Hi guys, I’m new to making twines (and IF in general). I’m using Harlowe 3.3.9 (the default) for my current story.
I’ve run into an issue where I have a big passage with (click:) macros for the player to build their character’s backstory with, but there’s a point where I’d like them to pop into another passage and then come back to the original passage, and it’s always dropped me back before all the macros were clicked. Is there a way for the story to remember which macros were clicked and redirect back to that state? I’ve thought about using (history: ), but it seems that it only remembers passage progression, not macros.
I’m open to completely restructuring, but I’d like to try and keep this structure unless it’s completely impossible to do so.
I think that is a work for hooks. you set variables/flags indicating the chosen backstory, and when returning to the passage, the flags rebuild the chosen backstory (with the added bonus that the backstory can influence the story…)
Alternatively (and perhaps more elegant in backstory selecting) you can restructure the backstory passage using binded cycling-links, active only when (visited:) returns true.
In short, no. All Twine formats only commit anything to the saved state when you change passage. Navigating “back” to a passage (undoing the state change) will take you back to the passage just as it was when it loaded, while visiting the passage for a second time, will still show the “initial” state of the passage.
Longer answer, yes, but only by implementing that yourself, with variables to track what you want to show and not show, as @Piergiorgio_d_errico explained.