Thanks to everyone who checked out MARPO during the 5th Lithobreakers jam! 

Originally I wanted to try making a text-based MUD like ApsisMUD for this jam, and I spent like a week on it before ultimately deciding it was too much for me to do in a month. But since by then I had landed on a text-only format, Twine seemed like a good fit at the time. (Disclaimer: I had never used Twine before, but, like, it's text, right?) 

Luckily I landed on SugarCube early on, the version of Twine that uses JQuery. That's good because I'd guess that 75% of this game's functionality ended up being JQuery, and only 25% SugarCube's built-in functionality. I trusted SugarCube to play the sound effects, refresh the sidebar, and display the bottomtext, but that's about it. Everything else is a monstrous "initialize" passage with a hundred JQuery functions. Do not recommend. Coding in the Twine application is not fun.

So you know how default Twine links move you from passage to passage? Mine don't do that. Instead I have a bunch of SugarCube <<link>> tags that trigger a function, reload the same passage with some variable changed, or swap out the bottomtext (most of which are, in of themselves, passages). That's why I ended up needing 160 passages. Below is my Twine workspace, where you can kinda see the shape of the map, and also that part on the right where I decide to use Twine as intended for a little bit.

All of the art was originally pixel art that got fed into a Python script that essentially turned the .pngs into .txts, which I then pasted into Twine.

The script had a dictionary of colors and corresponding words, and would add in the Twine links where needed. The resulting .txts are monstrous.

They look even worse in Twine.

But it is a lot easier to see some of the clickable areas.

Thanks again to everyone who played this weird lil' game! I wanted to try making a sound-based adventure game, and there's absolutely more I could've done if I hadn't spent so much time trying to wrestle Twine into being something it's not.

P.S. I just noticed that I didn't put the spaceship emoji in any of my jam games' descriptions to denote that the ideas are free to use. That's fixed now, in case anyone wants to borrow a horny angel or two.

P.P.S. The cover image for this post is the Signmother, as recognition of the fact that halfway through the game I went "wait how can Plaige read signs" and my solution was to make an invasive species of talking signs that appear around Ganglion.