{"id":2559,"date":"2012-11-15T18:26:18","date_gmt":"2012-11-16T02:26:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/?p=2559"},"modified":"2017-03-22T20:36:10","modified_gmt":"2017-03-23T03:36:10","slug":"ifcomp-2012-valkyrie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/2559","title":{"rendered":"IFComp 2012: Valkyrie"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This is the first game on my queue of the several written in Twine. I didn&#8217;t leave this so late deliberately; the Comp&#8217;s official random number generator gave them to me all bunched up at the end. Spoilers follow the break. (The judging period for the Comp only lasts for a few more hours, but I will abide by the spoiler rules up to the end, and longer if necessary.)<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>So, this game was written collaboratively by three students in a &#8220;Game-based Learning Developmental English course&#8221; at a community college in Colorado. I don&#8217;t want to be too snarky about this, but I&#8217;d say it looks like a collaboration between students. For one thing, the seams are easily visible. The very first choice splits the game into three branches &#8212; a choice of character class, basically, warrior\/wizard\/thief. These three branches all have a plot in common, concerning Norse gods recruiting you to find a missing necklace, but they contradict each others&#8217; details, and differ wildly in writing style: The Thief&#8217;s story is terse, giving a sentence or two between choices, while the wizard&#8217;s launches into about a full page of prose with every click.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, the whole thing is kind of goofy, in a way that suggests that the authors at least enjoyed writing it (except maybe the one who handled the thief, who may have been trying to get it done with quickly). I think my favorite bit was an offhand mention of the wizard using a magic spell to shrink her breakfast so she could eat it faster and get on with the adventure. That&#8217;s the sort of thing I&#8217;d expect from the unfettered imagination of a child.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s pretty much a failure at introducing me to the capabilities of Twine, however. (Not that this was the authors&#8217; aim.) As far as I can tell, this work does nothing that couldn&#8217;t be done in static HTML. In fact, it doesn&#8217;t even really take full advantage of static HTML&#8217;s powers: with only a couple of exceptions (all the more noticeable for being exceptional), it doesn&#8217;t embed links in the text, instead putting them at the end, like in a bound-paper <em>Choose Your Own Adventure<\/em> book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is the first game on my queue of the several written in Twine. I didn&#8217;t leave this so late deliberately; the Comp&#8217;s official random number generator gave them to me all bunched up at the end. Spoilers follow the break. (The judging period for the Comp only lasts for a few more hours, but [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[84,53,548,55],"class_list":["post-2559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-if","tag-if","tag-ifcomp","tag-ifcomp-2012","tag-twine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2559"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5126,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2559\/revisions\/5126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}