Postmortem

Since this was my first time making a game on twine, my mistakes were many and challenging. There are a lot of things that I would change if I were to approach this project again. 

First of all, I was inexperienced with CSS and Javascript, so a majority of my code was made using the templates provided to me by harlowe with little idea as to how they worked. However, now that I am more familiar with the process of twine, I would create more variables to store specific presets and put them into my code instead. That way, I wouldn't have to go changing every single passage if I found the layout unsatisfactory. 

Next, I would experiment more with the CSS Stylesheet. As it has proven very useful for not having repetitive code in every single passage. I also only found out that it can be used to set the image layout only after creating the game, so I would be sure to abuse this preset in my next game if I were to ever make one. 

Furthermore, I would fiddle around with the format of one passage and make sure that I was satisfied with the format before copy and pasting it to every other passage, as copy and pasting code to every passage proved to be the most time consuming part of the game development process. I would only paste my story in from a different document as I found that restructuring the passage took up way more time than I would've liked.

While implementing audio, I also found that floating paragraphs could be used to initialize variables. Next time, I would choose to use these in order to initialize my variables as it made things significantly easier to test. I feel this way as I only initialized my variables in the first paragraph, causing many things to break when I used the “Test From Here” feature.

Due to my inexperience in twine, I was unable to implement even simple things like images and audio. 

In fact, adding images may have been the most frustrating part of the twine development experience. This was not due to the lack of information, but due to sheer the amount of contradicting, unclear and outdated information that was out there. It took me a long time to figure out a way of uploading my own images without having to upload them to a website, and even longer to figure out why the images wouldn't display when I tried to test them. At one point, I almost went down the route of testing them and then replacing all of them on export before figuring out I could just export and test them.

However, at the end of the day, I did end up creating a game that made me happy and laugh. Additionally, now that I've learned all the rudimentary skills needed to create a twine game, I am optimistic that I will have an easier time creating the game next time!