So I’ve been plinking along at a Twine game (which we shall call The General’s Bride), as a break from the Big Intended-For-Spring-Thing Inform 7 Project (which we shall call Maupertuis). I haven’t actually played around with Twine since Twine1 and SugarCube were the default format, so getting used to Harlowe has been an adventure. I must say the information out there is not really the most organized, so I’ve been relying on haphazard Google searches and forum browsing to learn the ropes. It’s been interesting. Full disclosure: I started this project when I was sick and the idea of one-sentence hyperlinks seemed accessible to my needs at the time. This has, of course, gotten completely out of hand in the meantime.
The General’s Bride–as the name might indicate–is a romance game: something similar to a four-route visual novel making limited use of variable tracking in order to produce four endings through three choices. I’m trying to keep it short and manageable, for purposes of learning Twine through a beginner’s project. That’s… uhh…
… that’s going.
Anyway, writing something in the romance genre with Twine is interesting because I haven’t actually seen many multi-route romances in this format before: even though it really does resemble Ren’Py in a lot of respects in execution. I’ve seen a lot of artsy psychological explorations of a single relationship, or of a relationship with oneself, or both, but almost never the kind of date-your-way-through-a-decision-tree you commonly see in ChoiceScript games. So here is my visual novel without the visuals, coming soon! A short dating sim without the dating. It involves muslin, pelisses, and military rule.
Orestes Drunk and Pylades Fasting 