Bittersweet: a Twine Game
In another class, I was working on a command line scavenger hunt where you traverse a folder through the terminal. The structure I created for that sort of informed this project (or vice versa, because I was sort of working on them at the same time). I wanted to have a narrative where you have some choices, and then you have to move through a side cycle before moving forward again. This made me think of a forest path, where you can choose a direction and then you have to explore to find your way out. In fact, a forest walk was my theme for the scavenger hunt, BUT for this Twine game, I wanted to incorporate poetry about love because I've written web-based poetry before. That structure of living through a cycle until you've exhausted yourself, then finding a way out, can be mapped to bad or incompatible love.
I was inspired by Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet, and pulled content that resonated with me from there, as well as other writers and my own poetry. The way I placed content was based on themes: lover, beloved, beautiful, and foiled. The cycles you choose to enter determine the final piece of writing you receive (four outcomes). I struggled with a few things while making this, mainly learning how to add javascript, realizing that text inside sugarcube script is structured differently than in the passage, and having to build in order to really check if things looked right visually. It was overall a pretty tedious process.
When I was choosing what words to link pages together, I wanted it to be a bit abstract, like My Body by Shelley Jackson. Within a cycle, words are thematically linked, but I try to keep the order in which pages are linked chronological, so its easier to flow through a cycle without going back and forth too many times. Outside the cycle, I had links revealed once the user has seen the required pages. Now that I've finished it and played it a few times, I would say it's a little confusing and maybe lacking context, but I think I'm on to something. The content just needs to be fleshed out a bit more.