Writing Interactive Fiction with Twine

22. Story Style: Changing the Game Appearance in SugarCube

Spunky Spelunky by Puck Saint makes you feel like you’re climbing inside an arcade cabinet. It’s a text adventure set in a cave, fashioned to look like a video game from the 1980s. The text is in that familiar pixelated font of yesteryear, and the story scrolls onto the screen in blocky declarations, reminiscent of old text-and-image games like the original King’s Quest.

By manipulating the stylesheet, playing with transitions, and tweaking the appearance of the text in the passage, Saint takes a simple game about collecting ore and exploring caves and turns it into an adventure that looks more like Legend of Zelda than Zork. Saint used SugarCube as the base for the game, and you, too, ...