Post Mortem & Twine Garden

Hey gang!

Thanks for playing You're Going to be Fine (Branches)! If you haven't....you probably should before reading this, because there are gonna be hella spoilers. If you have, I'd really love to hear what you thought about it. 

Post Mortem:

So...why this? Why did I make this game, and what is it actually about? Basically, Branches started out as an exercise in learning Twine. The first draft was very stream of consciousness typing, and honestly the words haven't changed a lot since that first draft. Branches was always a sad, lesbian re-imagining of Beauty & the Beast. In this version, the Beast and the Enchantress are sort of the same person, and Beauty is yet another in a long line of imprisoned Beauties. This Beauty has managed to break the enchantment in her mind, and has cursed the Beast to remain a Beast forever - by eating the rose and running away. However, the Beast has some tricks up her sleeve, and Beauty may never truly escape.

So what did change during development? The art, and the code. I created the cover art when I made the first draft of Branches, and that's stayed the same. But once I started polishing it up, I realised it needed a little more oomph. So I replaced the undo/redo buttons on the sidebar with the rose photo, and added a forest landscape silhouette to the last two pages (poem & credits).  I've also hidden the sidebar on the title/end pages. To make things appear on only some pages, I've used Twine's "tag" system - by tagging passages different things, you can access those particular passages in the stylesheet by using [tags="your-tag].

I also played around with the passage links - instead of always leading to a new passage, they sometimes add to the current passage, and sometimes the links vanish once you've clicked them. I also used a trick from Leethe to make the links to the current passage use the "dissolve" transition, so instead of just popping in, the text slowly appears, matching the transition to a brand new passage. I think these little tricks added a lot to the mood of the game, honestly. 

I've attached the Twine Garden, some of the stylesheet & some of the code to this post, so you can get an idea of how it was all set up. If you want to more, just send me a message. 

What's next? 

I'm working on the sequel/side story to this, called Let Her Leave (Roots). I'm hoping to finish polishing it up in the next week or so & post it then.

Thanks for reading!