Synopsis
Are you ready to make your choice? The one that will shape the rest of your life? Or will regret the roads not taken?
About...
The Roads Not Taken is a sci-fi parser created for the SpringThing, forcing you to go through a coming-of-age ritual, with a choice that will shape the rest of your life. The main particularity of this game is that it was built in Twine, a non-parser engine (with little custom code).
The mechanic of the game was inspired by one-turn parser games, like Aisle and Pick-Up the Phone Booth and Die (the final choice), while the premise nodded at the ceremony described by The Giver (Lois Lowry, 1993), and more recent YA dystopian stories with compartmentalised societies.
More than anything, this project was, in retrospect, about my own hubris. When I started with it, on a whim, might I add, I knew parsers with custom engines were few and far-between, and I'd never heard of one made in Twine (turns out, they actually exist). I thought I struck gold on novelty and went to work. I tried to keep it as Vanilla as possible, especially with world modelling.
While The Roads Not Taken garnered attention for this Parser-in-Twine experiment, sharp graphic, and its intriguing mysterious setting, the actual gameplay wasn't as smooth as I'd hoped it would be. Turns out, creating a world model from scratch is pretty difficult - and I was still then a novice then in the parser codes and conventions. However, I think I managed to show there's still a lot more experimenting we can do in the medium - and that's pretty exciting.
Awards
SpringThing
- Biggest Stakes Single Click - Audience Award
- Loveliest UI - Audience Award
- Best Use of Medium - Audience Award
Reviews
Making your own parser is a fraught thing, and many people have tried and failed over the years. This one is better than many I've seen. I liked the overall story, and found it fun. I ended with a pretty big surprise in my playthrough, which was good.
- Brian Rushton
I do think the trail this game blazes, of adding parser capability to Twine, is a pretty cool one. I could see future efforts leveraging the expanded interface to good effect. It is this game authorship achievement that I find most compelling here.
- JJ McC
I admire the author’s bravery for trying to implement a parser in Twine.
- Vivienne Dunstan