@“SlumWolf”#p136419 ok you beat me! I was hoping I wouldn‘t be last! Hopefully I’ll be able to finish this weekend
@“SlumWolf”#p136419 damn this is cool as hell. would love to hear more about the process.
Nowhere near satisfied with this, but I need to finish, since I'm nearly two weeks late.
I wrote this from the perspective of the off-screen "villain" of a novella I've been trying and failing at writing for the past year and a half. I've had so much trouble with that novella, so I thought maybe coming at it from a different angle and format might be helpful. In the end, this turned out even more painful to write than the novella's been.
Not sure how this will read outside of the context of that novella -- but at least I'm done with it now! I can finally play @SlumWolf and @Mnemogenic 's games now, which I'd been putting off until getting mine done.
Thank you everyone for participating! I'll be back soon enough to start talking about what we're going to do for the next round.
@“Mnemogenic”#p135730 ||It took me a very long time until I realized this was probably based on the prompt “defenestration of Prague”. Were you the one that submitted this prompt? Or were you as fascinated by the word “defenestration” as I am? (I definitely did not know what defenestration meant upon first seeing that prompt.) I played a few times, but definitely did not see everything. Do you have an particular passages you liked a lot that I probably missed?||
@"SlumWolf"#p136419 Like MoH, I'd also like to hear more about how you made this! Very silly and very neat.
@“saddleblasters”#p137177 It was and I was! It's such a strange flavor of mob violence. And the fact that it happened not once, but three times in the same city is bananas.
As for particular passages, probably not. The ones I find the funniest are the ones where the player enthusiastically invites their own death. Oh, and the one where you knew the mediator would be arriving is a neat path I think. But I tried to give everything more or less equal "weight", and all roads lead to going through a window.
@“saddleblasters”#p137174 I read your game! Or, at least, I got to a point where it stopped offering me new links. I like the writing style and how sort of… amorphous? the speaker felt. The specific experience of being the only person wearing a t-shirt in the winter really resonated with me.
@“Mnemogenic”#p137181 yeah, that‘s the “ending” of it. Which is an ending because I’d been stuck for several days not knowing where else to go and decided to just end it there. It wound up being a lot more linear than I planned. I kept putting in branches then finding it hard to write without assuming information from both branches. Though maybe for this particular story it wouldn‘t really matter, since it’s already filled with unexplained references to other events.
I guess to speak a little more concretely, the effect I was going for was ||that you're reading excerpts of this guy's blog, and each "choice" is a link to another one of his entries, sometimes separated in time by years. You never actually get to finish any of his writings -- you only see pieces. I didn't fully commit to this, as some of the passages clearly are part of a single narrative sequence. In my novella, the protagonist is a devoted reader of this blog (which is only described, never quoted). I wanted to see what it would feel like to actually try to write some of these blog entries. It ended up feeling quite weird.||
@“SlumWolf”#p136419 finally remembered to play this while i was sitting at my computer (the first time i tried was on my phone and i couldn't get it to run (maybe my ad blocker?).
>!definitely made me laugh that part of being in hell would be listening to Korn on a loop!<
@"saddleblasters"#p137183 oooh i like the idea of this novella. >!i recently read a Dennis Cooper book, The Sluts, and the form of it is a series of posts on an early 2000s message board. if you haven't read it, i would uhhhhh... cautiously... recommend it? tho the recommendation should come with maybe the biggest content warning of all time. the book is absolutely disgusting. anyway, i really like reading fiction that is able to capture the feeling of being on the internet. so when you finish the novella let me know!!!!!<
like Mnemogenic i liked the tone of the game. as someone who lived in a very crappy apartment for a long time, the descriptions of the living space gave me sad vibe memories. in a good way, of course.
I have a few thoughts about how to do the next round:
Two and a half weeks went by way faster than I expected. How do people feel about significantly increasing the length of each round? My thought is we'd have two month rounds where you're encouraged to submit at any time during the two months, rather than having a submission time at the end. I went through all kinds of false starts and ended up reworking my idea as a reaction to @"MoH"#1454 's early submission, which gave me a lot of inspiration. By increasing the time for each round, there'd be more room for that kind of "dialogue". This also has to do with my next thought:
I'm very curious what a Twine poem can be. I also think the more experimental nature of this format could work well for a club like this. One person tries something, another person sees that and expands on it or takes in different directions, etc. Poetry can also be much shorter than stories. If you want, you could submit several "Twine haikus" over the course of the round, rather than a single long poem.
Based on everyone's earlier comments, I think the best way to handle themes would be to 1) make them optional, and 2) keep them relatively abstract. Feel free to nominate themes (you can pick from the list @"MoH"#1454 put in the [writing prompts doc](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CzTTlfBsQsz3qCvllzvVnHd5h_93hAtH0G-cDz-VB1c/edit) if you can't think of any off the top of your head). Otherwise I'll come up with a theme myself that I think could be interesting for us to explore.
As for the start of the next round, does **November 1** sound ok? If we're going with two month long rounds, it will end on New Year's eve.
Let me know what you think!
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@“saddleblasters”#p138029 Longer rounds (two months?)
I'm okay with this. Like you mention later, there's nothing preventing someone from making multiple submissions if they're feeling productive and I think that's a good way to do things.
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@“saddleblasters”#p138029 This round’s format: Poetry
Awesome! I can't wait to see what people do. I've already got ideas percolating.
@“saddleblasters”#p138029 i like this and if i get my druthers together would love to participate this time.
I‘ll see if I can find some more poetry-like Twines over the next few days that might serve as inspiration! a cursory search has led to me to this poetry jam and this collection on itch, but I haven’t had time to read through them carefully yet.
Been away from the forums for a long time, it feels like, but this looks fun. As an absolute novice in designing games and things, I'm pretty excited to try this out.
[“IC Twine Club - Round 1 ends Oct 9th!”,“IC Twine Club Round 2: Nov 1 - Dec 31”]
Ok, let's start Round 2.
As I said already, this round's format is poetry!
For a certain type of person, the words "Twine poem" are already enough to spark the imagination and compel one towards all sorts of explorations. If you're not that type of person, then here's some things you might like to try:
These are just a handful of ideas. See @"saddleblasters"#p138036 for some links to examples of poems people have made in Twine.
This round's (optional) theme is: **Transformations**. I picked this in part to evoke [Ovid's Metamorphoses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamorphoses), but more than that, the word "transformation" makes me think of this quote from Mao Zonggang, Qing dynasty editor of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, commenting on the ripple effect changes in alliances had on the plot of the book:
“How hard to grasp – these mysterious transformations events bring.”
Reading the English translation of RotTK as a teenager, I found it interesting to hear plot developments referred to as "transformations". Much of poetry also deals with transformation in some way. This can be the many literal transformations in the Metamorphoses, or the transformations implicit in Haiku, where there is a "[cut](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kireji)" at the end of a line, contrasting two different things. For many of us living in the Northern Hemisphere, we're currently going through the season of transformations, as leaves fall from trees and temperatures drop. Other kinds of transformations might include [Sun Wukong's 72 transformations](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A749tVRILMI), or the [transformations of geometry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformation_(function)). Feel free to put other ideas in the [writing prompt google doc](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CzTTlfBsQsz3qCvllzvVnHd5h_93hAtH0G-cDz-VB1c/edit).
I think conceptual poetry is really cool and is another form that I think can speak to the poetry-shy https://poets.org/text/brief-guide-conceptual-poetry
@“saddleblasters”#300 i finally played your game. i liked it, i think the main word i would use to describe it is “impressionistic.” you're correct that i felt some context was missing, but that disorienting feeling added to the tone of the story.
from a gameplay perspective, i think the content was well integrated into the form. it felt more like a spiral than a branching path, which i also liked.
We‘re about a month in to round 2, so I thought a check-in would be worthwhile. How’s everybody doing? I started a project, but I‘m not sure I want to finish it. I’m trying to write poetry in a way I‘ve never done before and it’s coming across awkwardly.
@“Mnemogenic”#p143106 i saw some of the really cool poetry twine games, got intimidated, and put it on the back burner.
the last game i made was really fun but took a lot of effort, so i won’t be able to make another one over the holidays with travel etc. but mark my words i am NOT done making twine games!!!
@“Mnemogenic”#p143106 I started a project too, but had a lot of trouble with it. I might just put it aside for now and try a simpler idea.
My friend and I are doing [this visual novel jam](https://itch.io/jam/winter-vn-jam-2023) for the month, so that will take up a lot of time. i still want to try a twine poem though, so i'll figure something out