Do you have about an hour? Can you write 300 words? Then you can—and should—make your own text adventure today.
That's the idea behind the ongoing Twiny Jam, which invites anyone and everyone to make a tiny game using Twine. If you're not familiar with Twine, it's an open-source interactive fiction tool that's incredibly easy to use; if you know how a hyperlink works, you'll be good to go almost immediately. (Check out these tutorials for a lightning-fast introduction.)
The Twiny Jam was spearheaded by Porpentine, the Twine creator behind games like Howling Dogs and Crystal Warrior Kesha. Naturally, she's contributed a game herself, a "procedurally generated emoticon adventure" called Frolic RPG.
Porpentine says she picked the 300-word theme for the jam "because I feel like low word count is a way to feel less intimidated… I get stuck a lot on the vague feeling that a project should have something More."
Indeed. I've played countless Twine games, written articles about them, watched my friends make them, and thought really hard about making one myself. But for some reason I always found an excuse to put it off. My ideas always felt too ambitious, or not ambitious enough. But if all I have to do is write 300 words, I might be out of excuses. After all, I just wrote nearly 300 words in this post alone.
If you want to contribute your own game to the Twiny Jam, it runs through Thursday, so grab a free copy of Twine here and get going.
