Day 2: My First Game Jam!

At the end of my last blog post, I had decided I wanted to achieve two things today:

• 1. implement some CSS;
• 2. expand and randomise sections of text.

I feel like I can safely say I met both of those goals today!

Most of the morning and afternoon were taken up by reading through CSS documentation, mainly using W3 schools as reference. I then put what I had learned (or relearned... lots of my knowledge of CSS and HTML coding came from my college years, which I can admit was about... 12 years ago~) into a simple stylesheet that my twine game can use.

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This involved thinking about certain design aspects. Whilst I could easily decide on what fonts would be used for headers vs text, the sizing of borders and styling of hyperlinks, I had not yet chosen what colour palette I wanted to use for my game.

<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/723096625764484376/2870020838058698260#" data-original-attrs="{" data-original-href":"https:="" blogger.googleusercontent.com="" img="" b="" r29vz2xl="" avvxseiadagl2amvxedbeltnfna4-0earojbvjf_llmxsfqpncmoqtc2zx_qtqe5m-iuuxdj8eiln1wk0ifw7zudh3kqmpyu7o7dj59boqcpfpwvlwksituzohcbzckfxgtezebhvzn4dved9uhbxdqlyijvtvdknmxm07nnhvv81-mokwgyebhscsmznwvrv8i="" s1364="" screenshot%20(25).png","style":""}"=""></a>

I frequently use pinterest as a low effort mood and idea board, and I already had a board that I had saved plenty of my favourite colour schemes in. These have mainly been used as inspiration for bitsy games or games that use less than 8 channels of colour. However, when browsing the ones I had saved over the years, I found none had that post box aesthetic (whatever that actually is...). so I searched for palettes with a post box/mail type theme.

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I limited it down to three options, but I most liked the last palette I had referenced (it's always the same, it's the last one you try!). This probably wont be my final colour palette, but it's been nice to not have to think about it again, and should I wish to change the hex values, I know exactly where and how to make those changes.

After mucking about with CSS, I switched over to randomising my text segments. This was easily than I had imagined, only using the either() function in sugarcube. Now each point defining passage has a 50% chance of having different text in the storyline! I hope that with this change, my game could be a bit more replayable.

Randomising my suspicious scores alongside my happiness meter proved a bit more tricky... and I wish I could tell you how I fixed it but I don't quite know what I did?

At some point I was super embarrassed because I had a functional game before, which then changed to a non-functional game and when trying to troubleshoot why, I was greeted with a  whole ass page of + 4 repeating. I wish I got a screenshot but I also am grateful I no longer have to look at an entire screen of + 4 + 4 + 4 over and over and over...

Finally, after losing some steam since it is currently midnight over here, I jiggled around my twine wysiwyg passages into a more readable format. This wasn't particularly hard but my fiance had a good point about flow chart readability, and I trusted his opinion due to his history and experience with other pieces of software that depended on flow charts (for example, Magic).

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Other than that, I might call it a day! What I'd like to do tomorrow is:

• Refining score probabilities using maths (will likely need a helping hand to make gameplay balanced);
• Adding more functionality and random text segments;
• Creating a new level wherein your suspicion meter could advance you to a promotion? Unsure... stay tuned!

Over and out!-