Undead Octopus

The Spring Clean Twine Jam

15 June 2020

This blog post contains some very minor spoilers for the Beginning Hour Twine story and the RE7 teaser demo.

At the beginning of May I participated in the Spring Clean Twine Jam; a game jam all about taking that project you've been neglecting for a long time, dusting it off and sharing it. I've been sitting on Beginning Hour for quite some time now - and since the pandemic has kept me indoors for a while - I figured it was the perfect opportunity to get some motivation to finish the project. And since the jam accepts works-in-progress as well as finished entries; what did I have to lose?

Once I had entered the jam, I had about a month to get Beginning Hour to a presentable state. At that time, I would say about 80% of the functionality of the game was done, but most of the text was only placeholder. Certainly not what you want for a completely text-based experience. So I knew I had a long way to go before I would have anything I would be willing to submit. One of the biggest development milestones I needed to reach before the project was complete was making the fight sequence; which is the final challenge players face in the game. It's been a difficult section to design, and it's where development ground to halt when I had worked on the game last.

I started by replacing all the placeholder text with full passage descriptions. I've heard a lot of advice saying that it's important to make a "minimum viable product", so making something I could present in the jam was the first priority, and making something "finished" could come later. Since Beginning Hour is an adaptation of an existing work, writing the passage descriptions was a case of looking at the source material and writing descriptions to match. The challenge came from being as concise as possible, whilst still getting the most vivid description of the scene across to the player. With the passage descriptions done, all I needed for a working, presentable demo was to test and polish the game.

This version of the game included the full first playthrough, as well as the second playthrough reveal up until reaching the basement where the fight scene is. The only things left to make the game functional from start to finish were the fight sequence and making the telephone interaction work. Since the fight sequence was the bigger job, and most important to the structure of the game (the telephone is a dead end for the player), I got to work on that first. And this is where the problems started.

I'm probably going to go into the fight scene in more detail in another post, so I'll keep it brief here. But the main issue I was struggling to wrap my head around was the size of the possibility space I wanted to create for the fight. I didn't want to code any kind of simulation, and instead I wanted to have a more concrete system where x action would yield y result. However, to have the number of possible options I wanted for the player meant that I would have to map out 256 different possible outcomes! For a while I tried to think through the system from each combat round to the next to try and minimise the number of possibilities; but eventually I faced the reality that I would have to map out all 256 possible outcomes and then cut corners as patterns emerged.

Ultimately this took much more of my time and my patience than I expected, and I eventually decided to cut my losses. Instead of finishing the fight scene, I would polish up the the game as a works-in-progress demo and truncate the sections that weren't complete yet. I didn't feel defeated though. I managed to do a lot of work on the fight sequence and it felt like quite a breakthrough, especially since this had previously been a massive roadblock to the project. The most important thing was I had made something I was proud enough to share!

I submitted my demo along with 31 other games and demos, and it felt great to feel part of a little community. I was prepared for receiving feedback on what I had made, but I wasn't prepared for finding people making YouTube videos made about my game! It turned out to be so much more helpful than I expected. It's one thing to have someone play your game and receive feedback; it's quite another to watch them play and comment on it live as they play! I'm so grateful to have been given the opportunity to get the perspectives of other people playing my game and experiencing it blind, even if the feedback I received did end up making my To Do list for the project much longer.

Another great benefit of participating in the jam was getting to play everyone else's games. It was a really great insight into what's possible with Twine and how I could take my own projects to the next level. I hadn't really dabbled in any css editing with Beginning Hour, so seeing some games with much more advanced user interfaces was really an eye opener. It was also great to see how some games has dealt with the more interactive elements of their design, and I found lots of interesting ways to make my own game more dynamic and streamlined. Here's a list of some of my personal favourites from the jam, in no particular order:

This was a great showcase for me to see what kind of things can be achieved with Twine. You can play my entry on itch.io. As well as giving me a great insight into how I can make my work better, it also gave me some inspiration for some potential games to make after Beginning Hour is done. A little unhelpful while Beginning Hour still needs work, but it's always nice to have ideas for new things to make!