Post by Jaco van Hemert in Writer's Block Deblock jam comments

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Identified very much with this Totally Accurate Simulation, particularly the "tab you've left open for eight months and never got to" part.

A very good fit for the theme, and the generators were amusing, especially when the sunlight of the evening streamed into the tavern. Speaking of, the tavern names were really quite good. Might need to keep this on hand for DnD games, ha.

I imagine that Twine doesn't have the functionality, but some ambient music would have been nice. I also would have liked to see an expanded version of the generators where you can more severely affect the story (like the happy or sad ending option) on multiple points. And maybe a failure state? (I don't think there was one, but I didn't try all the options.) I.e. that some options lead you to a "didn't manage to write something in time" state, to introduce more mechanics? (If I recall correctly, Twine supports variables and stuff, right?)

Anyway, cool game.

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Mandy J Watson2 years ago

I have a tab abomination that stretches at least three computers back in time....

You can do music in Twine (https://mandyjwatson.itch.io/the-mischievous-thievery-of-jessica-the-cat) but I did not have time to do any audio. I had intended to, and even recorded some sound effects, but audio goes in the ambitious part of the dev plan, along with more art and not being waylaid at the last minute by a weird, inconsistent bug.

Sunlight of the evening, to me, was sunset - that last golden hour bit or if you've ever driven straight into a sunset (it's not fun, especially if it's also raining) - but I take your point. There's no failure state because the theme of the jam was to make things easier (and being a writer essentially is a failure state and any time you actually finish something in real life it's a miracle, including this game, because the bulk of it was writing stories - I really know how to shoot myself in the foot!).

Ideally the generators would have been more complex but as I noted in comments on the game page they were proof of concepts of some ideas I've been thinking about that I haven't had time to play with, so this is an early start on some potential mechanics for projects in the future. It gets very difficult and very unwieldy very quickly (I have some complex - in a different way - systems in Jessica The Cat, linked above) so my aim was just to try out some things and make sure that the basics worked. I'm particularly pleased with the tavern-name mini generator so I'm glad you enjoyed it. I'm definitely keeping that as a side project to expand on.

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