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\u00a0here<\/a>! (Better with your sound on, but it works fine without.)<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n But we thought it might be interesting to write a little bit about the process of making a time travel game in Twine.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Our game has a SUPER simple structure. There’s Skegness, which you can visit in several different eras (the 1500s, 1880s, 1920s, 2010 and finally your home in 2086). There’s five or six core locations which you can move between – mostly the same locations in each time, so you can get a sense of how they change through Skegness’s history. And that’s pretty much it.<\/p>\n And yet, the mess of a map above. This game isn’t more complicated than other games we’ve built in Twine, it doesn’t have more passages, it just looks like\u00a0more of a mess\u00a0<\/em>because there’s more connections between different passages, a less linear way of navigating the space. When we’ve used Twine before generally there’s been a sense of forward motion through a narrative, even if there are many branches and paths – in this case it’s a much more spatial arrangement that players pick their own path around.<\/p>\n In terms of practical Twine-building, this meant we put half a dozen passages at the heart of the game – \u00a0the pier, the foreshore, the clocktower, and so on, with links to let people wander between them in a trad interactive fiction kind of way – and then called up a different version of their description depending on what time it was and whether you’d been to that place in that time before. (The “once” and “later” in Leon Arnott’s wonderful Replace macro set<\/a> is SO GREAT for this, showing a different version of a passage the first time you visit it – in the past I hadn’t encountered it and spent a lot of straightforward but very tedious<\/em> time setting and checking $ifVisitedBeehive variables).<\/p>\n Fortunately for us, most of the changes that you can make in One Night in Skegness<\/em>\u00a0can’t have huge immediate ramifications. There’s no way to paint the pier yellow in 1890 and then see it still a weird dirty mustard in the 1920s. The past of Skegness has already happened, after all, and the game represents that actual past – we didn’t want it to be actively misleading. So the changes that you make in the more distant past\u00a0mostly\u00a0<\/em>play out only when you get back to 2086 – a time period we could be much freer with on account of it, y’know, not existing yet (there are a couple of exceptions, mostly around changes that are clearly very silly and that nobody is going to mistake for reality).<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/newwp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/07\/twime-travel.png\")
<\/a>TIME TRAVEL IS COMPLICATED<\/strong><\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/newwp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/07\/1500.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n