Finally writing one of these before starting in on building the damn thing.
I think a big question here is going to be fumbling around my understanding of what makes something “a Twine”. Because I don’t want to purely use the tool itself to build some other thing (like a CYOA or a text adventure or concrete poetry or whatever), I want to make “a Twine”. That means trying to leverage the tool in a “typical” way somehow. To me right now the core of it is linked passages and cycling links, thats what I most thinking of when I think of Twine. But I’m aware that my experience with Twine and Twines isn’t massive, so I’m not claiming this will be particularly accurate. I just do think it’s an interesting question to ask - what is a typical instance of something a tool can make? In some cases it feels easier (Inform 7 is so structured for instance) and in others far more abstract (beyond 2D what is a Phaser game?).
(So this is a question about the culture around a tool, something that Inform 7 made me think about and led me to want vaguely puzzle-feeling elements for instance.)
When I run these kinds of platform ports (whether it’s v r 1 in Bitsy or Desert Golfing in Breakout) it’s important to ask what affordances are provided by the underlying system, the destination for the translation, and how they can relate specifically to what you’re trying to translate. So in this case the question becomes one of asking how Twine’s affordances can correspond to the punishments.
We know the punishments are eternal and usually cyclical, so it becomes about asking how Twine can represent these kinds of concepts. And, because it’s me, ideally I want to ask how it can represent these concepts in different ways, rather than using the exact same “trick” over and over. I’ve done some initial research on this by reading all of Twine 2’s macros and pulling out things I think can be useful. That’s available in the process journal already.
(So this is “just another” translation study for me, in part.)