Hello, hello!! I'm Zara, and this is my first game jam and my first go at designing any game at all- I wanted to try out an interactive fiction using Twine and a lil Cuphead au I'd been playing around with.

Story Summary:

You are Pirouletta, retired ballerina, crack-shot and the best damn roulette croupier the Devil's Casino employs.

Well... employed.

Pir had been fired a week ago.

After getting through her backlog of trashy novellas to read, cleaning her apartment top to bottom and moping around for a couple days, she's decided she's had enough and has come to either beg, bargain or threaten The Devil for her job back.

After joining up with fellow ex-worker Mr. Wheezy, Pir finds that Hell is empty, her old manager is missing and the Devil is nowhere to be found. They've gotta set aside past grudges and secrets to figure out if their old bosses are the ones causing trouble...or IN trouble.

Some concept art:

Gonna be using Twine to program the game and Krita/Medibang Paint Pro to draw the backgrounds/characters/animations!

I've got the story halfway done, as I'm programming some simple macros/learning CSS as I go and hoping to get all the demo story finished by this week to start on the graphics and designs. 

At first I was at a loss with what to start with. Story or designing the assets and coding a prettier background?? But once I laid out a general outline of places/hints/clues I wanted them to hit, I started writing out the narration! So I guess I had my starting point.

One of the biggest worries was how to narrate this entire thing. Most games I see like this have a second person style that gives the reader a sense of inclusion. "You pointed at an object" "You clicked here." But I wanted a bit more- unchangeable story? A sort of bottleneck plotline where there's different choices at certain concrete nodes.  And I wanted to give Pir a strong voice separate from the player. So we'll see how that goes 'v')>

I really do love having the linkreplacer macro move through dialogue in one page though! I feel it sets a good pace for observations and tone.  I need to research how to get a button replaced by regular text though. Like having an action button that says "pick up scissors" that when clicked- changes to a text that says "Scissors grabbed!" or the like.

I had to go through all my passages and do some changes bc I'd learned how to do a more streamlined linkreplacement! And I finally did a bunch of looping passages with a series of if/else macros to put in some hilarious flavor text.

I feel like I didn't do much today and yesterday, but I was basically debugging my passages, going through all of them and fixing obvious spelling/coding errors. While I was going through everything I also whipped up a spreadsheet to check exactly how many backgrounds and how many sprites I'll need and on what passage to use em in!

And I got the roughs done for the sprites! I want to get started on the backgrounds to begin exporting and adding it to the game already!

And then i can start on the tiny real quick inline pictures and gifs, since those are a bit more quick to whip up. Oh! And I settled on a title screen/ cover art thumbnail(that last one), so that's gonna be on the docket to line in the morning :}

Oh maaan, the spreadsheets is a great idea.

I've gotten the page set up the way I like it, and am now just working on the backgrounds needed and the illustrations that'll be inline! But I've got my logo, coverart and descriptions hammered out!

And very happy to have finangled this lil animation as a background piece:

My two beta testers were lifesavers and got all the major hiccups ironed out before the deadline!! It's up now and live  HERE

• I got sound effects on there and working!
• I have been yelled at by two close friends who got the bad ending! Success! 
• 51 sprites+background as the headers and 42 in-text illustrations total!
• A better understanding of Twine and CSS- when the game breaking macros came out during beta testing, I actually felt like I knew where to look and fix it fairly quickly!
• This has been tremendously fun, and I can't wait to begin work on the full game!!

Bruh.