I must have been 10 or 11 years old when I "designed" my first video game. And by designing I mean: I created a character, and then mapped out the levels by hand with a biro in a graph paper notebook. After all, Super Mario Land was my favourite game, and it was my dream to recreate it with my own little jump and run game. Of course this idea never went anywhere beyond my notebook, but a dream was born: Make my own video game.

Sidenote: I called this character PIMF (no idea why). Only later did I learn that Pimpfe was the name for the youngest among the Hitler youth. Yikes. Dodged a bullet there. (But I still love the general idea of the game: the objective was to deliver flowers to the girl you love).

A couple of years later, after hours upon hours of playing Secret of Mana, Secret of Evermore, Terranigma, Chrono Trigger, Lufia II and the like, I wanted to make my own 16-bit style JRPG. 

Again, I mapped out levels in my notebook, but this time around, I also started writing stories for these game ideas. One was called Legend Of The Crown and followed a young boy destined to save the empire. 

Another one was called Solaris and followed a young boy destined to save the empire. 

Another... you get the idea.

None of these ever happened beyond my imagination and notes. 

For one, I stopped writing the stories after a couple of dozen pages because being a teenager got in the way.

But more importantly, my religious upbringing threw a spanner in the works.

I grew up in a Christian fundamentalist cult and I was raised to become a faithful follower that would devote his life to worship and proselytizing. I knew my parents would never support a career that would enable me to create video games. So I gave up on this dream before I ever had the chance to pursue it.

But there was something else I was good at: ideas, and putting these ideas to paper. Apart from video games, I loved books, and another dream of mine was to write books. 

After leaving the cult in my early 20s, I started writing. Years later, this resulted in a couple of books that actually got published, including a national bestseller in Germany. Definitely a dream come true.

But there was still this other dream of mine: to create a video game.

In 2018, I stumbled upon Twine, an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories. Its pitch had me right away:

You don’t need to write any code to create a simple story with Twine, but you can extend your stories with variables, conditional logic, images, CSS, and JavaScript when you're ready.

Twine publishes directly to HTML, so you can post your work nearly anywhere. Anything you create with it is completely free to use any way you like, including for commercial purposes.

I was intrigued. While I couldn't code, I was pretty good at HTML, CSS, and even had a basic grasp of JavaScript (just like French, I am able to read it better than I speak/write it).

Was this finally a tool that would led me realize my dream?

It was. Despite my day job being something entirely else, this gave me the chance to finally explore game creation.

Six years later, I have two full games created in Twine to my credit (which in total have over 100k plays across several platforms). 

I've just started my next, most ambitious (Twine) project to date. There are at least half a dozen prototypes and incomplete projects, too.

I am sure there are many people out there who don't consider Twine games real games. And that's fine. 

But for me Twine was (and is) the chance to transfer my writing skills to something interactive, at the very least game-like and hone my game writing / narrative direction skills.

In the future, I can see myself exploring Godot, GDevelop, Ren.py and other engines. But for now, I am not quite finished with Twine. With every new game it's my aim to explore and stretch the boundaries of Twine, and see how far I can go. I feel: Before I try something new, I want to really master what I am good at now. And I simply haven't put my 10k hours into Twine yet.

I am every excited to see how my next project goes, and I will be sharing devlogs soon. If you're interested, please consider following here on itch, or on Threads and Instagram.