Post by cooldevo in Scout: An Apocalypse Story comments

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Great start for a game! I'm really enjoying the story telling and am able to feel that I can visualize the different characters and world as things happen.

I don't mind that there are existing backstories between Ezra/Elle and the MC, that hint at a little more coming. It's heavily implied that there is an extensive intertwined background between them as two best friends. Things seem to be taking a slight twist with both very tentative and nervous about risking a step that might ruin the friendship.

Also, love the scout profile! A great way to build your character as you go.

One question though, and I've come across it on a few TWINE games thus far. I downloaded the HTML here on Itch and play it locally. I have my save that is the character I play to play through it from start to end. In order to not spoil things that character will be the first to go all the way from beginning to end and is built around the character/profession I like the most. However, I had a technical issue with my browser, and was required to clear the cache. This resulted in my saves being wiped. Is there a way in Harlowe to export the save games to a backup file? I'm not very familiar with twine other than a few google searches.

It's not a huge problem, as it's currently a short and very fun story. But as the chapter count starts to rise it'll be harder to remember and recreate all the options and choices my character made.

That aside, this is probably one of my favorite games thus far on Itch, and it's only at Chapter 2!

edit: removed incorrect information about another TWINE game for save exporting. Wrong engine. Sorry!

Anya4 years ago(+2)

Thank you so much for your comment and question!

On the saves – this is something I'm in the process of working on. The Twine/Harlowe save mechanisms are...abysmal at best. The cache saving style of saves is definitely not my ideal setup. I'm considering a few workarounds for this that probably won't be implemented as soon as Chapter 3, but I'm hoping will be implemented by Chapter 4. This has been on my list for some time, but this comment is helpful in prioritizing next steps for improving the saves!

I'm so thrilled you like the story so far, and thank you again for playing!!

cooldevo4 years ago

Started playing around with Twine and Harlowe. Not sure how good of a writer I am, I'm much more of a technical person. But figured I'd give it a go. I definitely see what you mean with Harlowe's limitations saving.

I decided to switch my effort over to Sugarcube. It certainly has it's own quirks, but I think I'm picking it up. Saving is magically easy, the exporting your saves to a physical file and (re-)import them at will is fantastic.

Anya4 years ago

Ugh I definitely should have just learned SugarCube from the start. Ah well, lessons for next game!

cooldevo4 years ago

The lack of syntax highlighting makes it a lot easier to make a mistake in Sugarcube. Harlowe makes it really easy, say if you forget to close a macro to notice it before you've gotten too far. I've even had to add a custom story javascript to do some things that are already built into harlowe. For example, customizing the menu bar in Sugarcube takes a couple of lines in there. Also, I always store my variable as all lowercase, and then if needed uppercase the first such as a 'he/she' at the start of a sentence. In harlowe you just use the built-in '(upperfirst: $variable)' macro in-line and it's easy. In Sugarcube, I had to add a custom story javascript to do that, and then it's referenced as a function. Once it's implemented it's easy to use, but took a good bit of playing around to get it working... but now I have a good template I think.

I am building mine in Sugarcube now, but am also working on it in Harlowe at the same time. Been a good experience to figure out the pros and cons of each. Maybe I'm just sadistic.

If you get stuck I'm willing to try and help, if needed. No pressure, just an open ended offering.

Anya4 years ago

Oh, this post has given me so much to think about. I think my preferences for coding are maybe...simpler is better for most things, but trickier is okay for things like saves/menus? Which Harlowe provides, for the most part. Thank you for your thoughts, this is fascinating.

I may genuinely take you up on that offer, if you don't mind! I don't see myself switching to SugarCube for this game since it's in Harlowe/I'm familiar with Harlowe and on a deadline already but...maybe for next time? Thank you so much, again.

cooldevo4 years ago

Simpler is definitely easier... it took me a few solid days of pounding away on twine, sugarcube's documentation and Google to get what I think is a good template that I like. And even then I find I go back to tweak or change something I'm not happy with. There is definitely more coding than in harlowe, although once you figure out what you are trying to do it's easy to make it quickly repeatable.

Definitely stick with what you know and are comfortable using! That keeps the story coming and holds off the riots for falling behind. It's a significant effort to convert from one format to the other mid-stream, and then having to get up to speed on how to use it. If you wanted to see how I've been able to tweak mine, I can send the project, for purely research purposes of course.

By all means feel free to reach out! I've definitely gotten my feet wet with both formats now and enjoying it more than I had thought I would.

itch.io

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