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Holly Gramazio

The Twine Traveller

We recently made a short game called One Night in Skegness, for the wonderful SO Festival.

It’s a Twine game, and it takes maybe 5-10 minutes to play. Which you can do now, it’s at that link above! Or here! (Better with your sound on, but it works fine without.)

It’s pretty simple, as a play experience. Your character travels between a few different places in Skegness, and visits a few different historical eras. There are some low-key adventures. There are a few jokes. There’s a robot, there’s mild peril, there’s a chance to change the future. If you’re lucky and careful, you’ll return to 2086 and see what changes your journey into the past made.

But we thought it might be interesting to write a little bit about the process of making a time travel game in Twine.

July physical play roundup

July! And here’s some of what’s going on in city play and physical games…

Open Calls

The Interesting Games Lab is back in Bristol, after a long sleep of quite a few years! This is really exciting – Iglab was one of the earliest regular events for games with a big physical component, letting people meet up and playtest and discuss their medium. It’s so fantastic to see it back with a run of events over the latter half of the year. The next Iglab (now run by Free Ice Cream) is on 25 July, or you can submit a game (there’s a selection of themes) for another event in the run.

And in London, Beta Public – a night of performance and videogames – has been announced for 13 November. They don’t have a call for at a bit of info about the event (or book tickets).

Art Deck

So, late last year we ran a series of drawing games, called Drawing Games because we’re really bad at names, at No Quarter. And one of them in particular – named Art Deck, for reasons as listed above – we really liked. Over the last six months we’ve been working on it, on and off, testing it out and developing it as part of the London Creative Network artist development programme.

The way the game works is: you lay out cards, one at a time, to form a sentence. There are three sentence parts. The first is usually a clear instruction: “draw a rectangle”, “draw some eyes”, “smash something against the paper”. The second is usually a compositional constraint or an adverb of some sort: “near the edge of the page”, “in red”, “petulantly”. The final card usually makes things difficult, or funny, or both: “behind your back”, “while carrying a burden”, “with your wrong hand”.