This weekend I participated for the very first time in the Ludum Dare game jam, with my also first interactive fiction piece, and I have to say, I loved both experiences. OK, not so much the deadline pressure, but I had made a good schedule planning, and could follow it most of the time.

Until a few days ago, I didn’t know anything about interactive fiction. My husband told me I would like it when I said I was looking for enrolling in Ludum Dare this time, maybe with something low code, to do some educational game or something. He didn’t have any experience with the tools themselves, but listed to me Twine, Ren’Py, Inform and a few others that people use to create visual novels and/or interactive fiction.

After playing with Twine and Ren’Py for a few minutes to an hour, I decided to go for Twine this time. I used Twine and Sugarcube 2, with some CSS tweaks – but it’s mostly Sugarcube macros only. This library is so powerful – and fun to create with!

Most of the time, I feel most of the tools I use or learn currently get a lot in the way of accomplishing things. And Twine+Sugarcube felt something else completely: I wanted to create a story, create loops, create endings, and they made it very simple to do it. When audio effects came in, then not so much, but even so – things made sense, were consistent. There was no noise in the documentation, examples, etc.

When the jam theme came out on Friday evening, I had this maybe a little obvious idea, and there was nothing educational about it. But I had a blast. I didn’t even expect to like it that much. I loved both creating the story and its branches/possibilities/endings (interactively, as I progressed in my short day-sprints) as having a theme to think over and create it in the first place.

At the end of the first complete day I had a (boring) playable version; at the end of Sunday I had a better one (with graphics and some audio); and finally some hours from the deadline on Monday I had a version I was happy to share – and a lot of other ideas documented (more like “Future works” than TODOs, actually), of course.

Play it!

There is no chance you’ll enjoy playing my piece as much as I enjoyed doing it, but here it is anyway: you can play it online on itch.io.

And this is my game page in LD game jam.

Drop me a note if you liked my story (or if you didn’t, but played it anyway). I’d love to hear what you think!

Download and play with it!

The HTML (and associated media) is on github, and you can just download it and open in Twine. (Twine is so great, did I say this already?)