& Leftover Petals
Another month, another newsletter. Did you celebrate the Lunar New Year? If so, I wish you a (belated) happy new year! And I hope you had a nice Valentine’s Day, no matter how you celebrated it (if you did).
Before we start, some announcements:
1) I’ve mentioned you can send asks to my Tumblr if you wanted to communicate. Then I remembered that you need an account for it. Point is, I have a StrawPage now.
2) I revamped my website. Took me almost a whole year because I’m incredibly scatterbrained. Gonna miss the old layout not gonna lie, but change feels nice too, don’tcha think?
Now, onto the updates. Time for a long, nerdy talk!
Twine comes with a tool called Story Formats. Simply explained, these handle how things display on the screen (the text, images, etc). Depending on which Format you choose, the way you approach it is different. Think of them as basic programming languages!
Twine includes four Formats by default, but we’ll only focus on two: Harlowe and SugarCube.
Harlowe is the default, beginner-friendly one (as much as these things can be lol). This is the one I stuck with at first to keep it simple. But I kept thinking about the length of the project.
I’ve mentioned that I don’t wanna make it too long. Even then, one has to remember that each person reads at a different pace—what could take me 3 days to read, it only takes you 1 day and so on. Then I recalled seeing some Twine stories with a save system (like Visual Novels!) and I thought: I could implement that.
Problem is that Harlowe does NOT have that option. But SugarCube comes with a save system by default, so I switched Formats after that.
… Which forced me redo the stylesheet again so SugarCube could read it. Despite having a website, I’m not exactly the best with CSS. On the bright side, I learned how to color text on this new Format ∋( :D
{Any actual information on the project or what :v}
Reminder: we’re at the start of the project and some things might change as progress is made. But YES, I have a few morsels of info for y’all!
In the past I mentioned that I was using old characters for this story. Well, a fun fact is that they used to be stick man/stick people(?) OCs made ages ago. Well thing is, I find drawing stick people difficult. For some reason, my brain just has a hard time working with literal spheres. So I’m changing them into a different... uh, species? I guess it’s the word, yeah.
Long ass wall of text to tell you that I’m working on re-drawing the cast. I have a hard time working without visual guides, as soon as I get those things down, it’s a good chunk of work done. Maybe I can show some doodles on the next letter, so look forward to that ∋( :3