Ghostly Boxes Postmortem

I didn't get to work on art for some illustrated- or even animated- visuals of this silly ghost scenario, or anything, and I was rushing to get this out the door. I would have designed some different ghosts to watch over you and some different box assets, and a haunted house background. There would have been something like a jumpscare gif for whenever the ghosts scare you, and I had designs in mind for the ghost jumpscares. Instead, I settled for being descriptive. Drawing these things sound really fun, though, so I'll likely return to this project at some point to give it visuals, just like with the Martin game. The puzzle game, I was less enthusiastic about.

But I was recommended by this tutorial on how to insert sound effects into your Twine game to use Pixabay for free-to-use sound effects, and that was so useful. I used this Breathing sound effect, this Chattering Teeth (foley) sound effect, this Female giggling, a bit subdued, this Raccoons, hiss growl sniff attack TORONTO sound effect, this Opening Snickers sound effect, and this Loud Drink Slurping sound effect.

This would have been all nice and dandy, if it wasn't for the fact that the version of Twine that I was using- Harlowe- barely supports any audio functions. I had to embed my sound effect files and zip my html in a file with the files, and there's no auto-play or looping audio options, and you just see this if I tried to put audio into a passage.

This spoils the fun, if you know there's meant to be audio playing. I improvised by adding this Infinitely Loud Silence (ILS) sound effect to the safe box passages, but aghh, it still doesn't help with immersion to have to manually play the audio, especially when it tells you the audio length. There's apparently an extension to Twine called the Harlowe Audio Library. If I hadn't left the audio for last, I would have had more time to look into how to use it and see if it offered appropriate sound effects for my game. My game was fairly easy anyways, so I'm trying not to feel bummed that it took away a feature from the game like this. If I ever update this game again with visuals, I'll try transferring the game to his Harlowe Audio Library extension. I was still happy with the variables I had figured out for the game.

I still want to mess more with the CSS customization to the page, the text, the font, and the javascript effects, too.