After playing through a couple of text-based games for Monday, we’re going to try our hand at game design. On Monday, we discussed games as texts, as something for us to study like we would a piece of literature or a historical moment. (Is that a buzzkill? Maybe. But when you start digging into a game, sometimes you discover whole new layers that you didn’t realize were there! So it can also make the game a much richer experience.)

Games can be all kinds of things — not just entertaining, but instructive, exploratory, philosophical, and more. A good game has at its heart a problem, a question, or a story, something that drives the player to keep going.

Today’s lab is split into two. First, we’ll spend some time brainstorming and storyboarding. This is your opportunity to think through what your game will do in the big picture: what is its story? What’s the problem that the player’s trying to solve? What world are you immersing them in, and how can you convey that? You’ll use this Google Form to flesh out the answers to those questions.

In the second part of the lab, we’ll take those initial thoughts and start putting them into Twine, a tool for building text-based games. Twine games are built with a series of passages, which you link together to create pathways through your story that the player can choose from (or be guided through, or move through randomly depending on your game’s logic). Here are your goals for today’s lab:

  1. Head over to Twine and start your story by clicking on the “New” button and giving it a title.
  2. Create at least three “passages” in your story, again using the “New” button, and add a little content to each of them.
  3. Link each passage to another, either in the form of a player choice or in a guided format, where the player only has one link to click. (You should have at least one choice represented in your passages.) Your passages don’t have to be sequential.
    • You create links in Twine with double brackets. So [[Test page]] would generate a link to a passage called “Test page.”
    • You can format text using the built-in editor, but you can also use HTML and CSS if you’d like.
  4. At the end of class, export your draft story by going to Build >> “Export as Twee” and upload it to WordPress as a media item. (You can send it to me in an email if you want to make sure it goes through.)