Recently I started playing the browser game by vrelnir called Degrees of Lewdity. As you probably guessed from the title, it's a porn game! You play as a teen orphan, you get to create their look in a cute little character creator. Gameplay wise it reminded me a lot of a combination of old choose your adventure type games like ones on Gaia Online, combine with something along the lines of homestuck. Plus porn. The 'combat' system is essentially either fighting off or submitting to random encounters and named NPCs trying to have sex with your character. I have mixed feelings about it's success in being a well rounded game (you can read some of my thoughts on that here) but it is interesting, and has really relit my love for this type of game. I remember spending hours and hours as a kid playing browser text based choose your own adventure games.
So in a fit of passion (and a desire to see if I could mod some of the visuals in Degrees of Lewdity so they were more to my specific tastes) I started looking into DoL's modding scene.
Now, this is not a very big game, but it does seem to have a very active and flourishing modding community. I think that's super neat. I actually ended up playing DoL Plus, a version of the game that just adds numerous quality of life updates, as well as a handful of other neat features. I downloaded DoL Plus off of dolmod.net, a site dedicated to hosting DoL mods, as well as the base vanilla game, all playable right on the dolmod.net site, which is very cool! The passion of these folks is truly wonderful. I opted to download the files for DoL Plus since I am intending to mod it however.
In my researching how to mod it, I discovered it was created using Sugarcube, an add-on to Twine, which is an open source storytelling tool. Basically a tool that helps you code html based stories/games. I had never heard of Twine of Sugarcube, but the discovery of a tool that makes busting out a very rough version of a game had me so, so excited.
I am a lover of games. Games inspired me to start drawing when I was a child, and have driven my passion even now as an adult. I have always dreamed of creation, making stories and letting them loose into the world. I am however, also disabled, and very poor. This is relevant because I am not able to get a job working on games, nor am I able to fund a sizable game myself. Anything I create I do have to do with my own hands, in my own time, with my own energy. Well, save for my husband, who I collaborate with. But he too is disabled, and has frequent hand pain which leaves him quite unable to do strenuous hand activities such as coding an entire game, or drawing hundreds of assets. Not to mention the idea of voice acting, music, the works... something neither of us have the skill for, and while we could always learn, it certainly is still a roadblock if we were to pursue a more traditional game format.
In comes Twine.
I myself do not have hand pain. I am able to type, and draw, a good amount. Rediscovering text based browser games like DoL reminded me that games do not have to be overly complex, they do not have to be full fledged console games in order to be fun and interesting, and my husband and I's stories actually suit the format quite well. We enjoy mixing imagery with writing in a not quite comic but not quite written story format. We've dabbled in fanfiction in the past, and the things we were attempting to strongarm ao3 into doing via formatting the custom css resembled what a game made with Twine naturally is. It truly felt like a match made in heaven.
As of... a few days ago now, we've started working on a game using Twine! The name is pending, and I have no idea how long it may take to create. I have never made a game before, despite wanting to, so I have no idea how long to expect these things to take. I am also learning a lot of coding along the way. I've dabbled in html, css and markup on Neocities, ao3, Tumblr themes, custom forum formatting and the likes, but javascript is entirely new territory for me that I am frankly pretty intimidated by. But I am starting to pick up bits and pieces! I'm entirely self taught, so it takes lots of trial and error to do even simple things, but I am excited and motivated to see where this takes me. I have so many stories I want to tell, and I think that this may be a wonderful way to tell them.
So shout to DoL, DoL's modding community, and Twine for reigniting my love for browser games, and perhaps inspiring me to make my own!