Tag: garden-ghoul

twine question

garden-ghoul:

unopenablebox:

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

thank you!!!

idionkisson replied to your post:
who wants to rec me relaxing/distracting things to…

ANYTHING i read rewires my brain, that’s just like. literally what reading is to me. it’s like a magic charm that wears off after only a little while, and the only way i can back to it is to read more of whatever the thing in question is…i have no idea if this makes ANY sense, it’s super hard for me to articulate bc it’s so innate

garden-ghoul said: 

ugh what DOESN’T completely rewire my brain. I literally can’t even listen to music 95% of the time for this reason. the one thing I read specifically to rewire my brain is “If I” by psilent on ao3, which is a story about rocket raccoon escaping from a torture facility and trying to make a life as a guy with OCD. it’s very cathartic for me because of the progression from terrible to okay
when I was younger I’d read YA books and especially if they were written in first person I would spend like half a day legitimately thinking I was the protagonist? I think this is a DID thing

yeah i get very– i think of it as an altered state of consciousness almost, it’s more dramatic than being drunk and… ok probably not actively more of a change than being full acute sleep deprivation depressed, but i notice it more bc it’s a non-habitual thing/has an obvious external source.

at its most dramatic i feel like i’m both talking differently and processing emotion differently; i associate it with being almost manic/euphoric, funny in even weirder and more high-concept ways than i usually am, and sometimes with phrasing emotional and social concepts in a technical/unecessarily sciencey way if what i was reading leant itself to that. these are all states i can kind of access/behaviors i have regardless, but it feels qualitatively different and is clearly induced by what i was reading. i usually really enjoy it, though sometimes it totally rearranges my priorities in ways that– don’t usually have significant repercussions, but certainly can be inconvenient if i’ve just rewritten myself to be very strongly into manic makeup experiments and sweeping statements about the structure of reality, and what i need is to finish my dev bio assignment.

mostly it happens to me with fiction, especially fiction with a really strong, distinct, unusual diction, especially funny/witty diction. it’s happened with nonfiction pieces, more rarely, partly because standard science writing is a mode of thinking i have to engage anyway and so it doesn’t feel distinct i think in the way . it happens with long backreads of people’s blogs pretty frequently, which is actually my easiest go-to if i want to create specific aesthetic/subject-matter interests in myself: i have a mental list of people whose blogs to backread if what i want is “very funny, smart about character-driven fiction” vs “significant introspective access and high-vulnerability lyricism” vs “highest-integrity art opinions and mean jokes” vs “quantitative interests and gender shitposting” vs… etc. it’s actually super useful, or would be if i didn’t occasionally derail myself from actually writing the thing i wanted to write (or whatever) because i got distracted by the thing i was reading to put my brain in the right mode.

relatedly, if you (general you, not just you two) see a chicago ip address reading 20-200 pages of your blog, it is very plausible that it is me, doing that. pls feel free to let me know if i should stop, i absolutely will. i try to limit myself to ppl who seem to have a more archival/backread-encouraging ethos anyway, but it’s possible i’ve misread someone’s blog intentions and if so i am genuinely sorry