Hi, JavaScript (and I presume Java) is hellish, so I wish you luck with that! 🫡 And I go into the code I used to make the Shepherds Twine version here! The game engine is Twine Sugarcube, which breaks down into three components:

• HTML. If you think of the game as a body, HTML is the skeleton: it determines the structural arrangement of the UI and its layout (where boxes and buttons and navigation bars go; is your “home button” at the top or bottom of your screen, is your navigational menu at the top of bottom, etc.?) Once you get your UI set up in an arrangement/layout that you like, you hardly need this again. There are Twine templates floating around on itch.io and other spaces that wonderful creators (who have a better grasp on this than me) share freely: I credit the one I used as a jumping off point for Shepherds in the game’s credits, so I myself didn’t start here entirely from scratch!
• CSS. CSS is the ‘skin’ of the game, the cosmetic features that make it look pretty instead of a cluster of plain text, shapes, and buttons. Colors, images, borders, certain cosmetic effects like glowing on hover, and basically all cosmetic features are written in CSS. This is probably what you want to focus most on if you want your UI to be really aesthetic! (Brutal honesty: I absolutely hate it and it took me over a year to painstakingly learn it and refine the game’s UI over time–maybe even more. I try to blank that period of time out…)
• JavaScript. I believe Twine Sugarcube (which is one of several Twine sublanguages) is the only one that incorporates JavaScript, which makes it the most flexible of the Twine story formats, but also probably the most intimidating for new beginners. JavaScript is the 'brain’ of the game, the thing that–at its core–determines most actual game behavior. It’s the stuff that drives the mechanics under the hood. In actuality, Twine Sugarcube itself already uses basic JavaScript for its commands (variables are defined as $firstname is “Honor” or $sword is true, conditionals are things like <<if $firstname is “Honor”>><<set $courage to 50>><</if>>, which is basically JavaScript under the hood). If you want to make some of the more advanced features, like a codex that shows each entry without loading a new passage, or the interactive map, that requires more advanced JavaScript!

I hope that helps! And sorry if I’ve explained anything inaccurately, I am not a programmer by trade or profession, so I’m only explaining how I think of things from my self-taught perspective! 😅 I wish you luck with your own game endeavors, and thank you so much for your kind words about Shepherds too!!

Hi, I talk more about what coding resources and languages I learned for the Twine version of the game here! I really recommend reading that post if you haven’t read it already!

To make the Shepherds Twine version, I used Twine SugarCube, which is the most expansive and flexible but arguably the most ‘advanced’ version of Twine. (Other Twine formats include Harlowe, Snowman, and Chapbook.) If you have a long-term vision for your game and think it will require advanced features, as Shepherds did, starting with SugarCube is the most “efficient” way of doing things: it’s a steeper learning curve, but it ensures that you won’t have to switch to a different format down the road in order to add more complex features. If you’re just starting out and want to learn how to code interactive fiction, period, starting with Harlowe is probably less intimidating and may help you get a grasp of the basics of IF better!

Likewise, if you just want to learn how to code, starting out with the visual Twine 2 native app (where you code in little boxes as part of a branching tree) is probably best!

If you want to make a Shepherds-like game right out of the gate, I used TweeGo, which is more similar to ChoiceScript’s CSIDE: it’s a compiler that allows you to write all of your code in a text editor like NotePad or Sublime Text, and then just run the game from those text files, “compiling” them all into a single playable game file. If you’re asking me, TweeGo is absolutely necessary if you’re making a huge text RPG like Shepherds. After a certain point, all of the little text boxes and choice boxes in the Twine app won’t be able to handle–I don’t know–over 100,000 words? That’s an arbitrary number, I haven’t tested it myself, but I know that after a certain point, trying to open so many choices and passages will just turn your computer into an oven, if not crash the program altogether, so writing in plain text files through TweeGo becomes absolutely necessary if you have ambitions to make a large Twine game. Otherwise, the Twine 2 app works very well for beginners, game jams, or more typically-sized Twine games!

If you want the technical details, I use TweeGo in a version of this workflow (beware, this will look very confusing and intimidating if you’re new to programming and development), and I use VS Code as my text editor to write in. It even has a handy syntax highlighting for Twine that you can install!

If you want a very simple tutorial on how to set up and install Tweego rather than doing it my way (which I don’t think is necessary for a beginner), @manonamora-if made a wonderful, easy-to-use tutorial and installation guide here!

As for the cards, those were made with a mix of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, all of which becomes necessary to know when making a Shepherds-like game in Twine! If you’re cool with starting out with something simpler, I wouldn’t worry too much about all that and just focus on getting the basics of IF coding and writing down, first!

I hope that’s helpful! And thanks for enjoying the game!

Very slowly and painstakingly, haha!

There are 3 to 4 aspects to making a Twine game, in my mind:

• Learning “Twee”: this is the base coding notation of a Twine game without using the visual editor. This is how you learn to make labels, choice links, branching, etc. For example, in the Twine visual editor, you can create a choice that goes to a label titled ‘cainedieshere’ using this Twee notation: [[I choose to let Caine die.|cainedieshere]] This will show the reader a choice that says “I choose to let Caine die” and when they click on it, they’ll be directed to a passage with the label 'cainedieshere.’ Twee is basically learning more of this, and allows for more flexibility and 'shooting from the hip’ coding than having to manually create a new textbox and connect it to another one in the visual editor.

You can learn how to write in Twee/Twine using the Twine cookbook or the SugarCube wiki (if you’re using SugarCube, which is just one 'version’ of Twine (the most advanced one–I believe other ones include Harlowe and Snowman), as well as Adam Hammond’s tutorial on how to make a Twine game! This is what I did, though I fully admit that I had the advantage of already being very well-versed in ChoiceScript, which shares a lot of the same principles and nomenclature!

• Learning CSS: this is how you style the game’s UI. Full disclosure, I absolutely hate it. It’s so finicky and doesn’t make a lot of inherent sense to me, but I try to muddle through. :’) There are lots of CSS guides out there, including Grim Baccaris’s Twine Grimoire! There are also a lot of amazing creators out there who offer free Twine CSS templates for free, especially on itch.io, so you can start off your game with an existing UI. I used one of these and built up from there in order to develop the Shepherds UI!
• Learning JavaScript: this is only necessary if you plan to use a lot of complicated functions and behaviors, like interactive maps and documents that update without having to navigate to a different passage. I’m also horrendous at this and had to have a lot of help from people who are better-versed in this kind of coding, but thankfully it was only a small part of the game!
• Learning HTML: this is the framework that Twine outputs into, but I don’t think it’s really that necessary to 'learn’ if you’ve got the other things handled or are using a template! The principles are still good to know, but I wouldn’t say it’s really as crucial as the other bits.

Hope that all makes sense, and is helpful! :D

Hi there, thanks so much!! And to make a standard Twine game, you don’t really need to know any code at all; the native, out-of-the-box version that you can download from twinery.org makes it very easy to make an interactive game, especially with the many free visual templates that creators put out there to help others get started!

However, to make a lot of what’s in the ShoH Twine version now, that did unfortunately take a lot of code, none of which I knew at all at first! 😅 Figuring out CSS (to make the general UI, make it mobile-friendly, etc.), JavaScript (to create custom behaviors like the store, codex, and interactive maps), and twee (to code the game itself) ends up adding to a lot of work, let alone figuring out a good workflow system so that you can actually compile and test all of your progress. But resources like the Sugarcube wiki were invaluable when it came to getting started! Hope that all makes sense!

And I actually didn’t use any map software for Shepherds: I drew the maps from my mind’s eye on a tablet (which looked awful) and sent it to map artists I commissioned (who are listed in the credits) to bring my sketches to life! They did an amazing job (because my doodles looked horrible)!! However, if you’re looking for good map-making software in general, I really enjoy Inkarnate, which I used more recently to map out the locations in my current novel!