I’ve cut them down as short as they can go but they still present walls of text that the player must read before their next interaction. Those scene descriptions are rather long. We’ll bring our story to a halt at this point as we have plenty of material to play with and I’m hoping you can now see how the Knots, Stitches and Diverts can work together to better organise your story branches.īut there’s something troubling me about the Gore interactive fiction experience. You need help and the local police station is the first and best option on that front. Then again, you could give Ginger up as a lost cause, which she most probably is, and sneak away with those squid-faces being none the wiser. You’re hoping that the squid-faces will look on a flock of sheep as easier prey than an enraged, twelve-gauge drag queen. Or you could whack the top off the bottle with the Bowie knife, fill the bottle with stones, open the sheep yard gate and chase those sheep out with your makeshift rattle. You could pop the bus’ petrol cap with the Bowie knife, cut a length of hose and use it as a siphon to fill the bottle with petrol, stuff the bandana in the top, light it up and launch your very own Molotov cocktail at Ginger’s attackers. There’s a small flock of terrified sheep huddled in one corner of that yard and a reel of hose connected to a water tap, used for washing down the board between demonstrations. Next door there’s a mobile sheepyard and shearing board used for demonstrations of shearing prowess during the competition weekend. Looks like Ginger was a doing bit of whittling, smoking and drinking to ease her nerves before the performance tonight. There’s a deck chair nearby and at its feet a Bowie knife, a carved piece of wood, a bandana, a lighter and a pack of cigarettes, and an empty whisky bottle. Intent on doing what you can to help the old cowgirl, you take in your surroundings, looking for possible courses of action. Now let’s select the Ginger Burns option through to see how it all plays out. That means you can reuse Stitch names across different Knots whereas Knots all have to be unique within your game. One of the cool things about Stitches is that they’re only relevant to the Knot they’ve been placed inside. Here’s how I would put a sequence like this together. Thankfully, that’s where Stitches come in. Are we going to help Ginger or Jesse? And once we make that binary choice, surely it’s going to lead on to another set of choices about that specific character, right? Things are going to get complicated, and fast, if we don’t organize this properly. It looks like Jesse is about to suffer the same fate.Ĭlearly, we have a choice to make. Nearby, another trio of squid-faces are feasting on the blood-spattered remains of Jesse’s sound crew. On your right, Jesse Winton, the incumbent Queen of Country, has been cornered by three tentacled terrors. But she’s horribly outnumbered and it’s clear that she won’t be able to hold them off much longer. Inside, Ginger is putting up a valiant defence, blasting them with an antique sawn-off shotgun and horse-kicking them back with her silver-spurred cowgirl boots. On your left, several squid-faces are laying siege to Ginger Burn’s house bus, attempting to wrench the doors open or climb in through the shattered windows. You’re centre-stage of a true horror show, yet through the chaos of squid-faced monstrosities and fear-stricken people, your keen eyes spy two fellow song-slingers in dire need. I’ll demonstrate with a story I’m working on at the moment called Gore where a Cthulian apocalypse occurs during a small-town country and western festival.Īs always, we start with a Divert and Knot.Īnd we’ll put -> END in there too just to stop Inky throwing up error messages at us. Several Stitches can make up a Knot just like several pages can make up a chapter. If a Knot is a chapter in a paperback book then a Stitch is a page. Knots and Stitches are both places that the story can ‘turn to’. A Stitch behaves almost exactly like a Knot. In this tutorial, we’re going to learn a few tricks that’ll enable us to get a bit more stylish with our interactive storytelling. In Tutorial Three we learned how to create Options within Options within Options. I’m Edwin McRae, Narrative Designer and Interactive Fiction Writer, and this is Tutorial Four in my… Ink Script Tutorial Series
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