The Snowman Update is Here!

Postcards » Devlog
105 days ago by oter
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Another little update from me :)

I just finished the latest update to Postcards, which converted the story format from Harlowe 3.3.7 to Snowman 2.02, as well as integrated the p5.js library. Unlike other updates, player facing changes are minimal by design, but on the backend, everything is completely different.

I'm planning on doing a deep dive into the process of converting the game at some point, as I learned a lot along the way, but that is beyond the scope of this post. I might do it in a series of tech discussion posts or in a postmortem after the final update, but regardless, if you are interested in any specific aspect of the conversion process or working in Snowman, leave a comment down below.

Changes

  • The first change is a removal of the back arrow, which allowed you to go back and easily revisit passages. This feature isn't present in Snowman, sorry!
  • While most changes are invisible, I fixed a couple of typos, changed how some ellipses and quotes worked, and maybe fixed the odd awkwardly written sentence.
  • The biggest change is in the graphics of the postcard mechanic. Rather than being blue-text links to click on the body of the postcard, different options are presented to the side or top of the body of the postcard, which fills in as you click on them. This was my original vision of how postcard writing would work, and I find this implementation to be much cleaner looking. I hope you'll agree!
  • Finally, all graphical glitches on laptop and tablet size screens should finally be resolved. Do note that there will be issues on mobile screens though, and I currently don't have plans to optimize for mobile viewing.

Future Updates

The long-planned Epilogue update is still slated to be released soon, ideally within a month. But I've been quite busy getting my newest game, and first attempt at a big project, up and running so Update 4 may slip into mid-March.

Further Context for Update 3

Why change from Harlowe?
I've wanted to do this ever since I decided to continue developing Postcards after LD54. While most of the original development in Harlow was a breeze, there are quite a few things it struggles with, making it scale very poorly for big or complex projects, and—crucially—it isn't very customizable. The further you want your game to look and perform from the out of the box Harlowe, the harder time you'll have making it work.
What's the p5.js library and why add it?
Snowman, as a lightweight implementation of Twine, includes the libraries jQuery and Marked for various general and utility functions, as well as the template system from Underscore. I added p5 to handle graphics, which is what the library does best (in addition to other handy things like easy syntax for DOM manipulation). Though Postcards is pretty graphics light, p5 made it easy to implement the different page backgrounds in the game as a series of instanced sketches. And while this game alone wasn't worth the effort of getting p5 up and running, it'll be useful in the future for making games that look and behave differently from standard, out of the box Twine.
What happened to Snowman 3?
That's a good question. It's presumably still back in development, but hasn't been released yet, so I went ahead and released the update in the older version of Snowman. If/when it does release, I don't expect to update the game again. Once was enough for me (phew).

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