Kingdom of Cards

My twine project is based off of an earlier interactive fiction project about a fantasy world based around the four card suits. In this fantasy world, there are four kingdoms, each one representing one of the four suits. The Diamond Kingdom is very wealthy with a greedy king who wants to steal resources from the other kingdoms. They reside in an ancient Egyptian-like city in the middle of the desert. The Heart Kingdom is very warm and welcoming to travelers and other kingdoms despite living in the frigid arctic. The Club Kingdom is a medieval-like civilization in the forest that focuses on magic and nature. Lastly, the Spade Kingdom is a primitive kingdom that lives in the caves. They aren’t friendly towards strangers or other kingdoms and prefer to be left alone. I want my players to be able to explore the different kingdoms and learn about their culture. But I don’t want to do this through characters, as there are very few characters in the game. Instead, I want most of the culture to be told through artifacts. From temples to ruins, I want the player to explore and find more about the different cultures as they do so. There are also multiple different paths and endings in this game. The player can choose to unite all the kingdoms and make peace, or bring about the end of an entire kingdom. While the players cannot die in the game or even lose, there are still some challenges through puzzles. There are certain sections where you need to solve riddles to find the right path or travel through a maze. A lot of the challenges are finding the right items and how to use them. In this game, I use datasets to store the inventory. The inventory is very important for the game as you need to collect objects and use these objects in order to progress. I am also structuring the prompts in a way that is more of a wep and less of a branching tree. This allows players to explore the world and do the steps in any order at their own time. 

This was an idea for a project I created a while back. But back then, I was strictly using code to build the whole thing. But with Twine, I can create a whole path that would usually take me a week to make within less than a day. I can finally finish this project and all its paths. The visual layout of twine helps me organize and visualize how the story goes and how things are connected. I want to make this game to bring a world to life. I want to create a world with different cultures with an overarching theme for players to explore and enjoy. I am aiming to achieve this by creating a more webbed story opposed to a branching on so the player can go back and explore different areas and aren’t restricted to one single path.