Adventures in Twine: the Unicorn Trilogy
Although I have mentioned it elsewhere on social media, I haven’t discussed my games here much. Over the last few years, I’ve been dabbling in making hypertext games and stories using Twine, a wonderfully simple and flexible platform. It proved the perfect tool for making tiny little mini-games, light-weight and playable in a couple of minutes. Bearing in mind, of course, that the several minutes of gameplay took several hours to write, code and test.
It took some time before I was comfortable enough with Twine to create something that I could call a complete product. Once I did, and uploaded the final product to the lovely philome.la, the page seemed a little desolate. I looked at it and wanted it to be full of links to different games! Well, creating a portfolio of games takes some time and effort, even if they’re the sort of games that can be completed inside of six hours. But if a writer is not going to be realistic about their goals, they can at least be brave for them.
My first complete Twine adventures, the “Unicorn Trilogy”:
- “Box of Unicorns“, a cute cotton-candy colored romp where you collect small colorful unicorns to no apparent end.
- “Box of Unicorns: the Gritty Reboot” a.k.a. Unicorn Hunt, a low-rent grimdark post-apocalyptic parody, based on code almost identical to its predecessor, but with the added possibility of a bad end.
- “Unicorn Wars“, a heroic pseudo-epic in which you are called to defend unicorn-kind against sundry enemies. Slightly more complex gameplay with a countdown and a bad end.
Hazel Gold 