uhh @garden-ghoul (& @cinquespotted maybe? am i right that you do/did twine things??) &also at other mutuals im forgetting and/or the General Public– is there a good place to look at a lot of example syntax for twine?
i am extremely a novice and trying to teach it to myself off of the harlowe manual, but there’s a lot of basic-but-cool stuff (lots of them things i saw in some of the twines in the list-of-good-twines in ghoul’s game about games, which i am not far into but enjoyed btw!) which i understand in theory the syntax for, but am actually struggling with– like literally just how to connect variable value changes with clicks and/or ifs, which is the Most Basic, but none of the sample code in the manual actually shows how to stick macros together like that really, and all my educated guesses have not panned out
i’m trying to write a poem in it for a class, mostly, so it doesn’t have to do a lot of actual game stuff and can be heavily weighted toward stupid flashy text tricks (just like, replacers etc), and it will not be tragic if this is not a readily available resource, but if there’s a good body of existing work i could just sift through when i wanted to see how to actually put the macros into practice, that would be wildly helpful, so i didn’t get bogged down in the really basic shit so much.
as may be very transparent i know literally nothing about this, or the ~community, or whatever, so um– h elp?
Hmm, well, I managed to get where I got by reading the twine wiki, but it’s true that it does kind of suck a lot! Unfortunately I don’t have any resources with lots of good sample code so I’m gonna try and be a sample code resource. The bread and butter of my game was clickreplace, which I used like so:
At the end of the paragraph, some text I want to replace. (clickreplace: “some text I want to replace.”)[What I want to replace it with.]
Macros in general will be formatted like (macroname: function parameters)[what the function is going to do]. Another example you’ll probably want is set and if statements:
(set: $something=2) (if: $something is 2)[Success]
Prints “Success”. APPARENTLY you cannot use “if: $something=2″ because twine is stupid. you have to use its dumb natural language.
A tip is that if you want to check variables somewhere in a page, you must set them to some default value before this, otherwise your program will throw errors, and Twine’s debugging is totally useless.
If you want an event to change the value of the variable… the way I normally did that was I would put it inside the brackets of the function that had just activated, so that when the function activated I could set the variable to a new value.
Another fancy thing I like but haven’t used much is link-repeat, which is used a lot in 208 feet up the ruin wall. An example:
(set: $person to (a: “mother”, “son”, “brother”, “best friend”)) Your (link-repeat: “[(print: $person’s 1st)]<family|”)[(replace: ?family)[(set: $person to (rotated: -1, …$person))(print: $person’s 1st)]] has been kidnapped.
This is very complicated. First you declare the variable $person, which is an array (you know because it says “a:”) of 4 strings. Then there’s text outside the link-repeat (”Your has been kidnapped”). Then there’s the link-repeat. FOR SOME AWFUL REASON you have to put the print command INSIDE A STRING… family is a sort of temporary variable that I don’t understand? Basically copy someone else’s code and fuck with it until it works… I’m so sorry
uhh @garden-ghoul (& @cinquespotted maybe? am i right that you do/did twine things??) &also at other mutuals im forgetting and/or the General Public– is there a good place to look at a lot of example syntax for twine?
i am extremely a novice and trying to teach it to myself off of the harlowe manual, but there’s a lot of basic-but-cool stuff (lots of them things i saw in some of the twines in the list-of-good-twines in ghoul’s game about games, which i am not far into but enjoyed btw!) which i understand in theory the syntax for, but am actually struggling with– like literally just how to connect variable value changes with clicks and/or ifs, which is the Most Basic, but none of the sample code in the manual actually shows how to stick macros together like that really, and all my educated guesses have not panned out
i’m trying to write a poem in it for a class, mostly, so it doesn’t have to do a lot of actual game stuff and can be heavily weighted toward stupid flashy text tricks (just like, replacers etc), and it will not be tragic if this is not a readily available resource, but if there’s a good body of existing work i could just sift through when i wanted to see how to actually put the macros into practice, that would be wildly helpful, so i didn’t get bogged down in the really basic shit so much.
as may be very transparent i know literally nothing about this, or the ~community, or whatever, so um– h elp?
doing a hideously-pointless-but-satisfying/nonarduous assignment for my fellowship that basically just boils down to recording myself verbally flexing about my own science communication skills/the Central Importance of the Questions of My Narrow Subset of the Field, etc
so that’s not all that bad; and i spent rather longer than i should have this evening with someone i like a great deal, consuming the bubble tea of inevitable sin and talking, which is not good for my work schedule but was excellent for my emotional well-being
and i’ve finally sketched out a viable plan for the large and terrible assignment for the class i don’t care about, such that i will have something to actually latch on to in order to write it tomorrow afternoon, in the span of time that just opened up from the cancellation of my 3-hr work meeting; it boils down to a few thousand words but i can definitely manage that in that span of time even though i still have a lot of the research/source assembly ahead of me as well (”in that span of time” here meaning “in that span of time, plus the whole evening before/after Pointless Fellowship Assignment Discussion Activity, because i will need at least half of those three hours to go on tumblr in.” but that’s still workable.)
so that’s all fine. i thought maybe i was going to be totally fucked at this point in the week, but it’s okay, it will all be okay, i will get through to the other side of the week surviving it
also uh on a different note my therapist thinks i have adhd??????? which. i’m not. unsympathetic to, as an interpretation of my chronic, constant, and inevitable procrastination, and incredible difficulty paying attention to anything uninteresting without active outside pressure making me do it and often not even then really? also i need constant sensory stimulation to focus on things and can’t stay on one task for any length of time longer than half an hour to maybe an hour, and have never continued to own a piece of paper for more than a day in my whole damn life unless it goes in the Only Notebook and i never ever take it out until the exact moment it is needed again after which all bets are once again off
on the other hand i almost always eventually do things, and am good at calibrating my expectation of time needed for tasks to avoid working past ~1am, and can keep track of things in a calendar now. and it all causes me much more internal distress/inconvenience than it does actually disrupt my ability to deliver on my responsibilities anyway, w limited exceptions such as uh…my job, and also like, i am maybe just lazy and possessed of inherent moral rot and unconsciously gamed the diagnostic questionnaire on which she is basing part of this belief out of a desire to find a semi-external/treatable locus for my points of personal weakness. so you know. who’s to say
I don’t call it sleep anymore. I’ll risk losing something new instead—
like you lost your rosen moon, shook it loose.
But sometimes when I get my horns in a thing— a wonder, a grief or a line of her—it is a sticky and ruined fruit to unfasten from,
despite my trembling.
Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. Let me call it, a garden.
Maybe this is what Lorca meant when he said, verde que te quiero verde—
because when the shade of night comes, I am a field of it, of any worry ready to flower in my chest.
My mind in the dark is una bestia, unfocused, hot. And if not yoked to exhaustion
beneath the hip and plow of my lover, then I am another night wandering the desire field—
bewildered in its low green glow,
belling the meadow between midnight and morning. Insomnia is like Spring that way—surprising and many petaled,
the kick and leap of gold grasshoppers at my brow.
I am struck in the witched hours of want—
I want her green life. Her inside me in a green hour I can’t stop. Green vein in her throat green wing in my mouth
green thorn in my eye. I want her like a river goes, bending. Green moving green, moving.
Fast as that, this is how it happens— soy una sonámbula.
And even though you said today you felt better, and it is so late in this poem, is it okay to be clear, to say, I don’t feel good,
to ask you to tell me a story about the sweet grass you planted—and tell it again or again—
until I can smell its sweet smoke, leave this thrashed field, and be smooth.
“The desire field is a space bloomed of tension—the body’s fire, and its smoke when those fires quiet. (I am told they will quiet.) In these ever-green wind-bent star-strewn blades of worry and field, spinning until lost, I can rename the burdens of my heart—and offer the body back to language, to be carried, to be grinded into love and what is good. What if I call my anxiety desire? What if I rename this terrible thing as wanting and blossoming with touch? Why not let all bodies—my own body included—be the beloved and possible of offering me a smooth place to rest?
(“From the Desire Field” is a poem-letter to my friend Ada Limón. We have written into each other over the past few months. The space between our poems has become a kingdom I wander, along whose streets my griefs and anxieties move in new ways—they are unashamed and unafraid to be seen into. The gift of shamelessness: because I am writing only across our small kingdom, to an amiga/amor/hermana.)”
This was one heck of a thing to drop on me at 3:30 AM, Google.
now this right here is good shit. the unexpectedness of skeletor. the deadpan reaction. why this person was googling “most powerful smurf.” the fact that they did this at 3 in the morning. good post, quality post
must a sport be entertaining to watch? 