A short HTML Visual Novel developed in Twine for CRWR 213 – Introduction to Writing for the New Media. Utilizes some JavaScript and CSS to work around an otherwise limited software for Visual Novel capabilities, which I took upon as a challenge. The story contains 4 endings, though only one ending can be considered “good.”
NOTE: Not recommended to play on mobile devices. Can also be played on itch.io.
The final assignment for this course was to make a simple, text-based “story game” in Twine. However, I’d always wanted to make a visual novel at some point, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to do so, even if it was beyond the scope of the course requirements. With permission from the professor to proceed, I began my Visual Novel journey.
The biggest roadblock was inherent to the project: Working with Twine itself. Twine was not designed to make Visual Novels, only text-based stories with some image/video/audio functionality. To combat this obstacle I utilized the SugarCube story format, which employs a basic low-code format that allows for extension with CSS and JavaScript, allowing me to put my coding skills to use to customize the layout of the story to resemble a traditional visual novel. I performed lengthy research on pre-existing templates and guides on how to make Twine-based visual novels, referring to existing stories and macros built for the purpose of VN functionality in Sugarcube.
Working with a limited criteria scope, I ended up with ~30 scenes in the story, with some branching/converging paths. Most paths resulted in bad endings, with the one good ending only coming about through talking to characters in a certain order, which unlocks an extra choice in one dialogue branch that would not be visible otherwise. Given more time, I would have liked to expand the game a lot further, with more branching paths, endings, and character moments. I also would have wanted to add more dynamic character sprites, with poses beyond just the static frontward facing positions. As you can see from my character draft below, I specifically had the arms as separate parts where I could’ve drawn more variations had time allowed. It would have also been useful to overhaul the navigation more, allowing a player to simply click anywhere in the dialogue box to proceed rather than rely on strict buttons at the bottom.
