I’ve already changed the color and font of my game, which I think has helped significantly in helping my game take shape. Even small changes help make the game feel distinct. I still felt my game might be missing something, however, and wanted to add a unique edge to it and challenge myself a bit with the coding. As a result, a design element I’m incorporating into my game is sound, in particular music. I found a database of royalty free music when looking for background music during the audio project, and using that I found a song I think would be perfect to play in the background of my Twine game during game play. I think extraneous game elements are important, especially since Twine games are text based. Extra elements, especially sound, make the game seem more immersive. An ethereal song would help encourage the development of the darker fairytale feel I’m going for in my narrative. Additionally, I already added visual components to the game not only with text and color but also with a background image. Since there are two potential senses to be met with any digital experience (sight and sound), by adding music I would be fulfilling the second one. I’ve managed to get sound into my game, though not the song I specifically want, but I’m struggling to figure out how to get it to continue playing when moving from passage to passage. The only way to get it to play throughout would be to put the same coding in each passage and restart the song, which obviously I do not want to do since it’s disruptive to the experience. I may need to find a different solution, utilize sound in a different way within the game, like using sound effects rather than background music.

The one design element that I am trying to work into my Twine presentation is a nuanced  color palette With the CSS design, I intend to create a more immersive story through the ambient, as well as the foreground imagery, which will use color as a defining feature. To come up with a palette that would fit my goals, I thought of an iconic piece of art, Starry Night Over the Rhone, by Vincent van Gogh. The sweeping yellows contrasted with the gold stars shimmering over the river convey a sense of calm, night-time relaxation. I want to use pieces of this, but also integrate my own sense of style into the design.

The first major design choice to accomplish that is the base style sheet. This is one that is made from a darker color palette with a gentle blue gradient leading into a city skyline on the bottom of the page. That takes some cues from van Gogh but with a simpler color palette, should seem less busy as well. There will be very few other colors, and I really want to draw the eye toward the textual elements, so I will make the primary text color a light beige or dirty white. Hypertext links will be in a lighter blue to distinguish them from the regular readable text, making the game a bit easier to explore and play.

I also want to create art for some of the key choices which fit that overall playful-but-relaxing art style. That art will fit into the same scheme, with mostly blue tones for the primary colors and lighter grays or dirty white for the accents. This is an artistic choice that should keep the overall design more simple and less “busy” While retaining a good sense of style and uniqueness that will help it stand out as a project.

For my text preview, I will be discussing the design elements I hope to include in my game, CANDYLAND: the board game adventure brought to virtual life with a deadly twist.

CANDYLAND brings in all the fun candy-themed characters and places from the game with a new story attached. The main character is travels there from the “real” world and gets caught up in an assassination plot. Somebody is out to kill the Kandy King, and it’s up to your character to get down to the bottom of it. But It’s up to you whether your character gets to be a villain or a hero.

This game is supposed to involve a sense of solving a mystery. The player can find out information (“clues”) on who-dun-it by exploring the various commands offered during each round of game play, most likely from talking to the inhabitants of CANDYLAND. Since each candy person is a suspect, it is important that they be memorable to the player, and so pictures that show what they look like would be beneficial to the fulfilling the purpose of the game and must be included. It would be cool if I was able to make an icon for each character to display next to that characters dialogue and to show that the player has met that character. If the character hasn’t met a character, there will be a grey icon with a question mark inside it to show the player its still missing characters.

Along with pictures of the places visited by the player. The charm of CANDYLAND is the creepy nostalgia it gives you by putting you face-to-face with your childhood memories. I was heavily inspired by The Uncle Who Worked at Nintendo, the game we played in glass that really captured this feeling. I want the pictures to resemble a darker side of this joy-filled, sugar-coated land. If I had the time and the skill, I could even do my own digital art.

Lastly, there must be images of the items you collect. This way, the player will be able to remember that they have collected them. Obtaining certain items will lead to the ability to access new commands needed to move on with the story, and so it’s vital for the player to know what items they have and haven’t collected. As with the character icons, it would be cool if I could make item icons that could be used to keep track of what has been collected and what hasn’t.

Overall, these visual design elements will help the player reach the purpose of this game–to use the information and items they learn on their journey to solve the mystery behind the King Kandy assassination plot.

For my Twine, I’m using a very simplistic design but incorporating different headline fonts to mirror the story behind the different Twine stories. Unlike most Twines which are pretty scary and dark, I wanted my Twine to be somewhat funny (or at least funny to me). So my Twine is a story of a kid who wants to leave his small town in Montana and become either a rapper or actor. So the story splits between which career he wants to choose and that decision brings him to a different city. This is where font comes into play. For the following choices that the guy makes, I want to use fonts to give a feeling of the specific city or choice he is making. It will be fairly subtle as to not look tacky but I think that it can be tastefully done to give each city or choice it’s own identity.

My reasoning behind this choice is primarily because I enjoy fonts and the different types of ways that a font can change the design of something. I also think it’s a simple way to add to a story and highlight the importance of what is being said. The two cities that I’m highlighting are Chicago and Los Angeles and since they have somewhat iconic script font for each city that is usually on things like hats and posters, I think that’s a nice way to add more depth to the Twine and the story. Overall, I plan on using design in a simple yet effective way and will primarily utilize fonts as the main means to give an identity to the game.

Something that I’m incorporating in my project is background pictures. Each “passage” will have a background image. Sometime it’ll be the same image as the previous passage, but most often it will change. At first, having backgrounds doesn’t seem like it will have much of an impact in a story that takes place entirely in a desert, but I have a couple plans that will use the backgrounds very well to enhance the story. The first is that the backgrounds can help to set the scene. Sometimes I want the player to feel like they are in the middle of nowhere, hot, and hopeless. For times like this, I’ll use a picture where there is nothing but sand and an incredibly bright sun. To add to this, I would potentially break the text up into smaller sections so that they are greeted by the same image multiple times in a row (which will convey the feeling of hopelessness). I’ll also be able to use pictures of deserts at nighttime to remind the player what time of the day it is.

In addition to giving the player a better sense of where they are and what it’s like there, I may make a couple images of areas of the story that are harder to imagine. There is one point of the story where the main character is talking to a snake in a weird area of the desert. The original text spent several paragraphs (most likely just to make “The Longest Joke in the World” longer) describing this area. It would shorten the amount of text/passages needed in that section significantly, which would be welcome since I don’t want my game to be unbearably long.

These are just a few examples of ways I’d implement background images into my game to enhance the experience.

Since my story line is an old German fairy tale, I want to add some humor. Typically German fairy tales end without any resolve. The hero or heroin dies, but for some reason this one, the White Snake, does not. Anyway, I’d like to add some funny GIFs to the background that give some comedic side. I think having humor will make people want to play or keep them involved, as I’m not the best script writer. The test twines we played for homework were edgy and gripping due to the well crafted prose and effects. Apart from my inability to script well, the original story isn’t much of a horror, so creating a gripping thriller wouldn’t be easy for a novice Twiner. So I’ll stick to some internet humor. Your really can’t lose; unless it’s Kraft Cheesy.

My original idea to add media was to try to incorporate a youtube version of the story into the twine by embedding certain parts of the video in the text; however, I couldn’t think of a way to handle the “off” choices the player could make, as in choices that wouldn’t reflect the actual story and would cause the player to die or run away. My strict nature for consistency within a medium wouldn’t allow for other types of videos, cinematography, quality, and sound, without my wanting to scrap the whole idea itself. So, I’m going to add internet humor with GIFs that relate to the outcomes and choices made by the player by incorporating them behind the text, or possibly below the text if the color formatting demands it.