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Patrick R

[Dev Log] What Happened To Us - a Twine game

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So I figure I could track my progress for my Twine game, What Happened To Us, here. I kind of want where it goes narratively to be a surprise, so I won't be revealing everything, but so far I've...

 

  • Scoped the game.
  • Have written the outline of the story.
  • Have written approximately half of the actual game text.
  • Have decided on where and how the paths will branch.

Technically this game will have 40 endings, but the nature of it's second half means that it's more about the player having the option to express themselves in a total of 40 different ways, as opposed to the story actually ending in 40 different directions.

 

What I still need to do:
 

  • Finish writing the text.
  • Learn how to change background and text color in Twine.
  • Learn how to track variables in Twine.
  • Learn how to play audio files in Twine.
  • Learn how to set timers (if that's possible?) in Twine.
  • Write and record 40 different pieces of music.
  • Record approximately 48 other smaller bits of audio.
  • Edit an additional 11 bits of audio.

I'm glad I was able to scope and outline the game so quickly because the real challenge will definitely be on the creative side. The pieces of music I'm going to be writing will be simple, rough and quick. They will be lo-fi one-track recordings of just me and my guitar on my laptop mic, which is demanded by the narrative (and will make the recording process much quicker). But still, 40 pieces of music is a lot in two weeks.

 

I imagine this will end up being much more complicated than I think, so I'll probably be asking for advice or help regularly, particularly on the programming side of things.

 

But my first question is actually a smaller creative one: this is a fairly serious-minded game about two gay men breaking up. If I were to name the two men Jake and Sean (as they are actually whom the episode title "What Happened To Us" is referring to) would that be cool or would it be distracting and come off like Idle Thumbs slash-fic?

 

There's no sex in the game either way, so it'd just be a nod.

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Fortunately, the Twine side stuff of this should be fairly simple to handle. Twine tracks variables automatically, you just need to set them once and can call them at any later point in the story (keep in mind though that when you test play from later passages, you might skip the passage where you originally set a variable, and that might cause issues).

 

The background and color things will take some messing with stylesheets. You can probably find the right selector somewhere in that list and then cobble together what you need specifically with a bit of googling, at least that's how I usually do it.

 

I'm not sure how to do audio (except that it's definitely possible) but this or this might help.

 

You can set timers in Twine! Depending on what you want, the timedreplace or timedgoto macros could be helpful here. The former is for adding or changing text on the passage you're already on, the latter for moving you to a new passage.

 

Good luck spinning that yarn!

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But my first question is actually a smaller creative one: this is a fairly serious-minded game about two gay men breaking up. If I were to name the two men Jake and Sean (as they are actually whom the episode title "What Happened To Us" is referring to) would that be cool or would it be distracting and come off like Idle Thumbs slash-fic?

 

You could call them Jacob and Shaun and then it's more of a reference than slash-fic.  ¯\_()_/¯

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I think if you just edit your original post you can change the topic title.

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So I have my game scheduled out. I'm going to write 3 pieces of music a day, each recorded two different ways, for a total of 6 recordings a day. This should have me finishing the music for the game in a week. That's of the utmost importance because it'll likely be the hardest and time consuming part of the job. 

 

Concurrently, I need to do the rest of the game. So the schedule for the rest of the jam right now is:

Day 3 (Today)
* Write 3 pieces

* Record each twice

* Continue working on game text

 

Day 4
* Write 3 pieces

* Record each twice

* Record all additional audio

 

Day 5

* Write 3 pieces

* Record each twice

* Finish game text

 

Day 6

* Write 3 pieces

* Record each twice

* Implement Background/text color changes

 

Day 7

* Write 3 pieces

* Record each twice

* Implement variable tracking for ending

 

Day 8

* Write 3 pieces

* Record each twice

* Implement Timers

 

Day 9 

* Write final 2 pieces

* Record each twice

* Being Implementing audio

 

Day 10
* Continue implementing audio

 

Day 11
* Finish implementing audio

* Play-testing

 

Which should give me 2 days wiggle room, in case I go over-schedule. Which I probably will.

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I've decided to rescope the game, which will lead to 20 different endings instead of 40. The game ends with the player "writing a song" and originally the idea was that the player chooses three chords (from a list of six) and whether they want the song to be fast or slow. I figured giving a binary (fast or slow) control of tempo would be a reasonably easy way to double the amount of possible outcomes (since it wouldn't increase the number of songs I had to write), which in turn would make the experience more impressive and personal to the player.

 

But what I've found is that it's really hard to write a song that sounds equally good fast and slow. A lot of the songs I've already written sound terrible if they're any faster/slower, and I'd rather have the player have less possible outcomes if it means that there's less chance for them to be really disappointed by how their song comes out.

 

Also, the way I scheduled the game turns out to make no sense because until I write all the songs I can't really write good text about the songs. So right now the priority is writing the music and figuring out the technical side and then writing the text once it can reflect the music properly.

 

Also also, on a dev side, I've decided that I'd rather have people play my game and give me advice for the final product that "surprise" everyone, so I'll just upload builds.

 

Here's the first build.

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-I'm really looking forward to the audio being implimented.

-The character that "you" refers to seem to change abruptly and it was confusing. This is because I assumed that it was a CD they had made for me. If it's clarified that you gave them the CD early, this is not an issue.

-I wasn't sure if my choice to not keep the CD was registered. It kinda sounded like I was reading text that said I was keeping it. Maybe if I put it into something that I was obviously returning, this wouldn't be the case.

-The "pregnant pause" and "abortive 'Take Care'" comes off as an attempt to sound clever rather than as a corroborated metaphor. As a comparison, the dubbed videotape simile is expressive because it makes me think that the character thinks of things in terms of their own hobbies and vhs-collection fits with how I imagine the character.

-"or the time you wasted trying to learn the names of the characters on Babylon 5" is particularly good.

I like thinking that it is wasted time only because they are no longer together.

 

I'm anxious to see how the music works into this.

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1. The character that "you" refers to seem to change abruptly and it was confusing. This is because I assumed that it was a CD they had made for me. If it's clarified that you gave them the CD early, this is not an issue.

2. The "pregnant pause" and "abortive 'Take Care'" comes off as an attempt to sound clever rather than as a corroborated metaphor. As a comparison, the dubbed videotape simile is expressive because it makes me think that the character thinks of things in terms of their own hobbies and vhs-collection fits with how I imagine the character.

3. I wasn't sure if my choice to not keep the CD was registered. It kinda sounded like I was reading text that said I was keeping it. Maybe if I put it into something that I was obviously returning, this wouldn't be the case.

 

 

1. You are the same character the whole time but I need there to explain a reason that a mix CD you made for the other person is at your place. Or I need to find another way to trigger your character thinking about the mix CD.

 

2. It was an attempt to sound clever! Thank you for calling me out on it or I could have potentially left it in. Newer drafts are much less melodramatic. The past few days I've reframed the narrative to be less about the tragedy of break-ups to the more specific way that the arc of relationships follows an atrophy of momentum. Less generically mopey, more specific = good.

 

3. The decision to keep the CD is registered but I hadn't yet figured out how to track variables when I made that build, so the only difference right now is slightly different dialogue (you keep it, it tells you about your character, you put it back it tells you something about your ex's). But you are right that it's not 100% clear that the Hawkeye comic is in the box of your ex's stuff.

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1. You are the same character the whole time but I need there to explain a reason that a mix CD you made for the other person is at your place. Or I need to find another way to trigger your character thinking about the mix CD.

 

I'm not sure you understood what I was saying, I assumed by default that the CD was made by them and that they gave it to me. So when the memory starts, I thought the characters changed. Later, I realized that I had actually made the CD, but this drastically changed the meaning of the decision to keep or pack it.

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I'm not sure you understood what I was saying, I assumed by default that the CD was made by them and that they gave it to me. So when the memory starts, I thought the characters changed. Later, I realized that I had actually made the CD, but this drastically changed the meaning of the decision to keep or pack it.

 

Exactly, that's what I got from your comment the first time. I need a way to trigger the memory that you made a mix CD for them (because that act is the meat of the game) that is less confusing. I'm trying to keep the prose as brief as humanly possible, but an extra sentence when the CD falls out might be helpful. Or maybe a CD doesn't fall out at all, maybe something else falls out that is connected to your memory of that mix CD.

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One of the locations of the store I work at is closing, so I'm picking up a ton of extra shifts at work, so I don't think I'm gonna finish this by the deadline. I'm hoping I can, I have Wednesday and Thursday off, so maybe I can crunch on those days. But I probably won't finish this until a little later.

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We won't be able to play them all on the weekend the jam ends anyway. I'm looking forward to it.

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Well the timing turned out to be quite unfortunate, as I picked up a lot of extra shifts at work and the free days I thought I'd have to work on the game shrunk from six to one. So I spent the one day I did have (today) throwing together a rough draft of the game to give people an idea of what to expect.

 

Sadly most of the time I've sunk into this game has been musical and very little of that is in this rough draft. I think it'll be a pretty good game when it's done, but right now it's just incomplete. I'll probably end up finishing it in a different program, like TyranoBuilder.

 

You can play it here and check out the Wizard Jam page here.

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I used to listen to stuff like this all the time 10 years ago. It's really neat having a narrative leading you through a mixtape and acknowledging significance of particular tracks. 

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So as I continue to work on this should I start a new thread in the general Game Development sub-forum or just keep updating this? Probably just keep updating this.

 

I've uploaded the demos I've recorded so far to SoundCloud, so you can an idea of what the final songs will be like. None of the lyrics are final, they're mostly just gibberish I improvised to try out different vocal melodies. I'm pretty happy with how they've turned out, as far as not all sounding the exact same. Some songs are definitely better than others, but some sets of chords are extremely hard to write songs around. You can definitely tell I was stretching to pull anything out of F F#m G.

 

But the plan right now is to write all the songs and then work backwards and record a 40 second clip for each that sounds like your character piecing a rough approximation of the song together. Then I give you the option of going ahead and choosing that or going back and choosing a new set of three chords. That way even people who know nothing about music can still feel like they are making an informed decision as to how the final song will sound.

 

So right now the plan is to finish prototyping the game in Twine with SoundCloud links, finish the other 6 songs I need to write, go back and write lyrics for all 20 songs, then start to rebuild the game in TyranoBuilder.

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I love the idea and the demos have come out well. I'm really interested to see how the piecing together would work.

Looking forward to seeing where this goes.

 

The story caught me pretty quickly. My only criticism would be the layout of the links/text snippets, many of them worked well but I found it a bit confusing at times to understand what each link was for. I'm in two mind about the very small amount of text on screen at one time, on the one hand it made it very bite-size but I think I would have been happy to sink my teeth into slightly larger chunks at a time (to stretch the eating analogy).

 

I'd like to see what others took from it, I may be out in the weeds.

 

All in all a great job :)

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 I started playing through this with my girlfriend at my side. It got to be a bit much for us emotionally to experience together, so we stopped. That's a complement. I think your writing is very effective. I think moving this over to TyrannoBuilder or whatever is a great idea. You seem to have spent some time crafting more design than most twine games, with respect to text's letter by letter effect, and the background colour changing. I'd really love to see what this turns in to with a more robust tool. Good work, keep it up please!

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I love the idea and the demos have come out well. I'm really interested to see how the piecing together would work.

Looking forward to seeing where this goes.

 

The story caught me pretty quickly. My only criticism would be the layout of the links/text snippets, many of them worked well but I found it a bit confusing at times to understand what each link was for. I'm in two mind about the very small amount of text on screen at one time, on the one hand it made it very bite-size but I think I would have been happy to sink my teeth into slightly larger chunks at a time (to stretch the eating analogy).

 

I'd like to see what others took from it, I may be out in the weeds.

 

All in all a great job :)

 

It's a very linear game, as hard as I tried to insert little tiny bits of branching material here and there, so most links are just to move the story forward. I think I'm going to keep the size of individual pages roughly the same because 

 

1) I personally find it hard to focus on Twine games when they just drop paragraphs of text.

2) I'm actually a pretty poor writer of prose, and keeping things brief and fragmentary helps hide that significantly.

3) The whole thing is based on ideas of memory I got from The Sense of an Ending, and how you can jump in and out of reminiscing, in and out of present and past tense, how one memory can make you leap to the next. Hence the format: White text on black background for present tense, black text on white background for past tense, and light grey text on dark grey background for idle thoughts and ruminations that don't fit in either.

 

Basically the whole thing is ripping off Annie Hall's structure (which in turn was a ripping off 8 1/2, and was ripped off to varying extents by Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and 500 Days of Summer, so I'm in pretty good company), but with a mix-tape to give the progression of memories a more rigid skeleton.

 

I will probably have pages with longer bits of text as the game goes on, but I think in general it will stay quite terse.

 I started playing through this with my girlfriend at my side. It got to be a bit much for us emotionally to experience together, so we stopped. That's a complement. I think your writing is very effective. I think moving this over to TyrannoBuilder or whatever is a great idea. You seem to have spent some time crafting more design than most twine games, with respect to text's letter by letter effect, and the background colour changing. I'd really love to see what this turns in to with a more robust tool. Good work, keep it up please!

 

I'm sorry if I made you and your girlfriend uncomfortable! But also maybe a little pleased. Mostly sorry!

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I'm glad it was a concious style choice to go short. I did like how digestible it was in that form in general, just maybe a few times I found myself getting dropped out of the flow. Anyway, I wanted to try and give some kind of experiential feedback, I hope there's something useful in there somewhere. :D

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I'm glad it was a concious style choice to go short. I did like how digestible it was in that form in general, just maybe a few times I found myself getting dropped out of the flow. Anyway, I wanted to try and give some kind of experiential feedback, I hope there's something useful in there somewhere. :D

Yeah, absolutely, I really appreciate it.

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