Unfinished Twine Games Archive
Created: 2025-06-10 (06:32:26) — Modified: 2025-06-10 (20:12:35)Status: in-progress
Classic of Mountains
The first thing I ever made in Twine was a system that would generate descriptions of mythic landscapes, modelled after the Shan Hai Jing or Classic of Mountains and Seas, a Classical Chinese geographical text and bestiary. As you moved across a chain of mountains, The game randomly generated the name of the mountain, its geography, what grew there, and what magical animals inhabited it.
I eventually returned to the game and cleaned up the code, and still add words to the program on rare occasions. There’s nothing particularly clever or novel at work in it, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be clever or novel to generate interesting worlds in miniature.
Forest Forage
A prototype owl-chase dungeon crawler, based on a nightmare. Travel through an eerie forest by night, dodging some flapping, hooting, swooping, thing, and look to find a way out. Gazebos and shacks offer temporary safety. You can find items but aside from the paddle for the boat, and a few keys, most are useless.
In its current state the game is not very enjoyable. There is also no win condition, so you are stuck in the forest forever. I would love to return to it someday.
Island
Something like a bootleg Link’s Awakening, based on a dream. I’m obsessed with the eerie setting and puzzlebox design of Link’s Awakening and have always wanted to make a longer game in this vein. This one is more like a short nightmare.
Mountains and Monuments
A strange outcropping from the Classic of Mountains. Travel the mountains and place three kinds of survey marks (geo, rotating and triangle), then review them on your map later. There isn’t much context for this one. I worked on it for a week or two and wrote very little documentation.
I’ve always been fascinated by the history of surveying, and with hiking up mountains to visit aircraft beacons, radar stations and trigonometry points. This was probably an attempt to work… something or other… out along those lines.
Summer Holiday
A game I started, then abandoned, in the middle of the first pandemic lockdown in 2020. I had planned on going travelling. At the time it felt as though none of us might ever go travelling ever again. This might account for the frustrated and sad tone of the game, despite its excited overuse of the exclamation mark.
Travel across a wide, endless continent. Haggle over bricabrac in the marketplaces of towns and cities with whatever currency you have. Get lost on the byways and highways between settlements. Drink coffee for as long as you please.
This is another game I have aspirations of finishing but probably never will. Instead, its mechanics and ideas have been fed into a dozen other projects many of which themselves remain incomplete.
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Tags: @in-progress @my-games @twine @virtual-spaces
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