Project 4: Collaborative Interactive Narrative

In this final project unit of the semester, you will collaborate on a team of 2-4 people to compose an interactive narrative: a hyperlinked series of choices giving readers a range of reading experiences. The open-source Twine platform allows you to do so with little more than plain text and some brackets – but also to bring in variables, conditional logic, images, CSS, and JavaScript if that's the kind of thing you're into. (A major advantage of working in teams: maybe only one of you wants to dig that deep, but you can all benefit nevertheless.)

In assigning this, I have three main goals for you: (1) to practice managing a complex project involving multiple team members; (2) to assess your own skills as a digital media composer, so as to find ways you in particular can best contribute to a joint project; and (3) to integrate and consolidate the skills you've practiced across the semester.

I also hope you'll have fun with it!

As with earlier projects, the selection of content, and even genre, is your choice: "narrative," in Twine, can include adventure or horror fiction, but also memoir, training manual, poetic meditation, and more. You're free to adapt an existing text, if you give credit to the source.

Generative constraints

This is a starting point; we'll discuss and update in class next week, as has been our usual process.

Baseline criteria For a minimum grade of B, all projects for this unit must:

• Contain at least 20 passages.
• Have a title screen passage containing at least the story's title, the names of your team members, and a link to a credits page if appropriate.
• Have at least one clearly identifiable ending passage.
• Include at least two passages with diverging paths leading out
• Include at least one passage with converging paths leading in

Aspirational inspirations To target (but not guarantee) a grade above a B, the best projects for this unit may...

• Use visuals to direct attention or advance a claim
• Use sound to convey a sense of place or mood
• Use Harlowe code or CSS to make at least two new "looks" for selected passages
• Use Harlowe code to store variables and/or introduce conditional logic (if/then behaviors)
• etc

Collaborative Guidelines

Will be in another file, to keep this one straightforward. See twine-and-collaboration.md.

Here's a summary:

Deadlines and products

At each stage, unless otherwise specified, upload (push) your materials to your group's copy of this assignment repository. I recommend that you save often, using meaningful commit messages; for best results, please keep your filenames clear, lowercase, and space-free (use hyphens or underscores).

If you are using Box, please nevertheless share a link to your Box folder prominently in your GitHub repository.

date	what's due	expected files
Thurs, 4/4	Group Twine Proposal	Further thinking in writing about what you'd like to do for this assignment – and how you'll collaborate / divide the workload. Post to a file in your repository called PROPOSAL.md Optionally, you may wish to use your repository's Project tool to make a to-do list where you can assign tasks to members of the team and keep everyone posted on progress.
Tues, 4/9	Group Twine Preview	An early snapshot of your progress, to get the gears turning. Turn in: An html file exported from Twine using the Publish to File tool; A static screenshot (.png or .jpg) of your narrative in progress, showing the story map of passages and links between them. Any other files we'd need to successfully import and view your Twine – images, css to import (e.g. bootstrap), etc – should be pushed to the repo as well. An updated README.md, explaining in at least 300 words what you're showing us in this preview. Feel free also to ask questions or lay out next steps for yourselves! If necessary, credits for any assets used should be added to a clearly labeled passage in your Twine, and linked to from the title page.
Thurs, 4/11	Workshop-Ready Draft	A solid attempt at a complete, playable game. Turn in the same components as for the Preview, but updated.
Tues, 4/16, at 11:59 pm	Final Draft	Turn in the same components as for the Draft, but updated. This deadline will give us one extra studio day on Tuesday 4/16, and one class day to play each other's games (and talk about the final reflection for the semester) on Thursday 4/18.