interactive novel using twine/twee

[ianmart1n]

found out about this via my twitter feed and it seems like a really interesting project!

[ianmart1n]

so, I changed my mind about what i wanted to do about fifty times but I settled on generating an interactive story about returning to the small town where you grew up, and uniting estranged family members for some kind of life event (a graduation, a funeral, a baby shower). the output was twee source code, which could be imported into the program Twine.

i didn't give myself very much time to actually work on this so the story is not done, and i had more ideas (getting stories/descriptions through web trawling, changing peoples' minds about going, better word lists)... but i like the direction it was heading and it's okay in its current state.

Just now i decided to rewrite the existing code in a valiant attempt to have a "finished product" before the month was up, so i now have a way to generate novels about people rattling off random metaphors about life concepts (e.g. "Lindsay said that Death is like a dessert.") That style of metaphor was my favourite bit of the interactive story I was working on because it had some interesting output. just recently i found some good word lists for names and nouns so that was nice.

The source code (for both my twine story and the metaphor book) is up on my website along with some sample output here.

it was my first time doing this event and my second time really using python for anything, and it was a lot of fun. this has me excited to do more word generation stuff!

[MichaelPaulukonis]

Could you add those resources to the resources issue?

I don't know what the licensing is on that particular site, so you might want to check out corpora

[hugovk]

The name lists are sitting alongside some password crackers. The other site's noun list says:

Can I share this?
Yes, give this list to whomever you want. Please leave the list plain (as in, noun entries only, no identifying marks, disclaimers etc) for easy use.

[MichaelPaulukonis]

I've been looking at this, again; it's growing on me, as is Twine.

One of the other Twine submissions had a LOT of very, very short pages. And was annoying. And not very Twine-y (it was a translation of something else, and acknowledged as such; it's its own thing, so that's not a complaint).

What I like about this is that it... works? It works as a Twine. The "pages" are long enough, and make a certain amount of sense. And the connections make sense.

Sheesh. This might be one of the more sensical entries this year (NOT A COMPLAINT).

[ianmart1n]

thank you! i tried to make sure i was really using Twine's linking in how the story played out, so i tried to choose a format/plot that could get a lot of mileage out of connections, making sure those connections helped the player/reader progress through the story. nice to hear that worked out okay.

[MichaelPaulukonis]

If you see this in time, it's still not to late to enter the TwinyJam - http://boingboing.net/2015/04/06/twine-jam.html