wip: space frog! twine game (& me fighting with twine)

for this month i've been working on a small twine game for agbic jam based on the cover i made for the famicase collection earlier this year, but i definitely kind of underestimated how much trouble i would have with twine (or rather overestimated its abilities, i guess?).

since the theme for agbic this time is ancient techniques i decided to go with pixel(ly) art and just do a text adventure + images, so i figured twine would be a better fit than renpy... though honestly at this point i'm kind of wishing i had just gone with renpy because it would have been a lot easier putting everything together 😅 there are so many things i want to do which would have been very quick in renpy but are really not in twine.

i've been sharing images on the patron channel on my discord (if you're not in that, you can join through patreon i think but i'm not actually quite sure how it works? i think you have to link your account to patreon somehow, and then it links you to my discord...?) but so far it looks like the second image in this post! you can see how i've put the game together so far. (i think it would have probably been better if i arranged it more like a flow chart instead of just,,, squishing them all together? but i am learning twine still so i'll go with this for now and see how i feel about it. 

in case you don't know how twine works (i didn't until i started working on this haha) each passage (so each white square in the image) is one 'page'? i guess is the best way to put it, and you can jump from passage to passage by adding links to other passages and such.

what i DIDN'T know was that twine 2 (i'm using the story format called harlowe 3.1.0) doesn't actually really  support embedding images straight into the games... apparently, in twine 1 you could embed images by uploading? them into the engine and then you could see them in your game, but for twine 2 it seems most people are uploading the images to some separate hosting site such as imgur and linking to them from there, even if i am already going to be hosting the html file for the game on itch.io... (for comparison, for renpy all i do is put the images i want to use in a folder and when i want to show them in the game i just type in 'show [image name]' and they show up.)

i really didn't want to do that since i don't want to have to have people playing the game load files from elsewhere, and i also don't want to rely on an external service to always have the images available for me, so i had to go this less than ideal way about it which i figured out thanks to this helpful post >> https://damonwakes.wordpress.com/2019/05/30/twine-for-beginners-adding-images-as-base64/ 

so all the external files in my twine game are just files converted into base64 which is A LOT of text and this would look very messy if i just left it in the passages themselves, so instead i have separate passages for each image. (you can see them on the right side of the second image.) for the font file i embedded i couldn't do that though so it's just a gigantic block of text in the stylesheet... for reference i've uploaded what it looks like (third image above) - you can see me scrolling through my converted-into-text pixel font haha. (it's very long! it doesn't even have that many characters in it!)

i think i just kind of assumed that twine would be pretty friendly to adding more stuff than the engine mainly intended (that is a more barebones text adventure) and that was my fault. i don't know if i'll use twine again for a project like this since i'm currently not interested in making a game that's text-only. 

another thing i found out was that there doesn't seem to be any really good way to include translations in one game, so i think for now this game will be in only english. looking into how another game (https://laburatory.itch.io/nanopesos) did it, they have the game actually just link to other versions of the game uploaded to github, with one version for each language, which feels really not ideal to me. 

this has been a very good learning experience so far though! it's taking much longer than i expected to put this together because of the hurdles i hadn't expected, but it's still fun finally using twine. i've recommended it a lot of times to people because i've heard it was easy to use but i think in the future i'll have to add the caveat that it's easy to use - as long as you don't try to do too much with it beyond making a text adventure.