Whistler's Motive

A work of interactive fiction for the Javascript 13k Games Competition 2015.

Play it.

Summary

You're living in a late-70s early-80s police state run by a government that's heavily in bed with Bell-NYNEX. Post-Watergate, the telephony industry had an outsized influence on the development of technology at the same time that the government's fist learned to squeeze the people. The telco-state closed Pandora's box on wireless, so the future's going to be wired for everyone from military on down to Jane Smith.

You're a whistler; a phone phreak who can whistle perfectly-pitched tones that command the signaling technologies of the era. You're out to stop an automated artillery train heading to Portsmouth, NH to take out some fellow dissidents. But first you have to catch it.

Tech

The engine's kind of like Twine. In fact, the story was written inside Twine 2, and I have a small loader that extracts the passages from a Twine 2 HTML file into the simple name/body format my engine expects. Twine 2's empty HTML export was something like 400KB. My empty build is closer to 5KB, or 4KB zipped.

The engine was inspired by the Snowman format but isn't quite a workalike. It has the same <% code %> and <%= value %> inline code mechanisms and the same s variable for game state inside passages. I have some custom macros implemented to make some things easier, and I support running code as the target of a link with [[Description of link|js:call_some_code()]] syntax. That part plays hell with Twine's UI.

Engine Usage

Prerequisites: npm, webpack.

1. Run npm install.
2. If necessary, install webpack with npm install -g webpack.
3. Replace Whistler.html with a Twine 2 export or change the require at the top of main.js to point to your own Twine 2 export.
4. Change the header in index.html.
5. Run build.sh or run the individual commands (or platform equivalents) inside.

You'll probably want to edit css/main.css to suit your story, too.

Notes

This is less than what I wanted to produce. I got a late start on the competition and wasn't able to put as much time toward it as I expected. I saw the deadline, "13:00 CEST" and read it as "13:00 EST", so I lost six hours (!!) that I expected to use to polish the story and add more interactive elements. I was scrambling down to the last minute to get the story coherent and playable. Not sure if it worked.

I'm not even sure if the entry will be accepted; I got delayed during submission because I didn't have the required screenshots ready and the site kept telling me my basic arithmetic was wrong.

Ping me on Twitter if you give it a try and you've got something to say.

Future

I'd like to see if it's possible to make this into an actual Twine export format. I know nothing about Twine formats; it may not even be possible to get a small package from Twine without modifying its core.