap - Proves you didn't know them as well as you thought.

Year Walk - Creepy Swedish wood-walking.

Device 6 - Suave mix of game and thriller literature.

Helix - The most satisfyingly smooth controls ever.

Spelltower - Quickly devolves into guessing and hoping.

Threes - Why do the tiles have faces? Don't trust them.

Luxuria Superbia - The most intimate you'll ever get with your tablet (I hope).

Monument Valley - An architect's mad dream.

Framed - The comic-panel MacGuffin game.

[joshunsworth]

Challenge the Past is 'a multidisciplinary conference for scholars and practitioners who study the implementation and potential of visual and multi-sensory representations to challenge and diversify our understanding of history and culture.' taking place in Gothenburg this March.

The line up is astoundingly varied and interesting, plus, as a bonus, I will be presenting a paper on the Friday morning. This is the first time I have done something like this... should be interesting!