All these years later, I made a new Hawke

Sometimes I just want to game on my lightweight work laptop (a MacBook) rather than on my aging, big gaming machine or on a console. 

DA2 happens to run beautifully on my MacBook. Currently, I am playing a completely unmodded game. I might add mods later?

As of last night, I have a new Hawke: a female warrior who is extremely purple.  Not my standard Hawke and no idea yet which romance path(s) this Hawke will take. Isabela? Fenris?


edit: huh? why did DW change my icon for this post? well, fixed. 

Twine, SugarCube + Twine/Twee, signal boost and hmmmm

When I first tried using twine a million years ago ... or sometime in 2014-15 or something like that, it reminded me the experimental fiction I had to read at the end of the 1990s in some graduate-level seminar on Hypertext. 

I never did much with twine. 

Over the past few years while I have lived under a rock, twine has grown up A LOT and clearly I am extremely late to the party.

The other day phdfan (breakfastdragon ) reblogged a post on Tumblr about a free indie fan-game, Dragon Age Insurrection, that is currently a work in progress and will employ a variety of programmatic aspects -- character race and class, romances, etc -- and it is being made with Twine2/SugarCube.  Interesting! Twine is growing up!  

Last night I...

...skimmed through the SugarCube documentation
...started hunting down into on the underlying Twee format
...started realizing that it would be possible to hook a lot of extra javascript in and have the js make calls to a backend database
...which means Twine can now be used for far more complex projects

huuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.   

(▰˘◡˘▰)

But now I need to learn the basics of Twine and dust off all of my haven't-used-in-four-years programming skills.

So, rather than work on a bigger original project that I would consider using this stuff for, perhaps?? idk? Just a perhaps?

...Idrelle -- the person making DA Insurrection as an exploratory "learn how to make a text game" portfolio piece (and I am looking forward to it) -- ended up giving me an idea.

I have many many many hundreds of thousands of words of Dragon Age fanfic-in-draft that has been sitting in deep freeze for a while. Certainly, something small from within it could be the starting point for me playing with Twine? Obviously, I'd need to think about how to make it choice based with branching and and choice consequences but... hm. Why not?

Although I won't make anything that is anywhere near of the size and complexity of what Idrelle is making. Small. Or maybe a few small things. All... small. Learning exercises.

[is the icon for this post a hint? maybe. maybe not. but maybe. ;)]