Spring Thing last year was the first Comp/Jam I voted and reviewed for. I loved the supportive atmosphere and the excited yet always friendly chatter here on the forum.
I also love Spring Thing for its use of banners instead of points. Apart from the “Best in Show”-banner, we the people get to propose unique banners for aspects of games we like. “Most Annoying Acrobatic Sheep” could be one of them this year, for all I know.
Oh gosh, I do feel like I have to clarify something here- I meant my work isn’t at all along the parser puzzle-y lines I’ve seen floating around here. It’s a Twine, lightly gothic, narrative focused (really, you could argue its a character study) and follows a defined Asian young woman you’re playing as rather than an open ended player-insert. I think it’s quite similar to other Twine-y games, so I don’t want to disappoint anyone who opens it up with different expectations! Especially not because I’ve really loved reading through your reviews on the forums- I’d hate to feel like I’ve let you down if I’d accidentally misled you. Thank you for the well wishes, though!
I’m also more of a visual artist and writer, and while I’m especially proud of some of the writing in it (especially the bits about Michael!), Sweetpea is also my first little romp into making something finished in Twine and was made in just shy of a few weeks (in between final assignments and studying for exams) since I wanted to push myself to complete something in the medium. (English is also not my first language, though I’d like to think I’m a decent writer regardless!) It’s not a magnum opus by any means- I really just wanted to have fun making something and didn’t want to enter it into any sort of formalized competition because it’s an experiment for me- hence, Spring Thing, which feels less intense in that respect.
I was actually expecting a Twine or some other form of choice-based story. Don’t ask why, that’s just the vibe I got when reading your comments. Which are well-written indeed, you could have passed for a native speaker to me (which isn’t saying much since I’m Belgian and my first language is Dutch…)
So I was not misled, accidentally or otherwise. I’ve been exploring more of the Twine and Choice side of the IF-world lately. My big turnaround was Spring Thing last year where the “competition”-vibe led me to play games in a style outside my comfort zone and deciding I should let go of my preconceptions about Twine.
To repeat myself:
I’m very glad to hear you’ve enjoyed some of my writing here. Since I have zero programming skills and therefore cannot help with technical questions, I wriggled myself into the niche of frequent reviewer. (And attempts at comic relief in some threads where I otherwise have nothing substantial to contribute.)
Following a series of mishaps, a recruit from the Consortium Of Known Occupied Worlds is marooned on a tiny island on an unfamiliar planet; but the recruit is not alone - there is a Q’udzlth here!
I’ll be submitting a shortish Twine story that involves reading inscrutable glyphs like this one:
And, as stated in the other thread, the blurb will be entirely in emoji! It appears I’ve created something for people to read that they can’t read. It will surely do well.
(There are also actual English words on occasion. I do hope people find it interesting, at least.)
Is anyone else so sick of their Spring Thing game they could just barf on it? A month ago I was feeling pretty peppy about it, and now I hate it and can’t stand to run through it again. I feel like I won’t so much submit it as hurl it away from from me in disgust.
You mean, you’ve been staring at it for so long that your eyes have turned to dried peas and are ready to drop out of your head? I’m just about there myself. Quite natural at this stage in the game, I think.
I feel like it’s a 30-year-old kid that won’t get a job and move out of the house, and just stays up all night smoking pot in the basement and watching '80s TV reruns . And I have to stay up at night worrying about how the world will treat it when it finally gets its act together.
To be entirely frank, I’m more anxiously clutching mine to the chest, eyes riveting to cursed clock, convinced it’s nowhere near ready and never will be.
You’re suffering from final product shipping stress;
random bugs popping up.
things that used to work, now not working for no reason
silly mistakes you didn’t notice before
spelling/grammatical mistake in the first line, you somehow never noticed.
unexplained crashes.
PC suddenly giving you strop.
I could go on.
The thing is, this always happens. It’s not particular fun because the fun and creative part of the project is over. Now it’s the getting it all to work nightmare.
What always drives me at this time is the thought that, when it ships. It will be done, and there will be something to show for it. And, looking back, it will seem worth it. Although not right now
Oh, and what’s wrong with staying up all night watching 80’s TV. That’s what I do all the time. Except for the pot bit…
Yeah, you’re so tired of it but you can’t stop playing because you’ll find something.
I broke Fair two days before submission and got it working again and it would have been so much easier to just not.
I discovered that I goofed in Final Girl which hinged entirely around identifying a randomly chosen mystery person but the game would just forget who it was talking about and change its mind randomly in the middle of the game and get it wrong. I ended up adding a mishmash of identifying random binary code on every permutation of “choose the killer” card to make sure the game knew which &^%$(^^^^ card it drew and could keep track…
Oh, if you haven’t already, fill in the SpringThing submission form, but don’t submit the zip. You get a link after completing it, so you can always change it.
A little! More so that I’m feeling pretty happy with what I’ve made, even if I did wind up cutting and trimming away at things- scope creep can get a little out of hand, but having read about ‘make it playable, then complicate’ helped. Probably going to submit tomorrow after a study sesh with one of my best friends. Also made a Twitter since I think the submission form optionally lets you add one?
I was also picking through some class related writing recently (our prof basically asks us open ended questions related to the lectures for Evolution, and I’ve enjoyed doing the writeups for them) and pondering making something else, (an irreverent evolutionary biologist?) or poking around at a one room setting and trying to experiment more with what Twine can do (a sidebar specifically) and expanding on one brief scene from Sweetpea to mush it with said idea- lots of little writing scraps floating around. It’s been fun learning a teensy bit of CSS and HTML to muck around with Harlowe. Nothing fancy, but it’s cool to play around with and learn stuff from lurking documentation and forums all the same. Can’t wait until summer when I’ll have the time to piece them together!
I’m finally done~ish with my Spring Thing (well, as done as it’s going to get, anyhow; I ended up cutting a lot of content). It’s called New Year’s Eve, 2019, and it’s a sequel to Pageant, which I wrote a couple of years ago now. It’s a choice-based slice-of-life story about… well, exactly what the title says. It’s also my second game written in dendry, and either the second or third game ever written in dendry, depending on whether you count Bee.
Social gatherings are not your preferred activity. But this one is obligatory, and it threatens to ruin you.
You are Karen Zhao, a senior in college who is home for winter break, and seeing your old high school friends for the first time in years. You are not ready, not even close, but perhaps you could make the best of it.
If anyone’s interested in beta testing before, um, the day after tomorrow, that would be nice, but it might be too late for that…
If anyone is unsure, let me say that this game is extremely well written and took me <30 mins per playthrough, so beta testing it isn’t a huge commitment.
