Twine Game: “Flight of Icarus”

Thanks to my English professor, I came across a nifty platform called Twine. It’s a very user-friendly program (once you take a few minutes to watch someone do the basics) that allows you to create non-linear text-based adventures. I was very interested in the idea, given my history with videogames and love for anything that gives the player choices. I took an idea I had for a scifi take on Greek mythology and used it to experiment with it on Twine.

The result is a short, but hopefully sweet, text-based adventure with different routes to take and a few endings to reach. It engages digital media due to the mechanics of the game and it’s html format. While you could argue that similar things have been done on paper, this platform allows for much, much more customization beyond the typical “turn to page X for one choice and page Y for another”. For starters, you can’t see how thick the virtual space is to guess when your adventure ends, it’s sleek, and allows to embed images and hopefully audio in the near future when the second version of Twine is finished. The digital nature of this form of non-linear storytelling allows for a more modular story and makes it more accessible. You’re focused on the single plane that is your screen to sustain immersion.

In the future, if I were to refine this Twine iteration, I may even throw in some decent artwork to match.

Without further ado, have a quick playthrough or two of the Flight of Icarus and let me know what you think before I turn it into a comic or something similar. You can now say you’ve been here since the beginning!