17 May 2021
Making Games In The Woods With Twine
The Urban Tree Festival got off to an active start on Saturday, including launch events for our tree themed Wikipedia edit-thon and our Games in the Woods game jam. If editing Wikipedia to add and improve articles about trees sounds like your jam, please do join our Urban Tree Wikithon dashboard (passcode: vmqytwdr) if you haven't already, so your edits will count towards our stats for #wiktreepedia tracked activity. However, if making games and writing interactive stories is more up your tree-lined avenue, then read on.
Games In the Woods is an online jam running all this week, until midnight on Sunday 23rd May. You are welcome to join alone or in a team to create digital and analogue games, interactive fiction, web comics, board games, escape games, card games – anything you want! We especially encourage creative re-use of images from the British Library’s Flickr collection of digitised 19th century books, do check out these online Flora and Fauna galleries. There is also a fabulous curated selection of wildlife and environmental sound recordings picked by Cheryl Tipp, available via this SoundCloud playlist, which you can use in your creations.
At the jam's launch event, Ash Green gave a brilliant Bitsy tutorial (we blogged about Bitsy last week), and Marion Tessier shared our Games in the Woods Luography and tree themed BoardGameGeek Geeklist, as we appreciate not everyone may want to make games, but lots of people enjoy playing them. If you have a favourite game about trees, please do tell us.
We also provided an introduction to Twine, which is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories. Slides from the launch event can be found here and here.
To get an idea of what you can do with Twine, we suggest reading some free tree themed interactive stories, which others have created using the tool. Both The Old Woman in the Wood and Through the Woods Demo are part of an itch.io collection of tree themed games on itch.io that we have curated to inspire Games in the Woods jam participants.
On Saturday we also watched this useful video; Making Interactive Fiction with Twine, by Matt Allen from Closed Forum, which explains:
- Folder structures
- Making passages and links
- Hidden passage links
- Background, fonts and font size
- Style sheets
- Adding images, music and video
- Timed text and timed links
- Variables and if else statements
If you are interested in trying out Twine to write an interactive story, then these online resources can help you to get started:
- The Twine Cookbook, which contains documentation, tips, and examples for using Twine
- A Total Beginner’s Guide to Twine 2.1 by Adam Hammond, which includes these useful videos:
- A Total Beginner’s Guide to HTML and CSS by Adam Hammond
- Twine for Beginners by Damon L. Wakes
- The Twine® Grimoire, Vol. 1, by G.C. Baccaris
- Video showing how to Publish Your Twine Game to Itch.io, by Eric Guadara
If you're new to using itch.io and participating in game jams, below is some advice about uploading and sharing your game. If you've created a game that is saved as a html file you can upload and allow people to play it on itch.io in their web browser, rather than getting people to download the file to play it. Both Bitsy and Twine, which we featured in the launch event save the games they produce as html files. To get the game to play in the browser tick the "This game will be played in the Browser" box underneath the filename you uploaded. If it's a game that can't be run in the browser leave the "This game will be played in the browser" box unticked.
When you upload a file and edit the game information page, it defaults to saving the page in draft. To publish it so everyone can see and play or download your game, select the "public" option under "visibility & access". To submit your game to the Games in the Woods game jam:
- Upload your game
- Then click on the Submit your project button
- Then select your game from the drop-down list that appears
- Click Submit
Good luck and have fun, we are looking forward to seeing, reading and playing your games.
This post is by Stella Wisdom (@miss_wisdom) with input from Ash Green (@ggnewed), Cheryl Tipp (@CherylTipp) and Marion Tessier from Kingston Libraries (@kinglibheritage).