Sounds like you were playing the 3D version. Totally unnecessary “improvement “ by Cyan. If you get your hands on a statically rendered version, it’s better.
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Yes, I was. I was unaware there was another, earlier version! It’s always bummed me out that everyone loves Myst so much and I never played it, but honestly I just CAN’T STAND the 3D games where you have to move like that. This is why I’m such a fan of P&C adventure games on touchscreen-- just touch what you want to look at or where you want to go, no keyboard manipulation or joystick control. I’m gonna see if I can find this other version.
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Looks like Myst: Masterpiece Edition (not RealMyst) on Steam works, complete with the friendly old Mac pointy hand:
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Original Myst was Hypercard, which is pretty amazing. Definitely no getting stuck behind stuff there.
People used it to make choice games years before Twine and such. It was discontinued in late 90s I think.
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Although knowing MYST with it’s penchant for complicated machines, it’d likely be more entertaining in Inform/parser.
So, is that like making a game in Power Point?
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That reminds me of Decker, which says that it’s strongly influenced by Hypercard. Apparently there was also a gamejam for games actually made with Hypercard?
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In a way. I think the scripting support for Hypercard was surprisingly robust. though I never wrote anything for it. I don’t know what VBA support is like for PowerPoint these days.
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No. HyperCard was amazing.
HyperCard was an application construction kit, in that you dragged-and-dropped UI controls where you wanted to place them. Its scripting language (HyperTalk) was a naturalistic procedural language that was quite forgiving and easy to pick up. (Its Wikipedia entry has some good examples of its syntax.)
Visual Basic is an analogue, but it didn’t quite have Apple’s…finesse.
Each HyperCard application was called a “deck” consisting of cards. The app could move between cards in any order. Each card was programmable, in the sense that you could produce interesting results without switching cards. My understanding is that each location or view in Myst was an individual card, and each Age a deck. (I’m sure it’s more convoluted than that.)
HyperCard’s creator, Bill Atkinson, realized far too late that if he’d incorporated network support into HyperCard, it would have had most of the features that web browsers would develop years later.
I think that’s why I had a rush of nostalgia when I played The Kuolema in this year’s Spring Thing. Its use of Google Forms as an authoring tool reminded me of the early HyperCard apps. They were crude by today’s standards, but wildly good back then.
(Sorry for blathering. Long week, good to talk about something I enjoy.)
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In response to Lance Circone’s question — I personally have “read” many Twine projects where the interactivity wasn’t an all-out, in-your-face kind of element — it was kind of hush-hush, if you know what I’m talking about. And yet going through those works if they were on paper / just straight text would’ve been a vastly different experience than as they were, on Twine, whether with the actual mechanics of choice or just an illusion of, etc (and a much less appealing one, in my opinion).
I’m thinking maybe you could check out some of the games from the Tiny Utopias or even the ongoing Neo-Twiny jam for inspiration. Though sometimes their interactive elements are guaranteed to be subtle / works well because of how short the text is.
I think the game Sisters of Claro Longo by David T. Marchand is a good example of this. Read the reviews before you play, though, to get some “instruction” as to how you’re actually supposed to interact with this text.
Trying to write IF, and as a first-timer, I’ve realized how important it is to plan the interactivity.
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How much of the script is conversation, or conversational?
I ask only because I’ve personally found converting static prose (that’s ultimately heading one way in the bigger narrative) into something interactive to be most doable for me if there’s a lot of conversation or dialogue. Any time there’s a question or comment from a character, that’s a chance for the PC to react or speak back to it in different ways.
Whether the results are reflective choices, and/or they create temporary branches, and whether the branches are unique or variants, I feel I’ve found good mileage in this vein. That post by Cat Manning Josh already linked to suggests some ways to come up with useful sets of choices. The choices offered don’t always have to be profound, but I think they do have to be engaging.
The first time I tried this kind of conversion, I honestly had no idea how or if it would work. Now I’ve done it a bunch of times, I have confidence that it can work.
I think it you can divvy a game up with engaging choices, there’s no need to search for any other format. If I was going to generalise, I’d say the most common problem with Twine games is too many have choices that are too similar to each other or aren’t engaging. In other words, the authors didn’t have enough of a handle on how to get effect out of the options they’re presenting. A choice should always pull the player in, somehow. If the player loses faith in the value of the choices and just starts clicking, the game’s probably failed.
-Wade
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Ooh, that’s a great point. A bunch of people recommend Jon Ingold’s talk Sparkling Dialogue: A Masterclass here. It’s been a few years but I think the tldr (tldl? tldw?) is roughly:
- if you let the subtext do the work, then the surface text can vary
- so different options that go the same place but have different meaning to the player?
- he thinks of it as three options: accept/reject/deflect, so sort of agree/disagree, bring up a different subject?
- the character you’re talking to may be able to override your disagreement for in-world reasons.
- but also accept/reject can be “tell me more” vs. “yeah yeah, I get it already, let’s move on.” so an escape hatch or opt-in to “how much detail do you want here?”
Well worth watching imo, but again, it’s about an hour.
And going back to the “just click to continue” format, “kinetic novel” is another search term that might turn up examples…
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You might consider using Twine to control how the story is presented to the user rather than to make choices as to how the story progresses. Changing the font, making long expositions optional, changing the point of view, and similar options are possible.
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Something I’ve seen a lot of the more successful minimally-interactive works do is go heavy on the multimedia—sound, visuals, creative formatting, text effects. But the former two require the ability to create or source stuff from entirely different artistic domains, and the latter two require a certain amount of CSS know-how to do well, so this isn’t always the most feasible option. If you want to look at works that do this, I agree with Josh that it’s worth looking into kinetic novels, which is a type of visual novel without choices—they always have art and music/sound effects, and sometimes even voice acting. For examples outside of that sphere, I think 17776 and 20020 made it onto IFDB on the strength of what they’re doing with visuals and formatting, and Harmonia IIRC does have some choices but is largely relying on visuals and formatting as well. (On the subject of Liza Daly, there’s also Stone Harbor, but for me that one crossed the intangible, hard-to-explain line into “I feel like I might as well be reading a book.”)
Another approach I’ve seen is to divide the story up into scenes/blocks that you allow players to access out of chronological order. January, from last year’s IFComp, did this, and over in the IF-adjacent indie games sphere, Her Story, Analogue: A Hate Story/Hate Plus, and the last chapter of Higurashi no Naku Koro ni all do something along these lines. But they’re not just cutting up the scenes and letting players pull them out of a hat at random; they all have some kind of gating along the lines of “scene Z is locked until you’ve seen scenes X and Y” (or at least “you’re unlikely to figure out how to find scene Z until you’ve seen scenes X and Y”). X and Y don’t necessarily both come before Z in the timeline; in fact, in a story with mystery elements, often Z is chronologically the earliest, but it reveals something that explains or recontextualizes the events of X and Y, which wouldn’t have that much punch if you hadn’t seen X and Y already.
In general, I think the really important thing is to think about what interactive elements can add to your story, or at least, how they could transform the story in interesting ways. You definitely don’t want to be tacking them on out of a sense of obligation.
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Lance, if you want to keep the story linear, but still have Multiple Choices in it that makes a difference somewhere too, then maybe you could try rewards (or negative rewards) that are awarded depending on how smart the answer you choose is. The different storylines can then usually be easily brought back together behind the different multiple choice options.
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Ah, those are good ideas! I actually did write a game for the Neo-Twiny Jam, and I went with a few options you can do in any order before the big conclusion.
A lot of the script is conversational. Looking at it now, I think this would be a good way to add some interaction. For example, one thing I split up early on was how you can choose to comfort someone: either with words of reassurance or hugging them. Both fit the character, but people might approach it differently based on what they think.
Similarly, another scene has the protagonist talking to a friend to get ideas on how to befriend someone who doesn’t like them. This’d be another place to add in a small split; you could either be upfront with your questions or kind of lead into it, but you’d get the same conclusion in the end.
I like this idea, too. I have a small idea where the exact way you handle certain action-y scenes will give you more points depending on how effective you are, kind of like in Lady Thalia. It wouldn’t have much of an impact on the overall plot, but I think players would enjoy trying to get the best scores they can.
I don’t think I’m going to lean too heavily on sound or audio, since I usually have my own music going when I play through IF. I have a small idea for adding visuals – a notepad that updates with small sketches of characters and objectives as you progress – but that’d be something I’d add more towards the end, if at all.
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If there is only one outcome for the story, then the only choice is about the order in which the events are experienced. Let the choices just answer the question, “what should I experience next?”
Try putting each event/scene in your story on index cards. Then start looking at the scenes in relation to each other. Which scenes absolutely must follow one another? Which scenes have more flexibility? Which scenes can the player skip and still have a sensible story. This will give you ideas for how to lay out your game.
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I see that Stone Harbor was mentioned here as an anti-example, but it was my first thought when I read about adapting a linear story. Yes, it is basically like reading a book, i.e. no real choices or alternative endings (I think, I only read that once), but the interactive part was really keeping me, as a reader, interested. It was definitely more than just flipping pages of an ebook.
Stone Harbor is written using Windrift, by the way.
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Just cross referencing that this new system might be a really good fit for someone who wants to tell a simple choice narrative story without too much fuss:
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Yes, it’s designed to be simple to use! Definitely let me know if anyone has interest in trying it out. We are actively developing the platform so we are looking for feedback as well. I can post some alpha codes here as well if someone wants to try it out.
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That wasn’t intended as an anti-example, but as a “you may also be interested in this, which many people liked, although I, personally, did not find it effective.”
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