Hello!

For this jam, I'll be making a twine game with a linear story following the struggles of Milie-34, a clone made for war who must learn to cope with their trauma and their aversion for touch, while reconnecting with the humanity that used to be denied to them. As a trainee in the military branch of the foreign nation that welcomed them, Milie's story will focus on their relationship with Huan-Yue Liang, a fellow trainee and self-proclaimed rival who sees Milie's previous training and experience as a challenge. As the two get to know each other and connect, the player will have a few choices allowing them to determine whether or not Milie is okay with touching Huan-Yue or being touched by her, in a few different contexts. Neither options will ever be presented negatively, as the choices will be about Milie's agency, rather than any "make the right decision" type of choices.

All the characters in the story will be asexual, though of course the story is centered on Milie and Huan-Yue, who will be the ones discussing and exchanging on their pretty different and opposed perspectives.

I expect a few challenges when it will come to writing this down. First of all, I don't identify as ace myself, so while I'm confident in my writing abilities, I would be more comfortable having someone who's ace taking a look at the story before I publish it for a jam centered on that very subject. If you're interested, let me know (you can message me on the Discord server if you wish), otherwise I'll probably ask around on Discord once I've finished writing the first complete draft of the game.

The second challenge that I'm slightly worried about is the amount of lore I need to introduce to explain the context that the characters inhabit, even if I try to keep it to the relevant bare minimum. Ironically, I never worried about this for my previous game, The Wolf's Shephard, where this was the opposite of a problem because its fantasy lore was very "personal" in nature, and could be introduced piece by piece to directly inform the characters' relationships. With this new project, the sci-fi lore has to mention things like the vague history of entire nations just to set-up certain scenes and basic characters introductions, and without necessarily immediate emotional pay-offs, which makes TWS's efficient approach to lore difficult to emulate. Anyway, I'll continue to think about this as I write in the following month.

Edit: ... Oh yeah, third challenge: I still haven't found a title for the game!

Good news, the game now has a title: Stormtouched

I'm not gonna talk about its meaning too much here. I already did on the Discord, and I'm hoping the story will make it clear enough as it is read.

Besides this, writing is going along well. I tend to have a hard estimating how long a finished game is going to be, and consequently, how much is left to write, but I've probably written between a third or a half of the game so far.

And finally, I've spent all my writing time today massively rewriting an early portion. They say you shouldn't get too attached to an idea and I guess they are right because I decided the game would work better if I cut one of the two secondary characters out of the story entirely and instead fused their role into the remaining one. Because of this, I had to rewrite a lot of exposition, but I already think it works a lot better, with less unnecessary info to dump on the player, and putting more emotional connections with the narrator's feelings. Plus, the remaining character has a lot more leeway for appearing regularly (and now has more personality), and this will help me set things up for the main characters when needed for the rest of the story.

So, progress report: Stormtouched is currently at 8500 words and I would say I have a quarter left of the game to write (or potentially a little less than that). I've also divided the game into four distinct chapters, and to compensate for a lack of saving system, the title screen has links to the beginning of each chapter. There's exactly ten days left to the Jam and all is left is for me to write chapter 4 and edit/polish/play-test the whole game. I should be finished in time at the pace I've been going, but I'll unfortunately not have the time to have the finished game be beta-read before the deadline like I said I wanted in the first post of this thread. 

But! I've made a replacement for that plan with a quick demo for Stormtouched that I initially made in order to gather feedback on the game's representation of asexuality and aromanticism, but I figured, hey, this can work as a demo for the game in general, so here it is for anyone who wants to check it out!

I recommend playing it before reading the rest of this post if you want a clear picture of the mechanic I want to talk about and that I've tried using for the first time. For now, I'm calling it the arrow mechanic. It allows me to control the pace at which sentences, or even parts of a sentence, are revealed, and has proved a very useful tool for helping me set up the mood of various emotional beats, or create suspense as the narrator unravels an information or their feelings. Initially, I implemented this mechanic to make the game more accessible to people with ADHD, based on what Nadia did in her own game for Yuri Jam 2017 "can you say my name again." But in the end, I also took inspiration from visual novels where the text is often revealed sentence by sentence in order to achieve the effects described above.

The way it works is extremely simple, the code look something like this (I'm working with Harlowe, I don't know if it would be any different with something else):

(link: ">>>")[Some text. (link: ">>>")[Even more text.(link: ">>>")[  [[This is the usual link in Twine leading to a new node]]  ]]]

The more "links", the more closing hooks at the end of the entire sequence. 

Also, it makes the code looks like (even more) garbage, but I like to press the Enter key just before each arrow (within the "") in order to put all the arrows in a relatively fixed position at the start of the next line, under the current sentence. Otherwise, each arrow will be right at the end of the currently shown text, making it move horizontally a lot and requiring more mouse movements of the player.

Now, the initially unforeseen complication of this seemingly simple code is that it's everywhere as I've implemented it, so it requires a lot of polishing to do when editing. It's easy to forget a space between two sentences, or to misjudge how a line should be paced, necessitating to add or remove links (hopefully without forgetting to adjust the number of closing hooks at the end) and play-test the entire sequence again until it feels just right. It took me around two hours just polishing this demo, and the full game is going to be about 15 times bigger than this, so yeah. The way I use that mechanic turns out to have a noticeable cost in time. 

Also, this makes the implementation of If Statements harder, as I have to pace them within the confines of the links' hooks. Because every link is necessary for the player to progress the text, I can't have a link be optional within a block of text added by a If Statement. The way I dodge this problem is by making as many micro If Statements as necessary within the hooks of each affected block of text that is added by a link.

Also², while I find this mechanic very useful for the effects I've talked about, and hopefully the increased accessibility it brings to the game, it might not be usable in every type of narrative structure possible for a Twine game. For instance, it wouldn't work in one of my previous work, The Ghost's Drum, which has a very cyclic structure where the player goes through the same node several times and doesn't need to re-read the entire text of that node every time and is instead expected to directly scroll down to the choices at the bottom.

Here we go, Stormtouched is out and complete!

This is makes it my fourth Twine game and my favorite project so far. I feel like I took things a step further compared to my previous projects in terms of presentation, but also on the delivery of the themes. Plus, I finished just in time, which is nice. 

I have a bunch of thoughts about how the themes of this game played out in the end. I wrote these thoughts down twice differently before deleting them each time. Once in the author's word inside the game, and a second time here. What stops me from sharing these thoughts is that it makes me feel like I'm telling people what they should think of the themes of the story instead of letting them make their own opinion about the game by playing it. What I'll say is that I very much like the story I wrote and I'm confident in the strength and sincerity of the themes and their delivery, even if not everything is quite what I originally aimed to do with this project.

Looking forward, this project has inspired me into continuing to take things "a step further", and it's probably about time I move on from Twine games and on to visual novels, which have both a personal and global appeal that Twine games just cannot match. I came up with an idea for an episodic project while finishing up Stormtouched that I want to try making a pilot for in Renpy. Having an actual project to put together will be a good motivation for finally learning it too, and if it takes a satisfying form, well, I'll consider various "steps further" to take from there.

Anyway, a big thanks to Metaparadox for organizing this jam, it gave me the motivation to make my project for Stormtouched happen and I'm glad I participated.