Twisting Tales with Twine

Recently for my Writing for Digital Media class I had to write a hypertext story, or Interactive Fiction, to my liking. This was quite the undertaking, as I am the furthest thing for the best programmer. Using guides and inspiration from previous creative efforts I was able to compile a story that I'm very satisfied with.

The story is called Playing Through Ethereal and acts as my own fantasy universe. The initial inspirations for this idea came out of a few older projects which I decided to piece-meal together the best parts of into one more cohesive universe. The setting is set in the world of Ethereal, a fantasy world made up of large biomes called Perils, each with their own theme and set of challenges and creatures. The ultimate question left unanswered across the world's Havens(towns), Sanctuaries(cities), and Reigning Sanctuary(capital of the Peril, usually the center of power of the land). That's just a basic rundown as to not get too bogged down in specifics as it's still very much in-development.

^Above is a picture of the video game, Kenshi, and their character creation process. Much like here, I attempted to create a full-fledged RPG experience before realizing I didn't have enough time to do it properly. Specifically, I wanted the class the player chooses to impact how they interact with the world, as different elements of the world would become relevant to different classes, encouraging multiple playthroughs.

The greatest challenge I faced with the project was scope. I really want to do this concept justice, but just didn't have enough time to build out all of the potential classes and class-specific scenarios that would've encouraged replayability. Much like Kenshi, or any other traditional RPG, the character selection should impact how the world interacts with you. In this case, I tried to execute just that, and had a decent base to go off of, but the fully realized version of that concept will be somewhere down the line.

The final project is certainly more of an existential question than anything grounded in fiction. This was done just on a whim, as I've been having my own questions about certain aspects of my life, but I'll leave it to you to see for yourself. Overall, I had a lot of fun reacquainting myself with Twine and completing something in the world of Ethereal!