I want to make a game structured like A Spell For All, with pretty much the same layout. As in, access to a fairly functional phone in the sidebar (SMS, gallery, phone backgrounds, saving images/gifs from the main screen, map, ordering pizza, maybe other stuff.), persistant npcs who can move locations, items you can pick up/use/give/drop, a taxi/bus/train button that can pop up when available. I'm not sure if ASFA actually uses a particular game engine or if they just made it all themselves. I'm currently looking at the classic option of Twine with Sugarcube and have messed around in the editor a bit. But I was wondering if there were any better suggestions before I fully commit to Twine. I'm worried Twine is too limited to do some of that. Also if anyone knows how to actually DO the phone in Twine I feel like you could save me a lot of time if you could give me some pointers please.
Just use Javascript, any web framework you choose. It'd save you a lot of trouble since all those features don't come with Twine anyway and you'll have to make them from scratch.
ASFA is not built with Twine; it's all custom built from scratch using Javascript. You can do the same thing using Twine & SugarCube because they do not restrict you from directly using Javascript. As for how useful Twine would be, that would depend on how well you can do stuff purely in Javascript and exactly what you want to do with your game.
You could do all this in Renpy.
Whatever language you choose it's going to be more work than most visual novels.
Whatever language you choose it's going to be more work than most visual novels.
- Sep 4, 2020
- 91
- 47
Don't use Twine as a development environment, but use Tweego to compile Twee files into the game HTML app. The power of Twine technology is that as a HTML-based game system, you can leverage to the world of HTML and JavaScript support that's out there. My own experimental Twine-based setup uses TypeScript, SCSS, and numerous npm-based modules to build something that doesn't look like Twine/Sugarcube at all, but still uses the "passage" architecture for the game structure itself (and so I didn't have to build that).
I posted a detailed explanation of my setup in another post on F95 (you can find it via my profile), and I have an ongoing blog (link in the signature) that is my development diary. Why I'm doing it this way, how I'm doing it, what I'm learning along the way.
I posted a detailed explanation of my setup in another post on F95 (you can find it via my profile), and I have an ongoing blog (link in the signature) that is my development diary. Why I'm doing it this way, how I'm doing it, what I'm learning along the way.