1-1

1-1 is the title of my first game.  My first game!  That feels really good to type out.  1-1 is a choose your own adventure-style game made entirely with Twine, a game making tool I talked about recently.  It's a work in progress.  I'm not ready to show anything yet, but I've learned a few things since starting this project that I want to share.

First, Twine comes with an "actions" macro that I've been using quite a bit.  This macro allows a developer to define a list of actions that will be presented to the player.  The cool thing about actions is that Twine will only show the player actions that have not yet been seen in the current play session.

For instance, suppose a player enters a room with a bunch of doors (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) that can be entered.  These four doors would be mapped to an action, lets call it "doors action".  The player decides to open the yellow door and is greeted with a brick wall.  The next time "doors action" is called, yellow will no longer be displayed as a possible choice since that outcome has already been seen by the player.  I think that's pretty neat!

Second, working on this game has given me something to consider when making my next text-based game: Should I map all of the possible character interactions and branching paths first and worry about fine-tuning the writing last, or should I fine-tune the writing in tandem with brainstorming all of the decision making?  Currently, with 1-1, I'm spending a lot of time getting the text of each passage just right before moving on to any other parts of the story.  Example: I wrote the first passage with very little notion of the content that would be contained within the second, third, or fourth passages.

Whoa!  After writing down some thoughts, the way I'm currently working doesn't seem optimal, does it?  This blog is already giving back.  Who woulda thunk?  So, for the rest of 1-1's production (every game's a production people!) I'm going to try to map things out before drilling too much into the detail.

I love productive blog posts.

[Update 07/21/2012: My first game!]

Cheers,

Danny