DL2: Start of Revision

After the constant quantitative progress of word counts rising and nodes multiplying, the past month has been a shift toward looking at what I’ve put together as a first draft and identifying changes that need to be made. I read the draft out loud, taking quick notes, and timed it. An hour and a half. I’m still working through the list of tasks I created based on that read-through, but over the past month, I’ve focused on digging into the first and second branch stories, “Jigsaw” and “Matches”. Taking a step back and thinking about the characters, free-writing some dialogue and internal monologue, and ultimately changing the endings of both stories. The “Matches” revision is still progressing and will likely be added to Twine next month, but I tidied up the current choices and their impacts so everything should at least make sense for now.

The opening descriptions of the brothers were revised / expanded and the flow of the opening was re-worked a bit.

On the Twine side of things, I added an inventory screen that’s accessible through the footer and only appears when the player has reached the appropriate spot in the narrative. I worked through quite a few issues with how the inventory interacted with the primary nodes and how to bring the player back to their last primary node regardless of how they clicked within the inventory to view the description nodes for the inventory objects. It was satisfying to work out the bugs; hopefully I found them all. I had originally envisioned the collection of objects to be later used as solutions to puzzles, but the ability to skip their collection entirely, and how that would block the player from later choices, never really gelled. 

I also changed the way links are colored because I found it irritating that the “>>Return” links to previous passages were always purple (previously clicked or visited). They stay blue now, and hover as gray. Previously visited links other than “>>Return” are gray.

Numbered choices are indented even when they go beyond a single line now. A lot of relatively minor changes to formatting to make things look nicer and consistent.

Removed reference to an action that didn’t make sense anymore (thanks GB!)

One of the intimidating things about revision of a short story or novel chapter for me has been a reluctance to tear things apart that don’t work. Something about the way the words all sit together on the screen or paper makes it seem indelible. Crystal Wilkinson’s lectures / workshops on revision techniques helped tremendously to encourage looking at the writing in new ways, but I also like the way Twine breaks things apart and aids revision because the writing feels less monolithic. I have less fear about breaking what works about the whole while trying to fix it, because there is no “whole,” just a network of little pieces I can tweak and play around with. It does, however, add new potential for continuity errors as I shuffle things around and add / subtract words without realizing impacts to other parts of the story.