Okay curious im really want to make an interactive novel but add actual game play . My question is what types or forms of game play could be added in twine and how would you implement them. I would like to see example games too if possible .
In the story I’m planning the game play elements is a card game using elements of The Tarot Arcana and Solitaire adapted to my game . The cards would essentially be the choices and picking your choices gets you the narrative elements .
You would have action cards , event cards , and etc representing the game play elements. I’m curious could something like this be done in twine and does anyone have examples of twine games with actual game mechanics like RPG elements in the game .
This game will have strategic and tactical RPG elements in it but all using the cards .
Mayor Mystery has an arcade consisting of a few minigames, mainly consisting of timing text, link mashing, and random choices. I haven’t seen too much more gameplay than that, though.
Wow this is not exactly it but it has the mechanic just like I want .
One thing I want to do different is the text would be broken up like sometimes the choices would be in between the text not at the bottom. Also visuals of the characters and possible backgrounds if I could get that then it just literally be the character dialogue as text .
Since Twine is built on HTML/CSS/JS, the languages used by every webpage in existence, and arbitrary HTML/CSS/JS can be added to any Twine game, the easy but not very useful answer is that you can add literally any type of gameplay imaginable. If you care to learn HTML/CSS/JS, that is.
Sugarcube and Harlowe, the two most popular forms of Twine, have their own features layered on top of that, but they’re mainly to aid in creating choice-based stories, and use JS under the hood.
A more useful answer is that default, vanilla, no bells-and-whistles Twine lends itself to choice based games without in-depth game mechanics of the kind I imagine you’re looking for. However, there are many games and systems out there that have greatly expanded default Twine, and may be able to give you what you’re looking for. All of them will require some degree of in-depth coding knowledge and willingness to spend a long time tinkering with code and mechanics.
e.g. Another RPG Engine is an engine that lets you make an RPG in Twine. There’s a really long Steven Universe fangame that uses Another RPG Engine, though I haven’t played it since I hate how the engine looks. I’ve mentioned Trigaea to you, but there are a lot of other choice based Twine RPGs with complex mechanics, like Chronicles of the Moorwakker. All those can be taken for inspiration.
I believe Dendry also has engine support for card-drawing mechanics; it’s what Social Democracy: An Alternate History is made in. (Edit: it’s DendryNexus, which is different from Dendry. See the DendryNexus post below.)
Curious is it bad formto do the story in third person because of the fact you will play as multiple characters and that there are routes . I do not want to use first person or even second person perspective .
I think the second person perspective is just so weird to me because I always view the character as separate from myself .
The story will be linear with routes that are unlockable but with alternate history elements . Then you have the unlocked routes of five or maybe six playable characters .
To not over load on dialogue everyone shares the same beginning scene and you won’t get to pick a character to play as until after the prologue is over . By the time it’s done you would also understand the game mechanics .
The prologue would You play the scene as a secondary character and potential love interest later on. After the scene ends you will pick your official character . I wouldn’t give gender choice or romantic choice you have like fixed options so instead you can influence how the romance turns out and how romantic it is you don’t influence who to romance . I just don’t find games that give you the option on who to romance all that developed . Same with games that give you gender choice . In my game younger to play a woman but she is full seperate character with her own complete storyline ,.live interests etc .
No, it’s not bad form - second person is common for historical reasons, but there’s plenty of well regarded third person games like The Bones of Rosalinda.
In general, there’s no such thing as bad ideas or bad form, only bad execution. You’ll get much further if you make the game you want to make and then ask for advice on how to improve it.
This is very good advice. The biggest mistake that people make is talking and thinking about their dream project more than they actually work on it, so their dream project never gets made.
There’s an article on game development called Make and release lots of small games before making a big one. I’d recommend it. Your project idea seems very ambitious, so I would work on it in tiny parts, maybe working each individual part into a small game you can release independently and get feedback on. Reduce the scope. What about a game that only has action cards? And so on.
I am actually taking a programming class where I learn css, JavaScript and html . So this is good to know . I actually have a bunch of classes bundled together and a variety of topics I already paid for I just need to finish them.
The classes end with you actually having finished projects which make them even better for learning . So your saying if I get advanced html and css skills something I’m already working on I can push twine to its limits . I’m also learning JavaScript all of its gone over in my like web development class then you got individual classes that expand on these topics further .
I definitely needed this advice I have a bad habit of just talking and talking about ideas but not the executing them.
Im also a indie filmmaker and when I made my first successful completed film. One the things I did is go straight to the execution part. Tbf I have a lot more experience in film . I have pa’d on other ppl projects , worked as assistant director etc . So it’s not the same as a video game .
Learning web development is great, HTML/CSS/JS is a huge skill when it comes to making Twine games. Understanding code in general is essential if you want to make complex game mechanics.
I have personal experience with my own advice: the very first interactive fiction game I wanted to publish ended up getting massive scope creep, because I couldn’t stop adding random extra gameplay features while the main story was unfinished, and in fact I hadn’t even decided on an ending. That game is still unpublished to this day and I haven’t touched it in years. The smaller projects I made in a few days or weeks worked out a lot better.
I’ve actually noticed a trend where the longer I work on an IF game, the less likely I am to like the end result, because it’s harder for me to look at it and think it was worth all the time I spent. It’s also about attention: most games don’t get much, no matter how good they are, so it’s better to not get much attention on a small game than on a big one. Even Comp games don’t get many players compared to the giants of the 2000s flash game boom, when legends say you could upload something with no marketing or promotion whatsoever and it could go viral and get millions of views/plays. That seems ludicrously unlikely to me now. A few thousand plays is the most I expect when I upload something on Itch, and most games get even less than that.
Edit: Of course, over time you can build a reputation and a following. If you keep at it over years, you’ll probably make something at least mildly popular at some point. A lot of people give up before then. I think of gamedev, of which interactive fiction is a part, as a hobby for niche enthusiasts and weirdos. But a lot of indie artists are niche enthusiasts and weirdos.
Edit 2: Also, you may know this already, but in English you don’t add extra spaces before punctuation like periods and commas, only after it. The general rule is 1 space after, but 0 spaces before. It does mean periods and commas are much smaller and can be hard to spot, but that’s how it is. It’s definitely a rule you’d want to follow if you plan on publishing a text-based game in English. I don’t want to presume too much, so I apologize if this offends in some manner.
Oh that’s not a problem and oh I know I got to work on my grammar . I use to be so much better with that when younger and then it like slowly degraded the more and more I was using my cellphone. Grammar and writing is something I definitely work on before publishing . I see a lot of games in this space with like awful writing and grammar . You would think interactive fiction would have the higher quality writing since it’s only text . I think learning how to code will help me alot and seeing what’s possible in this space . One of my projects includes finding my first paid client I have not gotten to that part yet but I’m excited. I feel like every one using the internet should at least have some light coding skills. im not aiming for light coding though I’m learning back end and front end development .
I’m already signed up for few udemy classes focused on writing , improving grammar and I plan to start reading books again all this to help me improve on writing . Yes I think starting with a small simple game would be for the best .
What happened with them I discovered them like a week or two ago but most things weren’t working and apparently story Nexus was over . They kept the site up and running an apparently you could still register for some of the games or at least log in.
I like the entire concept of that two bad it didn’t last there a few companies geared towards women where they have these romance style saying sim games / novels . One of the most popular is called choices .
EDIT: DAMN I REALLY JINXED IT THE Company got bought out by some firm that uses a.i so I guess they probably went to shit .
They were interesting they had tons of stories , a large audience I don’t know if they ever had a real model of monetization on these games .
If the format of StoryNexus was appealing to you, you should definitely check out DendryNexus (the system Social Democracy was created in), since it’s meant as a sort of recreation of that.
Okay I got a few of the story Nexus games to work . They have my idea sone what but mine would add in significantly more game play aspects .
The actions concept is interesting but none seem to have rules or whatever actually explaining the games. I’m guessing because it story Nexus is closed .
I think fallen London honestly if it wasn’t text based would probably be a top selling traditional game if you added all the extensive lore , made it open world etc it even has the time wasting 50 hour grinds open world games seem to love . I played fallen London but haven’t made it anywhere because I don’t enjoy grinding away at a game just to get anywhere .
Yeah, I know some people are very allergic to even minor English issues with spelling and grammar, and will give low ratings in competitions to games for minor English issues. You don’t have to submit to a ranked competition, though, or submit anything at all. I remember the first few game projects I made, I shared with basically no one because I felt like they weren’t good enough to be shared and I wasn’t ready.
Again I don’t want to presume, but if you know a language other than English you may want to look at interactive fiction communities that exist for that language. Though, as a general rule, this community and all the game websites I know, like itch.io and IFDB/IF Archive, are mainly English-speaking and the audience for non-English games is much smaller. I don’t think they have translation features for non-English speakers, which can’t help.
Make something small and feel free to share it or not, and if you share it you can choose a ranked competition or some other place. Submitting to itch.io jams is a popular way to get attention for your projects. This community runs Ectocomp, which is coming up, and the Petite Mort category for Ectocomp is a low-stakes category for games made in 4 hours or less, although it is ranked. Petite Mort is also open to games in any language, though the English ones get the most attention. It’s the unfortunate reality of the English-speaking internet.
Pretty sure DendryNexus isn’t built on Twine, but I’ve never used it so other community members would know more. I believe DendryNexus is built on Dendry, and it’s separate from Dendry. Seconding the recommendations other people have made in posts above this one.
Edit: I really don’t want to disparage anyone; anyone is free to hang out here, no matter where they come from.
Dendry is a separate system; I’m suggesting maybe looking into it instead of Twine because DendryNexus is a tool specifically designed for the kind of thing you want to do.
If I wanted to make a game like this I would probably do it in Twine because that’s what I know, but when you’re completely unfamiliar with all available IF authoring systems and you have a very specific idea of what kind of game you want to make, that’s the perfect time to be asking, “Which system has the best tools/infrastructure to support the kind of thing I want to do?”
I do see that DendryNexus says it’s not recommended if you don’t know some JavaScript, though, and you would likely also need a bit of JS to do this in Twine, so you could instead start by learning JavaScript and decide later.
You would think interactive fiction would have the higher quality writing since it’s only text . I think learning how to code will help me alot and seeing what’s possible in this space . One of my projects includes finding my first paid client I have not gotten to that part yet but I’m excited. I feel like every one using the internet should at least have some light coding skills. im not aiming for light coding though I’m learning back end and front end development .