Queen of Hearts: My First IF
Platform
I tried both Inform and Twine. For Inform, I went through the tutorial through Baba Yaga’s Garden. Maybe I am just a slow learner, but even after about an hour of tinkering with the platform, I found it confusing and frustrating. I couldn’t figure out how to add non-text elements to the game. It also seemed counterintuitive to me that the game was “coded” but the “code” very much resembled natural language. I also felt my game-making choices would be limited because Inform is so explicitly map-based.
I decided to go with Twine. This mostly had to do with the fact that I knew how to use it, five seconds within opening the application. I could add images and other non-text elements, as well as edit the text color and make design choices, through the CSS editing button on the bottom. Overall, Twine was much more intuitive to use than Inform. I do believe what Christina said about Inform being a very powerful tool. However, for the purpose of this assignment, I decided to use a tool that lets me focus on the product rather than learning the tool itself.
Premise
Gram High School is having their 50th Annual Prom. The five hundred students in the Class of 2019 are having a hot debate about who would be the next Prom Queen. Most people think it would be Beatrice, who was Prom Princess her junior year. But she was dating the Class President then — Michael — who happens to be School President now. There was a post on YikYak bashing how the Prom Pageant is a “party for the cliques.” Therefore, the Class of 2019’s leadership came up with the most objective method for determining the Prom Queen — by the number of Instagram likes she gets from the top five posts in the time period between March 11th, a week from now, and May 11th, when Prom is happening.
You have a secret crush on the School President, and it would feel real good to be Prom Queen, beating Beatrice. Beatrice has a lot of enemies, and they want to help you become Prom Queen too. So the main competitors are Beatrice, the textbook popular high school girl, Sammie, a math genius who also parties a lot who already got into Harvard, and you, who…are just you. You live with only your mom in the poorer part of the neighborhood, don’t play sports…you are a good student, so you really hope you get that full-tuition scholarship to your state college.
Map
