IS Entry No. 9: Twine Update

I’m getting the hang of the basic macro command functions on Twine. I realized that I was extra confused last time because some of the YouTube tutorials were providing Style Sheet code to copy and paste, without any explanation about how it was written. Also, some of those videos were really outdated and not compatible with the newest version of Harlowe.

I reached out to fellow classmate Tommy for some guidance on where to begin because he’s done a great job documenting his progression in his Sketchblog. Also, the sheer amount of resources available on the internet can be overwhelming. He suggested some really helpful tutorials which helped with specific functions. I found the Twine Cook Book was hard to navigate because I was only looking for Harlowe tools and there’s a lot of jargon I didn’t understand because I felt like the most rudimentary things weren’t well defined.

Overall the most helpful resource by far has been this website: https://twine2.neocities.org/
Highly recommend – super straightforward but there’s A LOT of info!

It’s a bit frustrating that I haven’t figured out how to implement all my interactivity ideas because those aspects took me a long time to think up since I had little experience with games and I wanted them to be meaningful to the story narrative. It would feel tragic to abandon some of these ideas after all of this because of implementation issues.

Takeaways + Tips:
– Use https://twine2.neocities.org/ as your go-to Twine guide if you’re using Harlowe
– Using built-in macros in passages is way easier than figuring out CSS in the style sheet
– Work out all (or most) of your macros in one passage before moving on to the next (it gets confusing to find errors when you have an entire web of passages)

And that’s as far as I’ve gotten because I’m still figuring it out myself.