Foolish Earth Creatures: April 2025
As you probably know if you follow my dev diaries, I write my games in Twine, which is a system for making choice-based stories that run in a web browser. Twine has a visual editor where the story is represented with boxes linked by arrows.
But actually, I haven't used the Twine program itself for years. For all my games since They Will Not Return—including Beyond the Chiron Gate—I've used Tweego.
Tweego is a command-line compiler that takes a bunch of text files and builds them into a Twine story. This means that you lose the visual map with the boxes and arrows, but you get to write your code in any text editor you like. I use Notepad++.
For Chiron Gate, which is based on choosing the next passage from a huge list based on complicated code, the visual story map would have been actively unhelpful. For more conventional branching narrative games (They Will Not Return and Cyborg Arena) it might have been helpful, but for me the ability to use a more fully featured text editor and arrange my files into folders outweighed the benefit of the story map.
For Foolish Earth Creatures I'm using Tweego and Notepad++ again, but this time I'm also using the Twine 2 program to make a separate Twine story to act as an outline for the main one—a technique that doesn't really need to be called anything but that I have nevertheless decided to call Twineception.
Here's what that looks like at the moment:
Each passage of the outline story represents a “scene” of a dozen or so passages in the real story, which I write in a single text file. They're colour-coded based on their status: green for first draft complete, red for only a simple placeholder, etc.. Each scene is small enough that I can keep its structure in my head, and then the outline story helps me keep track of how the scenes link together.
The overall structure is what Sam Kabo Ashwell calls a “Branch and Bottleneck”. (If you were to include all the invidivual passages and not just the outline, it would look more like a “Quest”.) Every successful playthrough will go through a similar overall story, but the details of what happen depend heavily on your choices, and there might be very little content shared between two playthroughs.
As you can see from the amount of red on the story map, I have a lot of writing still to do. The outline will also likely change, although probably not radically. (One downside of using a separate Twine story as my outline is that I have to remember to keep it updated when I change the structure in the real story.)
Hopefully I'll have changed some of these boxes from red to green by this time next month.
Can our hero wield the power of Twineception, or will the complexity of the project defeat him? Find out in next month's developer diary!