[Day 6]
Another work day, which means another day of my brain being fried. But I did manage to get some actual writing done today! I'm finding myself using the same techniques I use to get through NaNoWriMo, as you can see in the excerpt that I copy-pasted below. Mainly it involves me writing the easy stuff out so its done and leaving the hard stuff for later, even if it means working out of order.
Excerpt ("Beach")
You decide to head to the beach. $name always loved to play in the salty water. You haven't been in awhile, but you figure $pronoun might still like to wade in a few inches and bark at the seagulls that frequent the sand.
Blah blah blah
You let $pronounindirect off $pronounpossess leash and watch $pronounindirect trot over to where the seagulls are resting. $pronouncap doesn't sprint like $pronoun used to, but $pronounpossess bark is almost as loud. The seagulls squawk in return and beat their wings to escape.
Blah blah blah
$pronouncap slowly sits then just flops over. You hurry over to check on $pronounindirect, worried something might be wrong, but then $pronoun rolls over onto $pronounpossess back and wiggles a bit, covering $pronounpossess coat of fur in sand.
"$name!" you say in exasperation. You're going to have to give $pronounindirect a bath now. Apparently satisfied, $pronoun rolls back over. $pronouncap seems exhausted by even that little bit of effort. You can hear $pronounpossess breathing more now, and $pronoun doesn't seem to want to stand just yet. You decide to sit on the sand next to $pronounindirect.
I'm getting much more comfortable using variables and setting new ones. I found out it was easier to have choices set up so they take the player to a new screen rather than set up a prompt and add text to an existing screen. So a few more passages are being added. Like so.
Cafe has now become Cafe->WhippedCreamYes or WhippedCreamNo->Cafe End then onto a new place. This will likely be added to each of the places, but these little intermediary screens won't have more than a sentence or two in them most likely. I set this one up specifically because $whippedcream is referenced in "Beach" and I wanted to make the reference worked. It does, but now I'm having to think about formatting and working on removing whitespace because Harlowe/Twine has an annoying habit of creating whitespace where unprinted text or variables are, leading to awkwardly long beginnings and paragraph breaks.
Next couple of days will be more writing, more choice implementing, and maybe looking into CSS and learning how to pretty up the game a bit. I'm no good with doing my own graphics, and my only formatting experience has been with forum BBCode, but there are a lot of good resources out there and here in the jam. I'm sure I can find a tutorial and free-to-use graphics.