Hi all, first time poster and Twine newbie!
Long ago, I was the writer for a massive multi-ended game. The whole thing racked up to 400-500k words, so pretty much the Lord of the Rings trilogy. There were paths for people who wanted to persuade, lie, be jerks, be nice, and the story would branch and bottleneck a lot to compensate. There were companion NPCs, multiple endings, and a LOT of flags stitching things together.
Then, the game team fell apart, and I was left with a gigantic mass of CYOA text and no coder to put it into a workable format. But then, a few weeks ago, I realized there was Twine. Why not revive this game and put it into a playable format so it's not a total waste?
It's early days, but things are looking promising. Got a working combat system working using array variables entered in for each enemy, so I can keep all the combat stuff in one place. (If you're duplicating stuff a lot, you're probably doing it wrong, right?) But even at this early stage, I'm seeing potential problems in the number of passages and criss-crossing paths that are manageable now, but may become unwieldy in the future.
Tl;dr: I'm basically asking if anyone knows any time-saving tips and tricks for Harlowe for a big complicated project. Things like the (history:) and (display:) macros are already saving me a lot of time. I haven't figured out how to have a single passage contain multiple passages worth of story and rotate these on link-clicks, though.
So, what tricks have been life-safers for you guys?
Long ago, I was the writer for a massive multi-ended game. The whole thing racked up to 400-500k words, so pretty much the Lord of the Rings trilogy. There were paths for people who wanted to persuade, lie, be jerks, be nice, and the story would branch and bottleneck a lot to compensate. There were companion NPCs, multiple endings, and a LOT of flags stitching things together.
Then, the game team fell apart, and I was left with a gigantic mass of CYOA text and no coder to put it into a workable format. But then, a few weeks ago, I realized there was Twine. Why not revive this game and put it into a playable format so it's not a total waste?
It's early days, but things are looking promising. Got a working combat system working using array variables entered in for each enemy, so I can keep all the combat stuff in one place. (If you're duplicating stuff a lot, you're probably doing it wrong, right?) But even at this early stage, I'm seeing potential problems in the number of passages and criss-crossing paths that are manageable now, but may become unwieldy in the future.
Tl;dr: I'm basically asking if anyone knows any time-saving tips and tricks for Harlowe for a big complicated project. Things like the (history:) and (display:) macros are already saving me a lot of time. I haven't figured out how to have a single passage contain multiple passages worth of story and rotate these on link-clicks, though.
So, what tricks have been life-safers for you guys?