Happy Pony Valley Riding School
A silly equine Twine
We were a small but perfectly formed group this month as we met to play and discuss my very own attempt, Happy Pony Valley Riding School. I started HPVRS as an entry for Anything but Human Jam during Reading Digital Fiction’s digital fiction workshop, but, as is often the case with jams, I didn’t finish in time. I’m obsessed with horses, so I knew I wanted to make a game featuring them, and I’m also very interested in relationship systems, so that gave me my starting point.
I’d never added images to Twine before, so it was useful to have Dreaming Method’s Andy Campbell on hand to show me how it’s done. As we discussed during Hello Words, while technically being capable of handling multiple variables, Twine doesn’t make it particularly easy to use them, especially if you want multiple checks within one passage. We also noticed that the ‘silently’ command doesn’t always seem to work, and couldn’t figure a way around this issue.
Once again, the benefit of playing your game in front of audience became obvious, as naturally there was an error I had missed. This was also a good example of Twine’s clunkiness with variables. To capitalise a variable in ChoiceScript, you simply add an exclamation mark. So if you assigned ‘he’, ‘she’ or ‘they’ to the variable $gender, using $!gender would print as ‘He’, ‘She’ or ‘They’. There’re a lot of shared expressions between Twine and ChoiceScript, so I’d used this without thinking, (and missed it during testing as only one character is affected and only if they are selected in a particular order). In Twine, it appears an additional macro is required in order to capitalise a variable on the fly. To me (a non-coder, remember) this seems quite complex — I’ve been studying it today in an effort to make a fix, but I can’t figure out how to use it.
However, we agreed that for all its foibles, Twine remains the most accessible tool for getting started with interactive fiction and learning the basics. It’s also really useful for planning work in other formats because of the ease of dragging connected passages around in its editing view.
Next, new member Leigh led a discussion of quests from the writer and reader-player’s perspective. We considered what makes a good quest, how much information the reader-player needs in order to progress, and what it was about our favourite videogame quests that made them so appealing.
Next month we’ll be having a writing session. Don’t worry if you haven’t got a work in progress yet - I can run some brainstorming and writing sprints to get everyone going if needed. If you’d like to join us in writing and discussing story-games , (and possibly getting our new collaborative game underway…) you can sign up here or just turn up. We’ll be in the NVA’s Clubroom on Thursday 8th June from 6:30pm as usual.
