Twine Devlog 2

Writing's done! Sorta.

February 04, 2023

Writing's done! Sorta.

This post is gonna be way shorter since... well, it is a mostly text game so I can't really show anything without also spoiling it. Got a couple of more macros and other technical stuff I can show, though.

Note: I'm not really doing alt text for the code screenshots (not putting the actual code in there rather), so if anyone that uses a screenreader (or anyone in general that doesn't want to type all of it) wants it I can post it somewhere! Presentation

Not much on this section, since I'm not gonna deviate much from the format on the screenshots I included in the previous post.

I've been having a bit of a weird time with the Sugarcube sidebar. I was pretty sure I wasn't gonna use it and made a note to somehow delete it during polishing. But then I realized I had a couple moments where the protagonist (now named Demy) mentions having info on their blog sidebar and I thought, hey it would be cool if you could see that!

A screenshot of the game with the prototype diagetic sidebar. It has the title Cut Stings, an icon of a snake-like creature, and the text: Hi, I'm Demy (They/Them) and I've been running this blog since 2012! I post about gaming mysteries, lost media, ARGs and my own creative writing.

A couple issues that make me unsure about this are:

  1. The tile and author passages on Twine would have in-world info, which might get confusing? Maybe not, but I'm a bit worried about it.
  2. That would mean it'd be best if the game's title (currently Cut Strings but that's technically placeholder) and the blog's title would be the same, but I'm not sure of a name that works both in and off universe.
  3. Not sure about the placement of the icon and author name. I've experimented with them being side by side like they are in the comments, and I don't really have a strong preference either way. As in, both look kinda off.
  4. I still want the saves and restart button, and that'd be an issue if the sidebar is diagetic.

Don't really have a solution for any of those yet, so let me know if you have any suggestions!

One more thing! This is for one of the endings but I've showed it off on Twitter so I'll show it here as well. Scrubbed off the actual text to avoid story spoilers.

A screenshot of the game. It shows a page layout imitating the Twine passage editor.

Technical

Made a couple new macros! Two of them I'm not really sure where or if I'll even use them, but it was a nice little challenge still.

First up, a macro that gets the current date and shows it in the same format as the blog posts! It's not too complicated, I've just struggled a bit with mixing Twine code and Javascript. For HTML you can pretty much just write it and it'll sorta work out, but it doesn't seem like it lets you do pure JS without need a special macro or something. So I had to do some weird stuff inside the set macro like I saw in an example.

A screenshot of the current date macro code.

Then a macro that does the same but for the current time! Nothing too weird here aside from the slice trick which I copied from somewhere.

A screenshot of the current time macro code.

Finally, a macro that throws a custom error! Had to do this one on the not-widget format because once again I don't know how to make Sugarcube let me put JS in a non script passage.

A screenshot of the error throwing macro code.

There's also another macro, but I'm not gonna show the code since it's long and also not made by me in the slightest. I can show the result, though!

A screenshot of the game. There is a bitsy game embedded on the passage.

Yeah, bitsy! I took the macro from the github with a ton of cool bitsy hacks, which you can find here. It's for one of the endings so I was going to keep it a secret originally, but the bitsy pretty much kills the mobile compatibility so I'll have to put a warning for that somewhere.

Conclusion

Gotta finish this post before midnight so I don't have to change the file name! Goodnight!