second day of edits

Yesterday I spent a good bit of time trying to get some variables and conditional logic happening. Before doing that, I realized I needed to work up a little story for my game so that I had some kind of structure within which to work.

So, I made a game about getting lost in the forest and....well, play it and you'll see! It's so simple, but I just wanted to try out some game play mechanics that would depend on the player's actions. 

Twine has these things called macros, but really they are what every other programming language refers to as functions. To learn to use these in this game, I took a refresher course from YouTube. Last time I brushed up on giving the game some style, and this time I brushed up on how to use variables and conditional logic. Here are those videos: 

It's a playlist of four videos. I know my game seems simple (well that's because it is), but it took several hours of trial and error work to get things playable. The best way to learn these things is to just set aside some time and play. In my opinion, the playlist above is the best I've seen for Twine and variables- and just overall it's an excellent series. I suggest you play around with some ideas in Twine and use thee videos to get started with some interactions. Once I got to the variables and functions part, things started to take a good bit more time. and there were long periods where I was just doing trial and error type of trouble-shooting. Lots and lots of failures to finally get it working. That's how programming works, so remember to be patient and take a break if you feel yourself getting frustrated. It really helps to sketch out a basic design idea for your overall game first, and that way you have a kind of map to follow as you learn to use Twine.

Basically, I created a variable and added to it's value based on player decisions in the game using the set and put functions (what Twine calls macros but every other computer language calls functions.) Also, I added conditional logic to open up parts of the game only if the variable had a certain value. I also used a variable to collect and use the player's name in the game play. And I used another function of Twine's to embed the accurate day of the week in game play. We can go over this in more detail in our meetings as needed. And don't forget there's no substitute for just playing and doing yourself (and checking out the tutorial playlists I'm recommending.) 

Learning how to find and use online resources to support your dev work is a critical skill to have in any technical profession, and for game development knowing how to pull in help from online as you need it is a critical skill for you to develop. Learning by doing is the name of that game. Never try to just "keep everything in your head." Always have the Twine documentation open in a separate tab because you'll need to refer to it all the time. I like to avoid using the worlds never and always, but in this case I believe those words are very appropriate!

Being a game designer doesn't require you know how to program at all, but it's helpful to at least play around with programming a little bit. Twine is a great engine for learning the basics, and since it uses HTML/CSS/JavaScript, you are learning programming skills that can be applied in many more contexts. I hope you have fun!

For example, look at how Mighty Coconut incorporates Twine into their game design process.