Complexity when using Twine

[OldSailor]

Hello. I'm making an HTML game with Twine. The problem is that I'm creating a lot of passages, not only for the story, but for many things like sex scenes and preferences and this makes the project quite complicated. Passages are popping out from everywhere. No matter how much I try to keep it controlled in a linear symmetry, it doesn't work after a while. If you have any solutions to make this simpler and minimize the complexity, I'm grateful in advance, t

 

[Alcahest]

I reuse the passages to keep the number down. For each location, I only have two passages -- the location itself and the event passage where I add all the events for that location. Essentially, I have a macro that calls the same passage over and over with the current event step.

Currently, 1.5 years after the release of the game, I still only have 114 passages, and about 20 of those are for widgets and other special stuff and the rest are actual game passages.

The other tip is to stop using Twine and start using Tweego. Then you can keep all passages as files and manage them with folders or however you want to do it if you have many passages. Since I have so few passages, I just keep everything in the same folder.

 

[Affogado]

Seconding the use of Tweego. My project is narrative in nature rather than sandboxy/location based. I create a new file for each "scene" named something like "Laboratory" (assuming you only visit the lab once; if you'd visit it multiple times append an adjective or just a number) then each passage would be named something like "Lab Arrival", "Lab Talk to Vince 1" "Lab Talk to Vince 2a" "Lab Talk to Vince 2b."

Of note is that I've already planned out the general narrative flow using articy or figma or some other flowcharting software; you could even use web twine to plot out the branching narrative and then do the actual coding in Tweego.

 

[OldSailor]

I have no idea what you're talking about

 

[Affogado]

I have no idea what you're talking about

Tweego ditches the visual IDE and lets you compile Twine projects with text files instead.

 

[OldSailor]

Tweego ditches the visual IDE and lets you compile Twine projects with text files instead.

I looked around a bit, downloaded it and tried to try it, but it's not something I can use. At least not for now. Really my first priority right now is to minimize the number of passages and I don't know how to do that. I've looked at other games but their code is really complicated and my coding knowledge is not that good.

 

[Affogado]

I looked around a bit, downloaded it and tried to try it, but it's not something I can use. At least not for now. Really my first priority right now is to minimize the number of passages and I don't know how to do that. I've looked at other games but their code is really complicated and my coding knowledge is not that good.

Ultimately your number of passages comes down to how many choices you give the player, and how much text you want them to see at one time. More text on the screen = slower pacing, less text = fast pacing.

 

[OldSailor]

Ultimately your number of passages comes down to how many choices you give the player, and how much text you want them to see at one time. More text on the screen = slower pacing, less text = fast pacing.

Thank you for the information and suggestion, I will look at the videos on youtube and try.