A screencap of the Twine software, demonstrating the coding used.
Into the Lair
This is my second work of Interactive Fiction, submitted to the Interactive Fiction Competition (IFComp) in 2018. I wrote Into the Lair in about three months, using the program Twine. It placed 43th out of 77 entries that year. I learned after the competition that some of my coding was faulty, and several judges were unable to access the ‘win’ condition.
You can play the complete, but unedited, game here.
Into the Lair is 37k words long (across all branching paths and code) and takes about 30 minutes to play. The player takes on the role of a vampire, newly freed from the thrall of Viscardi, their vampire maker. The player descends into Viscardi’s lair, with the goal of either killing this him or disrupting his operation.
I started writing Into the Lair with the goal of making better use of branching paths, which I hadn’t utilized much in my previous project, Harbinger. With that in mind, I coded in dozens of situations with several possible solutions for each. For example, the player encounters a handful of Viscardi’s other thralls in his lair, and is given the options to ignore them, kill them, free them, or drink their blood, with each encounter playing out different depending on variables.
The branching paths made the story more dynamic, but they were also trickier to code. The end result was a game that is still playable, but not the best demonstration of my technical writing.
I learned a lot from writing Into the Lair, but ultimately decided not to complete the edits that would have made it into a satisfying final product.
A screencap of the Twine software, which visualizes the progression through the narrative.