Highnoon Conversion for Twine

This week's creative project is a conversion of Highnoon for the Twine interactive fiction system. While I was converting/reimagining for Arduino I had two thoughts. The first was that I'd like to do a more faithful conversion with the original dialogue and secondly that such a conversion would be a way to demonstrate the power of Twine.

• Play Highnoon online.
• Get the source code.

So, you know the game; You're in a showdown with Black Bart. You each have four shells and are 100 paces apart. In this original version there are more win/loss conditions than straight death.

Twine allows quite a lot of expressiveness and flexibility when writing interactive fiction. It also outputs the results to a single .html file that require no supporting libraries or other files. If you are interested in the basics of Twine then I'd suggest looking at this tutorial.

The conversion to Twine was fairly straightforward. I used the Jonah Story Format because it places passages one after the other without clearing the screen like Sugarcane does. I made a few tweaks to the inbuilt functions; the first to totally suppress the output of passage titles and the second to totally deactivate old choices. This was not difficult; it was more a matter of removing the bits of code from existing functions that I did not need.

I also based passage names around the line numbers in the original code. This eased moving from the GOTO style of the original code to the structured coding style of Twine.

The verdict; a very playable old-style game.

Checkout the other games I have converted