Devlog #1 - First Dates Process

I'm making this game as part of an assignment for school! We've been instructed to make a "Narrative Game" and our instructor kindly introduced Twine to us as a platform we can use.  It's a platform known for interactive stories, and it's also aimed towards writers as opposed to programmers, so the coding process isn't too difficult which I found neat. The first thing I did was to try and think of an overlying message/theme. I decided to go with "Don't let your failures turn you away from something that you've always wanted." and I started brainstorming story ideas around that. It's a message that I personally struggle with towards my own art.  As much as I'd like to make art on my own time, I end up never finishing anything because I'm scared of the outcome being bad. Even though I know that the only way to get better is to go through the bad first.  I wanted to express this feeling, but I didn't want to make a serious game so I ended up with writing about a girl who's afraid of rejection and dating due to bad past experiences. The goal is for her to either understand that the only way that she could actually experience love is to be open to it, instead of closing it off, or she realizes maybe "finding the one" isn't actually that important to her and it's just another end of a chapter for her.

In terms of the actual coding and mechanics, I wanted it to be so that you can choose what the main character is thinking, and depending on which option you leave it on, the outcome is going to be different. I had read some of the stories on Twine and in some of the stories, clicking on a sentence allowed you to cycle through different options, and I wanted that to be my main mechanic. I searched on Twine forums and Reddit threads on how people were able to toggle though options and I found out about the (cycling-link:) function, which allows you to set a variable, assign strings to that variable and then be able to cycle through the different strings by clicking on it. While this function allowed to give me options, I still had to figure out how the different options could lead to different outcomes. I learned that instead of using the [[]] function to link and create a new passage, you could also use (Link:"")[(go-to: "")]. In the link, you put whatever text or dialogue you want the player to click on for them to go to the next passage/page. I combined this with if/else statements and this allowed me to be able to change the passage according to whatever sentence/string the reader leaves it on.  And so with all of this knowledge, combined with a simple outline of my story, I was ready to start writing the game in Twine.