Twine Interactive Digital Narrative

• Platform: Twine

• Purpose: This assignment allows students to showcase their IDN design, development, and implementation skills. Further, it helps them practice UX and UI design for browser-based IDNs. Considering the importance of narrative game mechanics, the assignment allows students to explore their design by applying IDN theory. Students develop their Twine IDN over seven weeks. Students iterate on their work each week while implementing theory and practical considerations from the lectures. The project includes a writer’s statement where students reflect on their production process.

• Requirements:

• • Project Length: Playthroughs should take 20 to 30 minutes.

• • Project Size: At least two endings that are achieved through the effective implementation of dramatic agency. 

• • Project Aesthetics: Aesthetics for this project must reflect the narrative world’s theme and tone. Students are encouraged to consider visual and sound design in their experiences to increase narrative immersion.

• • Coding Proficiency: Students must use Twine Macros, conditionals, variables, and other common data types and structures as part of their production. This work involves learning or using some basic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript proficiency. Instructors are encouraged to produce extra tutorials and videos of various Twine script implementations. In addition, students learn to deploy their experience to Itch.io to embed their projects in their portfolio easily.

• Evaluation: 

• • Interactivity: To earn a high grade for interactivity, students must demonstrate that they could implement fundamental non-narrative interactions, such as turning the sound off or on, and narrative game mechanics, wherein interactions transparently drove the story. In other words, the students designed choices and interactions wherein the user was unaware they were impacting the story. Further, to teach ludonarrative harmony, students had to include ludic interactions that influenced the progress of their narrative.
  • Story and narrative: Students must produce a compelling narrative experience, as validated by instructor and peer reviews. This ideation involves creating and implementing well-developed characters, settings, and dialog. The written material has to be error-free, and its style demonstrates the aesthetic tone and theme of the piece. Accordingly, the work had to have a clear structure, such as those suggested by Marie-Laure Ryan and Janet Murray. The story had to have multiple meaningful endings—dead ends in IDN structures did not count as endings. Additionally, the IDN needs to encourage replay by creating a strong desire in the interactor to replay a decision or experience the narrative through a different character’s perspective. Lastly, students must complete an original story, novel in its perspective, and not a retelling or remix of an existing narrative.
  • Production values: Students are encouraged to use visuals and audio in their experience. Students can use Generative AI tools to produce material for this project. The benefit of using Generative AI for their production is that it increases the perceived quality of the final work. That said, instructors need to teach students about ethical approaches to using Generative AI as part of this process. Those lessons must include discussions around training data, giving credit to human creators, and naming the Generative AI tool used in the IDN credits. Students engage in two in-class peer review sessions to achieve a high production value in the work. During these sessions, students are encouraged to help their peers through coding, design, or creative examples and prompts.