I have a friend, Jennifer Weller who writes incredible stories and I’ve always wanted to collaborate with her on illustrating one of her shorter ones. We’ve toyed with the idea of creating a traditional style kid’s book or even telling a story via a parallax scroller meant for a tablet. She’s had the words done for years, it’s always been an issue of me having other projects on the go and not setting aside enough time to get the visuals done, regardless of format. Cue the Twine Game engine.

Twin allows people to tell interactive stories and simple narrative games with little to no coding, though it does take quite a bit to make it pretty and if you’re not a person who thinks well in flow charts, this still may not be the tool for you. For the digital games class I’m taking with Dr.Emma Westecott, we’ve been asked to develop several different game sketches using different creation platforms and topics. For this particular assignment she wanted us to work with built in Unity assets and focus on game mechanics or use a narrative based game engine like Twine or RenPy for more of a story focus. The catch? The story game/interactive experience had to be based on someone we know.

Jennifer my writer friend and I grew up together in Northern Ontario. I was a bit wild and very fun forward, (and pretty much raised by wolves) and she was a spectacled bookworm, and voice of reason. To this day, the two of us are pretty much the same, except she now worries about me going to Zimbabwe without health insurance and has three girls, though she ends up looking better with each pregnancy; they’ve turned her into a motherhood version of Dorian Grey. I swear, there’s a portrait of her hidden under a stack of Pampers in Thunder Bay somewhere…

All that is to say that a beloved rapscallion (my words) character very similar to me has shown up in a few of her earlier works, including the one I’ve chosen for my Twine game sketch, The Red Button. I actually like to think of this story as the two of our childhood id’s in fictional boy form. So far the narrative game doesn’t do much other than control the metering and pacing of how the text is presented, while the reader controls when to go back or read the next passage. I don’t love how you have to manually input each image in each flow chart box per page, as it is incredible cumbersome if you have 50 pages and simply want to swap a neutral boy’s face for example, with that same image but with raised eyebrows and then go back for the next set of lines.

Given the amount of text I was working with and that I had figured out long term Twine wasn’t for me, I decided not to do much in the way of visuals, which upon researching, I’ve found is a very common way of delivering Twine experiences. It did however, prove to be a useful tool in terms of helping me iterate how I should be breaking up the text and very quickly giving me a feel for just how many pages this would be and the large amount of visual assets I will need to create to flush out this project visually; regardless of whether we go with an online or analogue book experience.

Link to The Red Button narrative “game”: https://webspace.ocad.ca/~3164472/digitalgames/

Screenshot of part of the structure

Custom made avatars of Boy One and Two