Chris Klimas's Blog
Putting the finishing touches on the Twine release tonight, I realized we have basically changed everything in our quote-unquote stack: Twine 2.0.0 (2014) Twine 2.1.0 (2017) ES5 ES6 + Babel CSS LESS Grunt npm scripts Backbone + Marionette Vue + vue-router + Vuex Browserify Webpack Selenium Karma + Sinon + Chai Still Alive But On Borrowed Time: Font Awesome, jQuery, SVG.js Still Alive, Not Going…
Click/tap/what-have-you to see at full size. Birdland was awarded the XYZZY 2015 Award for Best Game, and was written by Brendan Patrick Hennessey .
This was originally posted at my Patreon . At long last! I'm pretty excited about letting people at it. We spent a lot of time in beta, but I'm hoping that investment will pay off. You can download it from the home page . If you're upgrading, please read the release notes carefully. A lot has changed. I think you will like what's new and I've tested the upgrade path as best as I could -- but I…
I've decided that beginning in 2022, I will be absent from Twitter. That's not to say that I was particularly present on Twitter this past year, anyway--but I feel like I may as well draw a line instead of being vague. I don't plan on deleting my account, though, because I don't want anybody squatting the account name. The short reason is: Twitter exhausts me. There isn't any joy left in it for…
(an, not the) Ursula LeGuin documentary airs on PBS this Friday . I can't wait to watch. Count me as one of those kids who fell in love with the Earthsea books but came back to her other works as I grew older. She's one of my heroes.
This was originally posted to my Patreon . The Chapbook web site has been updated with URLs for beta 2. Note-- plural URLs. There are now two flavors of Chapbook: the regular one, and a stripped-down micro build that removes all test-related code, that's about 20% smaller. I've also opened Chapbook's issue tracker, with some trepidation, to the world at large. Time to find out what everyone…
I gave this talk on June 15, 2019, at the (hopefully first) Narrascope conference in Boston, Massachusetts. Some talks were recorded on video, but mine wasn’t, and I thought at least some of this information was worth sharing with the world at large. These written notes are, of course, far from my exact words, but they are roughly my recollection of what I said, at the very least. This talk is…
My wish, in the event that anyone whose powers might encompass this is listening, is that there are more places like this one .
This was originally posted to my Patreon . Get it here . This should resolve all the issues I'm aware of with beta 1-- related to Windows saving files, and all platforms having trouble with playing or testing stories right after you've created them. Please remember that this is still a beta, so make sure to keep copies of your work before using this!
This post originally appeared on my Patreon . Hooray! I'm very excited to have something for people to try out, but mind the warnings about data loss. Expect some bumps in the road-- I noticed a new bug just this morning as I was doing the release. Below are the release notes I posted to GitHub, where you can also download the beta . New Features Now uses Electron as its desktop app shell instead…
The other announcement for today is that I have transferred ownership of Snowman , the Twine story format I created, to Dan Cox . I put out a call for interested people back in November—I want to focus on developing Chapbook —and Dan was gracious enough to volunteer. Dan is a steadfast contributor to the Twine community and also serves on the IFTF's Twine commitee that I chair. I'm excited to see…
This post originally appeared on my Patreon . This is a quick fix to resolve a bug that can cause data loss-- data loss so bad that I've yanked the 0.0.1 release. One feature I added to Chapbook is, if a story runs into an error, it offers to the player two choices: Go back to the previous passage, hopefully so that a different route will allow the player to continue Do a "hard restart," which…
This post originally appeared on my Patreon . I've been quiet for some time now, because I've been working on something new that I'm excited to share. In fact, I have a lot of news, so I'll summarize everything first, then go point by point. I have a new story format, Chapbook, that is in prerelease state. I’m going to involve Patreon backers in the Chapbook development process, and have added…
Let's start by turning some subtext into text: I am trying out gradually moving away from Twitter in favor of this blog. Lots of reasons why. Twitter's got issues, to say the least, but I also like writing longer posts. I like the quiet of working on something for a while, of typing into a rectangle that fills my screen instead of a one guiding me towards writing three sentences, maybe, at most.…
The question that has underlain my work is, quite simply, "Why Hypertext?" ... If we are going to throw literature classes, citations, and even reviews into mass confusion (no more turning to page 21), we'd better have a good reason why. If we are going to ask readers to take an active role in searching for text, making connections, understanding links, and finding structure, we'd better make the…
Missed it the first time through, but here's a data visualization by The New York Times that demonstrates exactly how devastating a well-designed visualization can be.
I've been grappling with a stomach bug the past few days, which was as good a reason as any to unplug from everything I could for a little. Two things I thought were notable as I caught up on my RSS feeds: Donald Glover Can't Save You . I lost track of his career after Community --and this article hints that there is a bigger story to tell about that particular series--so this profile was…
Andreas Larsen has solved a problem I've been grappling with for a while now but, until I read his work, couldn't put a name to. In short: CSS gradient fills pop out at you because they have hard edges.
I didn't know who Sean Vanaman was, either, but he worked on Firewatch . It's a great, honest conversation about the state of video games that somehow left me, despite so many signs pointing otherwise, feeling that there is still a commercial future for games with strong narrative components.
This post originally appeared on my Patreon . This fixes a few problems with publishing stories that existed in 2.2.0. That's pretty much it! Download it in the usual place .
This post originally appeared on my Patreon . After a few bug fixes and updates to story formats, the 2.2.0 release is ready for use! I've posted downloads and release notes to twinery.org . In other news... that whole Patreon fee thing just turned out to be a lot of needless stress , didn't it? I'll post more thoughts on my Patreon in 2018 soon.
Sebastiaan de With's explanation of how his team redesigned Halide for iPhone X without access to hardware is both impressive and maddening. Impressive because of all the mental gymnastics, maddening because the gymnastics were needed. His discussion of reachability is spot-on. In this world of bigphones, everything mobile should be designed with this in mind.
This post originally appeared on my Patreon . I didn't understand the significance of the email I received from Patreon about fee changes at first. It was written in that shallowly friendly tone that customer-facing tech companies have nearly universally adopted as their style guide, that regardless of its actual content aims to disarm you. It took until I read Jimmy Maher's explanation that I saw…
After trying out Steven Soderbergh's interactive movie Mosaic , I was surprised to find that there are very few reviews of it online, only puff pieces promoting it before it was released. So, some observations. First, although nearly every piece in the press describes it as in the vein of Choose Your Own Adventure, Mosaic is not a CYOA. It's a movie that allows you to leap between points of view…
Next weekend, I'll be speaking at WordPlay in Toronto , as well as giving a Twine workshop there. The workshop will be a little bit of an experiment; in the past, I've done workshops using the default Twine 2 format, Harlowe, but for this one I'm going to try showing people Snowman. What I have found with Harlowe is that eventually people will ask about some edge case that I don't have a great…
Chromeography transitions between images by literally tugging pixels here and there. Field Play visualizes vector fields in a hypnotic manner. Recommend use: watch the default one for 30 seconds or so, then hit Randomize. I have the barest understanding of WebGL, so these types of things are always gee-whiz material for me.
This post originally appeared on my Patreon . It's been a while but hopefully this will be a nice surprise-- with the caveat that it's a beta, and so I wouldn't use it with your most important story of all time that's due tomorrow morning. You can get it on Bitbucket . What's new? Passages can now be wide, tall, or just plain large. Make important passages bigger on the map so they're easier to…
I was alerted by M.C. DeMarco on Sunday to an issue with twinery.org. Namely, the home page was serving up malware in one of its JavaScript files-- the little script that shows the screenshots at full size when you select a thumbnail. That's pretty bad. (To be honest, I am not sure of all the bad things that malware may have done. You can examine a copy of it on the Wayback Machine . What I saw it…
Ross Ramsay, one of my Patreon supporters , asked: I was just curious if you had any plans to incorporate Dropbox or some way to synchronize and collaborate with the program? If you eventually add some kind of mobile system for this, it would be almost needed to sync between devices. As is, I'd use it to work with others, and sync between my work and home computer. With the ability to sync in some…
This originally appeared on my Patreon . This fixes a bad bug with 2.1.2 that could cause stories to become corrupted, so if you have downloaded 2.1.2, please upgrade to this as soon as you can. This seems like a reasonable time to talk about how testing with Twine works. Initially, the test suite used a tool called Selenium that scripted actions in a web browser and verified the results. The…
This was originally posted to my Patreon . It's out now! You can download it from the main site ; I've also posted release notes to the wiki. This release should fix a nasty bug affecting non-English speakers and also clean up some issues related to story format versions. The localization issue was particularly insidious. What was happening was: 1. The app would do its initial startup and load in…
The middle beast, a tremor of trepidation in his words, said, "You aren't from a dark planet, are you?" "No." Calvin shook his head firmly, though the beast couldn't se him. "We're--we're shadowed. But we're fighting the shadow." (Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time )
This was originally posted at my Patreon . Here's what's inside! Thanks to contributions by users like you™, Twine now speaks German and Czech, and speaks Italian better The SugarCube story format has been updated to 2.14.0 The Harlowe story formats have been fixed so that syntax highlighting while editing passages works correctly again Using Twine on Internet Explorer 11 and mobile browsers has…
For this post, I'm going to steal an excellent idea Emily Short had and answer a question Jeremiah McCall, a historian who maintains Gaming the Past , asked me over email with a blog post. He wrote: Since [the story format] Harlowe is the default [in Twine 2], I am using Harlowe and I understand that SugarCube [another story format bundled with Twine 2] is a bridge from Twine 1.x. I have scoured…
In a recent IFTF blog post , I mentioned I hoped to get Twine 2.1.0 out by the end of the calendar year. Well... that hasn't happened, obviously. The main cause was me coming down with two minor illnesses nearly back-to-back over the winter break -- one head- and throat-based, one stomach-based. So most of my free time ended up being allocated to lying in bed with a fever instead of, you know,…
This originally appeared on my Patreon . Short and sweet this time -- this one fixes yet more bugs that were found by intrepid testers. Thanks, intrepid testers! You can get it from Bitbucket ; please reports bugs there too.
I found this gamebook because not only is it one of the few modern-day gamebooks that has its own page on TVTropes, but said page is linked directly from the TVTropes page on the entire genre . Clearly someone's a fan. You can download this as a PDF for free, but I shelled out the $4 for a paper copy because the angel on one shoulder whispered: support the author and the genre and the devil on the…
After the election, I began taking a break from Twitter on my personal account.It was just -- a bit much, is the simplest way to put it. I still read and post on @twinethreads because apart from poor souls trying to get tech support in 140 characters and a few random ranters, it's been a nice experience. Seeing photos like this makes my heart grow two sizes. In the meantime, I'm trying to blog…
Paul Gresty wrote a fitting tribute to the man who wrote over fifty gamebooks . I think I only encountered one Lone Wolf book in print growing up, but I enjoyed Project Aon quite a bit.
This was originally posted to my Patreon . Well, I tempted fate by thinking that we were close to a release. Beta 3 had a nasty bug that invisibly ate up hard drive space on the story list. If you used beta 3, follow these directions to clean up the mess. This fixes a few other bugs that were identified in beta 3, too. You can get it from Bitbucket , and I've created a new forum thread for…
This was originally posted to my Patreon . Not quite there yet, but pretty close to a release. You can download it from the usual place . The major update on this beta is that we've added multiple versions of Harlowe and SugarCube, two popular story formats -- the things that run a published story in a browser. In particular, Twine 2 has lagged pretty hard behind SugarCube releases, so this beta…
Thinking you are ahead of the popularity curve on a song, but subsequently hearing it played at a Chipotle Pressing on a display in the belief that it's a touchscreen, but it isn't The drop in room temperature that occurs when a public speaker says something uncomfortable but undisputably true
Today, my mind turned to this game . I never understood its political background until I read Jimmy Maher's coverage of it ( here , here , and here ). I was too young to witness Reagan's rise; the first election I can remember is George H. W. Bush winning 1988. So the fear of what Reagan might be capable of was alien to me. I'd like to think that the past can help us understand the present, but I…
This was originally posted on my Patreon . This just contains bug fixes to beta 1, but it's pretty close to shaping up for a final release. You can download it from Bitbucket , and as with the first beta, feel free to leave feedback here or on the Twine forum .
This post originally appeared on my Patreon . After a long gestation, I've put out a beta of Twine 2.1.0! This revamps the user interface quite a bit and speeds up a lot of tasks, particularly with larger stories. If you were used to waiting a few seconds for Twine to start up or load your story, this should make you happy. There is a lot changed under the hood. I can't really understate that.…
This post originally appeared on my Patreon . I have something new for you to play with! I realize it's been a while. It's called grunt-entwine-quickstart , which probably sounds like nonsense if you don't live in the JavaScript world. In short, it's a set of utilities that will help people who are a bit more technically savvy, or who are building larger stories. With it, you can: Create a single…
https://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2016/may/how-the-toronto-symphony-orchestra-uses-graphic-design-to-guide-its-audiences-though-its-music/ I love the clarity of the infographics, and think they're a great way to map a piece of music. However, I wonder if they would change my listening experience as much as I think they would. When I go to the BSO , I usually browse the program before the…