For years, I have grumbled on the sidelines about sticking to the randomized order. In my view, part of the challenge of the competition is coming up with a subject for a game that will draw eyeballs. I have rejected ideas for games on the “won’t draw enough eyeballs” criterion. And then once you have an eyeballs-drawing idea, you have to execute it. And then you have to sell the execution. This is all part of the challenge. The cover art. The blurb. When players look at those, your game is already fighting in the ring. It’s tough work to make them compelling.
I play the entries based on which ones catch my interest. Not determined by the randomizer. Not alphabetically. At least, not religiously. I’ll give a random game a shot sometimes, but my own curiosity is my guiding star.
And front matter certainly can be part of a game. My little +=x game didn’t do well in the comp, but that’s an example where the blurb is integral to the game. As in, if you don’t read the blurb, you will not understand the plot. Some people didn’t read the blurb and then, unsurprisingly, didn’t understand the plot!
Yeah, I meant the dark mode/light mode. Since SugarCube has several ways to do it (one correct and several hacky but still simpler than having duplicate versions of every passage), I really assumed Harlowe must have something I didn’t know about, but I guess maybe not!
Yeah, if it’s helpful context, Harlowe doesn’t come with much built into passages by default. The main thing it does have—forwards/backwards navigation arrows—I don’t like, and getting rid of them was one of the very first things I learned to do in Twine, lol. So no built-in color scheme toggles or save files or anything like that. Because Harlowe doesn’t give you much at the outset visually, it’s an invitation to make a lot of choices for how you want it to look.
That does, perhaps, still raise a side-question of, “Why create projects in Harlowe?” The answer up to this point has been that this is what I learned first, meaning that implementing its basic link navigation infrastructure was pretty intuitive/approachable to pick up for a non-programmer. I wrote Lazarrien: A Love Story originally in six days, starting from a position of never having used Twine before in my life. Now that I have incrementally learned how to do a bunch more things in Harlowe, I don’t yet see the value in throwing that away to start over from scratch in a different Twine story format, or a different system entirely.
As I mentioned originally, I already have plans to get outside help with implementing a more efficient switching mechanism, so no one needs to worry about solving that for me in this thread! I assume the actual solution is going to end up being some JavaScript thing. (There isn’t currently any author-supplied JavaScript in Pharos Fidelis or my other projects since I don’t know how to use it yet.)
I think my bigger point in bringing up the light mode implementation in this journal is to illustrate the kinds of technical and aesthetic concerns on my mind while making this project. Often, the programming “constraints” I encounter turn out to be the result of maladaptive attitudes/behavior on my part, and I try to accurately reflect that where relevant. I think it’s revealing that I would default to doing something slow that I intuitively understand the logic of (spending two days embedding identical copies of the text into the 484 passages) instead of finding a better solution that requires me to go further to learn programming logic or whatever.
I really enjoyed Pharos Fidelis! I’m not really one to naturally gravitate to gay demon melodrama, but you really did draw me in with the mystery and allure of “romantic island getaway” paired with the content warning. And then of course, the characters and setting were so interesting to me, that I was ready to try my hardest to get those two crazy kids together (success achieved!)
I hadn’t given much thought to light/dark mode in Harlowe, but now I’m curious to give it a go. If I figure it out in any vaguely elegant way, I’ll try to remember to come back here and share.
I enjoyed Pharos Fideles more than I expected to. I usually like a lot of interactivity in a game, while PF was more linear. But the choices I had were impactful and well-described. I mean that I understood what each choice meant and why I was making it. And I vibed with the romantic relationship and was rooting for a happy ending. I’d be glad to see future works in the same vein.
