I recently wrote a library for Decker called “twee”, which handles parsing and generating Twine’s .twee file format as well as the Twine 2 HTML Output Format.
This also includes a “Contraption” (a custom building-block that can be pasted into decks to add new behaviors) for playing stories written using a special Decker-compatible story format called Ply.
Having these facilities should open up a wide range of new ways to use Twine and Decker in concert. Does this seem useful? Are there ways you’d like to see this improved in the future? I’d love to hear your thoughts!
First off, very cool! I’ve heard of Decker being used by a few forum members here so thanks for making an appearance.
I haven’t used Decker before so take all this with a grain of salt.
I think authoring Twee directly in Decker sounds great for getting people to try it out. The retro aesthetic of Decker is hard to reproduce in native Twine with pixel-perfect text rendering so you’ve got a great canvas for old-school enthusiasts.
I’m not sure of ways to improve it, as I feel that native Decker might be the next step up for a Twine author to consider. I think your Ply story format needs to be kept as functionally simple as possible. It sounds like there is a solid communication between Decker and the Ply output. Like, it seems possible to make a Decker pop-up box to allow the player to input their character name and then use that in the Ply/Twee story.
Question: I think this is a Decker thing itself, but when I went fullscreen the rendering went blurry (Firefox, Win10). Is it possible to keep that “next available” pixel size snapping thing going in fullscreen? Or maybe an optional nearest neighbour to stop anti-aliasing?
I’m not sure if this is straight forward to do with Decker as is, but when I see that retro look, I think of Adventuron and think about setting up locations, actors, objects, and adding synonyms for verbs and nouns. A text adventure parser framework, basically. That classic, command line at the bottom and scrolling prose above thing with images though.
Anyway, love what you’ve created here. Seems like it can be as simple or as complex as one might need. Great job!
The sky’s the limit for blending logic embedded in Ply with scripts that are in the surrounding deck. You could absolutely expose other kinds of interactivity and visuals.
The behavior of fullscreen upscaling is somewhat browser-dependent; most solutions will look good on some device/browser combinations and blurry or distorted on others. For the best experience viewing and editing decks I very much recommend using Native-Decker.
With respect to parser-based interactive fiction, you might be interested in this discussion over on the Decker Community forum, where I demonstrate using Decker’s visual object hierarchy as a way to represent rooms, items, and verb dispatch.
That is pretty cool. Thanks for sharing the parser link!
By the way, you have it rendering the best it can be in the browser with fullscreen scaling. I edited the CSS and got nearest-neighbour rendering to work and it looked like absolute garbage with fractional scaling. It was a total mess of irregular pixel sizes (especially with dashed lines). Forget I said anything!
