As it says on the tin: Broke Down is a Twinestory about tearing shit up and getting off on it.
Twine is easy to use, but it takes a little persistence to coax out the possibilities. Fortunately, there are resources everywhere (Porpentine has collected many). I relied heavily on the collective knowledge shared by the Twine community.
1 Design
I wanted to design the layout first, because I knew that there would be a temptation to use the default CSS styling if there was a time crunch. The hardest part was figuring out which elements affected what, especially for the sidebar (the hyperlink in the byline bedeviled me). When I got stuck, I was able to look at Leon and Porpentine’s stylesheets to figure out which elements to reference in my own CSS. Dan Cox’s Twine tutorial provided information about using Google Web Fonts.
2 Mechanic
Implementing the story layers was easily done using Twine’s built-in if macro and jumping to “more” and “less” passages that changed the level variable. The hard part was resetting the variable each time the reader advanced, and I felt this was critical. I couldn’t find a way to combine the set macro with internal links. I thought I found a workaround using Leon’s timedreplace macro, but an hour before the deadline I realized it didn’t work. As a last-minute MacGuyver move I created duplicate passages that reset the variable and automatically jumped to the prose passage using Leon’s goto macro. It doubles the number of passages but it works.
I used a number of Leon’s excellent macros and fixes:
- Timedgoto macro
- Timedreplace and timedinsert macros
- Display macro fix (allows variable passage names)
- Inline CSS fix
3 Writing
I got a late start Saturday morning. I wasn’t sure about the story, I just knew I wanted 3 levels of prose. I spent most of the day freewriting stuff and reading erotic fanfiction (sorry, it’s true), and I thought about people in rollover crashes and what it might be like to roll downhill in a metal cage and maybe hit a tree or water. I don’t know what that says exactly, it’s just where my head was at. Sometime Sunday morning the story clicked and I wrote the bulk of the prose from then until deadline. I was writing up until the last ten minutes and ended up condensing routes to make it in on time. What you’re seeing is relatively raw.
4 Post-competition
I will release a post-competition version before voting ends. I mainly want to expand the routes and add more diversity, but I had an idea for color scheme changes that I want to try implementing. Li’l, my jam partner for LD25, has expressed interest in creating music.
As far as what worked/didn’t work, I got lucky and had access to awesome macros that let me set up the story experience I wanted. It was a much more organic process than my previous entries, but it worked out.
I wanted to compromise between game play features and storyline so the game wouldn’t be too kinetic. I tried to find a good middle-ground, but it still feels light on both ends. 
