Harbinger

A screencap of the Twine software, demonstrating the coding used.

In 2017 I competed in the Interactive Fiction Competition (IFComp), an annual competition for writers of branching-path stories and text games. I wrote Harbinger, a short hypertext novel, using the program Twine, all in about two months. Harbinger placed 21st out of 77 entries that year.

You can read the entire completed story here.

Harbinger is 20k words long (across each branching path) and takes about 30 minutes to play through. In this story you take on the role of an unnamed talking crow. An unknown evil, taking the form of a great fire, is spreading across the country, seemingly unstoppable. The crow tries to warn the innocent people in its path, but not many are receptive to that warning.

Harbinger was my first attempt at a branching path story, and though I am quite pleased with the result, I made limited use of the nature of the format. The story only has one ending, with one main path to that ending, and a dozen or so options along that path that only flavor the narrative.

I enjoyed and learned much from the process of writing Harbinger, and I believe it’s demonstrative of my technical writing skills as well as the themes I enjoy exploring.

I used much of what I learned in my next IFComp project, Into the Lair.