No Time To Play
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Weekly Links #119

You know the saying, in science no experiment is a failed experiment. So I'll chalk up my little adventure in CYOA writing to a learning experience. You see, I had this story idea rattling around in my head for a while now, but it was too weak to work in static fiction. But I had this notion that games can get away with much weaker stories than books, and meant to try Squiffy anyway. I also had this plan of writing the story in a linear fashion at first, use Squiffy's "continue links" to split it up at key moments, and only then start worrying about choices, flags, alternate text and what not.

How naive of me. Even before I started writing in earnest, I was already thinking in terms of passages and branches. How do people manage to use Twine and still come up with a linear story? A theme was even emerging where the game would offer daring/caution options early on, and that would open and close some alternate paths later, based on which score was higher.

Trouble is, the story didn't work. At all. After three days of barely making any progress, I had to decide it couldn't pull its own weight in any way, shape or form, and interactivity didn't help either. So much for that. Oh well, I'll know better next time.

In related news, as of this writing none of my beta-testers have given any signs of life for a week, so City of Dead Leaves will be a little late. Better than releasing a completely untested version out of impatience, I hope you'll agree.

And now, for the links:

But that's really just a nitpick. Until next time, have fun.