Travails

Wow, that was a good couple of days. But I’m going to post about them later.

Things had not gone well earlier in the week. After my struggles with Twine last week I still had plenty to do, events conspired to make sure my evenings were otherwise engaged. Wednesday especially, when I spent the evening beside the A322 awaiting recovery after a van crashed into the rear of my car.

This was the car I had planned to drive up to my father’s house in Yorkshire on Thursday evening, for a social visit but also to get me close to York for Heritage Jam. So instead I spent all day Thursday sorting out my insurance claim, trying (and failing) to get my car picked up and a courtesy car delivered soon enough to get up to Dad’s. Then, when that was ruled out, working out how to get to York in time for the Jam. Oh, and in-between trying to get my Twine game into a presentable state.

The Team Info-pointers project was ruled out. I didn’t get a chance to even look at the data I’d collected the previous week. I had to let my team-mates down, but I didn’t even get to send them an apologetic email until half-way through Friday, from York. I had taken the Info-point unit along, in case we got a chance to do something related to it.

Eventually I worked out that if I got the first train out of Farnham on Friday morning, I could get to York into time to miss only registration and the meet and greet elements. I emailed my plans to the organisers (the lovely and brilliant Tara and Izzy) and told them to save a place on a team for me.

Then I cracked on with the Twine. I got all the links working and debugged, all the weirdnesses that were left over from early experiments. Cat sent me alternative (.MP3) versions of her sound files, in case people’s browsers couldn’t cope with the original .WAV files. I tried to host a build on my personal web-server so that people could play directly on-line, but again, couldn’t get the sound files to work. So, running short of time, I scrapped that idea and packaged everything into a “download this folder” package on my Dropbox’s Public folder. People would have to download it before playing. On reflection, I realize I should have compress it first.

But I didn’t have time to think that last Thursday. I had to enter it into the on-line stream of Heritage Jam and get an early night. Oh! I had to write a “paradata” too, up to a thousands words on the whys and wherefores of our creation. I forgot about that. So, I scrapped the early night and set to work. Luckily, I’d already asked Cat for a paragraph or two to include in a coda at the end of the game. So that went straight into the paradata. The rest flowed pretty easily, I was two tired to care if it was good or not.

I attached it all to the email and pressed “send”. And here it is, the very last entry, you’ll note, that was put on Heritage Jam’s website.