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This piece of interactive fiction invites readers to shape Enora's story as she seeks her cure for her ailing mother in the misty Otherworld. Will you craft a whimsical fairytale adventure, or hopeless nightmare?
💬Excerpts
💬Excerpts
A twig-fingered hand pulls off the hat and gently shakes the rain from it. I see it is an old man, wan and pale. He looks up at me and his eyes are like a skull's.
“You’ve washed away my eyes with the rains of the Otherworld," says Eithne, "you are a witch, child, there is no denying it.”
“I am not he who escorts mortal souls into the Great Beyond. No indeed. I am but a humble fiddler, he who is sworn to distract Old Man Death from his grim labors and lift his morale in the face of an eternity of service.”
📚Lesson: Interaction over Advancing
📚Lesson: Interaction over Advancing
When writing interactive fiction in Twine, it is often easy to fall into the trap of creating a "traditional" text where the Twine author has simply replaced the act of turning pages with clicking on hyperlinks.
Wanting to avoid this, I explored the different options for interacting with text in Twine. I was intrigued by the mouse-over function. Once I added a blurring effect after the mouse-over, I had simulated the gesture and effect of blotting out wet ink. I decided to make this new mouse-over action one of the primary ways for the reader to interact with the text.
The narrative spin I gave this text interaction was that Enora can cast a spell that blots out elements of her story from reality. Erasing a part of the story has direct consequences for the narrative, as demonstrated in the example above. In this section, the player blots out Enora's scream, thereby creating a new reality where Enora stays silent.
📚Lesson: Player-Dictated Tone
📚Lesson: Player-Dictated Tone
Through their decisions, the player can alter the tone of the story, shaping it into a tale of delight or horror. Many decisions players can take within the text impact the overall mood of the story. The mood is tracked invisibly by two different variables.
In addition to the blurring spell described above, Enora can also cast a spell that shapes the ubiquitous fog of the Otherworld into tangible things. However, whatever is summoned by the fog matches the prevailing mood dictated by the player's previous choices, as shown below.
Enora can summon either Death's verdant garden..
... or his wasteland.
🔧Fix: Differentiated Visual Feedback
🔧Fix: Differentiated Visual Feedback
The most important comment from playtesters was a lack visual feedback to inform their decisions.
Functionally, there are two different kinds of hyperlinks in this piece of interactive fiction. One hyperlink simply moves the story to the next Twine page. These hyperlinks often are hidden until the player makes some additional interactions on the page to "unlock" the ability to move forward. The other type of hyperlinks increase the overall story's mood scores, either horror or delight. These hyperlinks are often the first links a player sees on a given page.
Players expressed frustration at not knowing whether a hyperlink would take them to the next page or change something within the page they were in the process of reading.
The simplest fix to this would be to make the two hyperlinks visually distinct, and give an example of each during the prologue to act as a tutorial.
The link at the bottom of the page above will move to the next Twine passage.
But both of these links will influence mood and not move the player to the next Twine passage.
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