Since we are at the end of the festival, I thought I’d leave a few closing thoughts about my story and about the others that I’ve read. I’m grateful to those who have read and reviewed Thin Walls, and pleased that it has generally gone down well. I hope @rovarsson didn’t lose too much sleep.
I came up with the basic idea several years ago when I was in an awkward housesharing situation and read Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves; I noted down a few ideas, but didn’t go back to them until the autumn of 2020 when a lockdown was looming and I wanted to have a proper go at writing something in Twine. Although the basic idea was mapped out by the end of that year, I tinkered and rewrote again and again: I’m glad I took the time, as I was really happy with the final result.
One feature I ended up regretfully removing at an advanced stage in the editing process was in the party planning scene. One of the characters was to have turned to the reader, breaking the fourth wall (because all the walls get broken in this story, right?), and asked you if you have Spotify. If you answered yes, you would be put in charge of playing the party music by clicking on links which would open up Spotify in your browser. But it ended up being unworkable: I wanted it to just play one song and then not move onto another, which was apparently impossible. That would have been a particular problem for the last song in the sequence (I was going to have John Cage’s 4’33" - which is nothing but silence - open up when the music stopped in the story), because there’d be nothing prompting you to close the window. A single playlist would have worked, except that the time taken to actually listen to all four songs in full would be far longer than it would take to read the relevant text. Also, in the last month or two before submission, I became aware that Spotify was in the news because it was hosting anti-vaccination podcasts, and I didn’t know how big that story was going to get. In the end, the easy thing was just to remove the feature altogether.
I wanted to encourage the reader to explore the house independently, open doors, look in cupboards, be curious, click on links, notice that some things are different at different points. So I was heartened by @deusirae’s review, which suggests that that’s exactly how it’s being read. I wanted to provide just a little bit of a challenge when the reader has to figure out where to go next, but I didn’t want this to be too taxing: after reading @mathbrush’s review, I now think I have overdone this element a bit, but he has marked it as being a one-hour read, which sounds about right to me. I am considering getting an itch.io page and uploading a slightly edited version in which there is a little more signposting (e.g. the upstairs kitchen should be unopenable until six chapters have been completed, prompting the reader to go in there only when it becomes necessary to do so). I’d also like to put in a couple more responses when you prematurely open the door under the stairs, purely for the fun of it. And I’d like to insert the cover art into the front page if I can figure out how!
Having deliberately incorporated a number of different Twine techniques into the story, I now feel fairly confident at using it, at least in its Harlowe incarnation, but I would like to improve my knowledge of CSS and other visual effects. The easiest way to signal which passage was narrated by which character was to use passage tags and then to assign a background colour (some of which were chosen for specific reasons) to each tag via the stylesheet. For reasons I still can’t figure out, instead of filling the screen with the colour and letting the text run across it, this results in a narrow coloured panel against a black background, with a reduced space for the text. I ended up quite liking that effect: it looks like a kind of pop-up window against the background of the black frame, which is used for the second-person frame narrative sections, and which unifies the whole story. But it does make it harder to read on a phone (and I think the chapter called ‘Knowing the Score’ must be pretty much impossible). The only way I can find to fill the entire screen with a background colour is to include formatting instructions in each individual passage, and I’m sure there has to be a better way.
The festival has been a really great experience, and I have enjoyed the other games I have played: I will follow up with a few thoughts on them, and a couple of longer reviews. I do intend to carry on with Twine: at the moment, I’ve got a couple of possible projects in mind, one relatively simple; another much longer, more gamelike, and more fantasy-ish. If I ever get around to them …
