'

On 5/19/2025, I added about another 5Kb, a mixture of prose/twinescript.

As of 18th May, 2025: I gave updates previously the 16th and the 17th of this month. Progress is strong on my current WIP, A Campfire Tale. This evening, I broke 10,000 words and we're at 48 passages. A lot of those passages contain considerable prose, twinescript, or a mixture of both.

This afternoon and evening I've spent time fleshing out inventory manipulation. It's semi-puzzlely in that you most combine some items to create new items, and then must make use of some of those new items to escape the initial chamber in which you were deposited after the alien ship tractor-beamed you.

Altogether today, I increased the game contents by about 10 Kb.

I recently reported on my blog about my WIP, A Campfire Tale. That was two days ago. Since then, I've made significant progress. In the past two days, I've added about 7Kb of a combination of narrative and Twinescript.

The last forty-eight hours' work has been on I guess what could be called my first puzzle of the game (and, indeed, or anything I've ever coded). Basically, I'm trying to set up some inventory-manipulation to make the player feel clever while advancing the story.

So far, I've implemented examining items, and I'm working on item combination logic.

I'm at 41 passages on my Twine WIP, "A Campfire Tale", and currently I'm spending some time building an Action/Object system in passage EscapeFrom.

Here is some code from that passage. To date, I've got it working to show appropriate long descriptions for objects that I select with a hyperlink click:

I was able, using the instructions found here to get Rez working on my Windows machine. The creator of Rez has been very encouraging, and I'm thinking about devoting some considerable time and effort to learn to use this tool.

I highly recommend reading the following:

• Awesome Minds - Video Game Creators: An Entertaining History — Alejandro Arbona (2018)
• Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling (2013)
• Create Interactive Stories in Twine — Brian Mayer (2019)
• Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7 — John Ransley & Aaron Reed (2010)
• Cybertext - Perspectives on Ergodic Literature — Espen J. Aarseth (1997)
• Inform - A Design System for Interactive Fiction — Graham Nelson & Emily Short (2015)
• Interactive Storytelling Techniques for the 21st Century — Andrew Glassner (2017)
• Letters to the Cyborgs — Judyth V. Baker (2016)
• Make Your Own Twine Games — Anna Anthropy (2019)
• Making Games: The Politics & Poetics of Game Creation — Stefan Werning (2021)
• Mostly Codeless Game Development — Robert Ciesla (2017)
• Neverending Stories - The Popular Emergence of Digital Fiction — R. Lyle Skains (2022)
• New Narratives - Stories & Storytelling in the Digital Age — Thomas Bronwen (2012)
• Playing the Text, Performing the Future — Meifert (2013)
• Reading Digital Fiction — Narrative, Fiction & Mediality — Taylor & Francis (2024)
• The Computer As Medium - Social Cognitive Computational Perspectives — Berit Holmqvist (1994)
• The End of Books, or Books Without End? — Jane Yellowlees Douglass (2001)
• The Twine Cookbook — Dan Cox and Chris Klimas (2024)
• Second Person Roleplaying & Story in Games & Playable Media — Pat Harrigan (2010)
• Twisty Little Passages — Nick Montfort (2005)
• Videogames for Humans - Twine Authors in Conversation — Merritt Kopas (2015)
• Writing Interactive Fiction with Twine — Melissa Ford (2016)

dev.tw
        passworded access to Developer Notes
dorn_head_foot.tw
        contains header and footer passage 
          for use with hbar and bbar tags\
dorn_intro.tw
        contains passages comprising the Intro to the game/story
dorn_2.tw
        contains ?# passages that form the beginning of this hyperfic
dorn_last.tw
        contains scripts and special passages
        contains code for the playtime macro
        contains code for the fade-in macro
        contains code for hashing to enable passwording
        contains code to implement [nosave] tag for passages
        contains Config data:
          maxSlotSaves = 3
          maxStates = 50
          saves.isAllowed conditions
        contains code to check for [noreturn] tag, for menuing
        contains code to add visits to passage(s) programmatically 
               during initialization (for testing)
        contains code in PassageReady to track total number of passage visits

I'd estimate I'm probably halfway through the development of Glaive Seeker, a play-in-your-browser game I'm authoring with Squiffy for the player in my Earth Apotheosis game on r.rpol.net.

I've not been impressed with the robustness with which Squiffy handles variables. Twine seems more robust in that regard. In fairness, though, I just wrote a very brief example source file, and variable incrementing worked as expected. So perhaps I have syntax errors in the game I'm writing. I'm not experienced using Squiffy, after all.

I'm thinking that Twine is a more mature tool, certainly in terms of its age. However, in doing some reading about the new v3.01 Harlowe story format, it seems far more complicated than what I want to fool with or need. At the time of this writing, I'm thinking future games or tutorials might best be fit by the SugarCube2 format for Twine.

Incidentally, the nodes screenshot above was taken from a layout created using Twine. That's right, I'm using Twine to help visualize the flow of my Squiffy story.

I shared the above screenshot with my player on 9/16/2019 (note that this assertion conflicts with the date shown above this post's title; that's because Flatpress uses UTC time) in msg 120 of a private message thread and will be interested in the player's reaction.

I'd estimate I'm probably halfway through the development of Glaive Seeker, a play-in-your-browser game I'm authoring with Squiffy for the player in my Earth Apotheosis game on r.rpol.net.

I've not been impressed with the robustness with which Squiffy handles variables. Twine seems more robust in that regard. In fairness, though, I just wrote a very brief example source file, and variable incrementing worked as expected. So perhaps I have syntax errors in the game I'm writing. I'm not experienced using Squiffy, after all.

I'm thinking that Twine is a more mature tool, certainly in terms of its age. However, in doing some reading about the new v3.01 Harlowe story format, it seems far more complicated than what I want to fool with or need. At the time of this writing, I'm thinking future games or tutorials might best be fit by the SugarCube2 format for Twine.

Incidentally, the nodes screenshot above was taken from a layout created using Twine. That's right, I'm using Twine to help visualize the flow of my Squiffy story.

I shared the above screenshot with my player on 9/16/2019 (note that this assertion conflicts with the date shown above this post's title; that's because Flatpress uses UTC time) in msg 120 of a private message thread and will be interested in the player's reaction.