Game of 1000+ poems
A game where you compose poems by choosing the next line.
Fullscreen recommended!
To play:
1. click on the link you like
2. repeat until the poem is completed
3. copy it and paste into the comments with your feedback!
4. start the process from the beginning by clicking 'Restart' button
5. optional: turn on this music on the background while playing for the right mood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnudRuVaZhk
Made as a submission for the Extra Credits Game Jam #6, theme: "Take Care", "Extra Retro" challenge!
P.S: written and scripted in Ink engine. Font by codeman38 from http://www.zone38.net/
Comments
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Take care
about your business
let others become strangers
and forget their names
so they can grow new ones
each taking care of their business and protecting it from you
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This was fun. I enjoyed watching as each added line distinctly changed the feeling of the poem as a whole.--I think my favorite version of this poem excludes the final two lines. Thank you for making this!
Thank you for playing it!
I'm glad you liked the poem (or at least part of it :)
Take care
within the cup of tea
if there is nowhere else, then at least here
drift on the currents of your thoughts
but inevitably the planet rotates, reliable the day is dying out
if you don't enter the same river twice, then he doesn't catch you
and you'll slip through his fingers, like a small jellyfish
Love it, I have sunk far too much time into it already, adn I summoned the virus :D
Thanks!
I'm glad you've loved the poem! The jellyfish thread is one of my favorites one too.
Oooh, I dig it. The blues tracks you linked make for a groovy experience. I'm curious to know what lies beneath the surface in how you hook up the lines, but for now, I'll enjoy playing around to see what grows from it.
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Take care
instead of this flower pot of old
take care like the apple of your eye
it's worth fortune in the antiques shop
In the photo: warm scarf, sad eyes
isn't that enough for happiness?
Thank you for the comment!
I'm really glad you enjoyed our game!
As for hooking the lines, it was a sort of improvisational interactive fiction writing exercise for the two of us. It went like this: one person would write the line, than another would write two or three possible developments for this line, then the first person would write two or three possible developments for each of these lines, etc. As you would imagine, number of branches quickly grew out of control, so we had to make some cuts and leave our poem relatively short.
And this process ate like 80% of our development time :)
Oh neat, that sounds like a lot of fun. Could be a simple game with friends all on its own.
Thank you for sharing!
Your welcome!
It was a lot of fun to a point where we created loads of branches and managing them all become really toilsome and exhausting. So in case you'll decide to play this game with friends, be sure to limit your scope or it will grow out of proportions really fast :)
Having a structure before hand like 4 line ABAB or a haiku or sonnet might do well to help creatively constrain the process.
Yes! This was my thinking too.
Super interesting game, a cool and different way to go for the thematic :)
Take care
after the wicked old woman Priscilla, because she
was your kind aunt Prissy many years before
human skin becomes papery over time
a life's sketchpad, scribbled with wrinkles
who knows, maybe your care could erase some of those
Thanks for the comment!
We did enjoy playing around with the theme and spinning it in multiple different ways. It was surprising how poly semantic this phrase is!
This is such a cool take on the theme! Really well done. You went with a super simplistic style which works really well (except for when the text you have to select overlaps with the picture on the right). The minimalistic sound effects when you select an option somehow gives your selection more weight, but I wish there was a little jingle once a poem is completed. All in all I loved it and am very happy with my poem too:
Take care
after cute little girl Lola, as everyone did
back when trees grew taller and grass was greener
it was when we left home forever
touching causes pain, if I don't turn into a cloud
care for me gently, as only as you can
Thanks for your comment!
I'm glad you've liked our game! Honestly, we have planned to make the audiovisual feedback more vivid, but were faced with some hard limitations on the Ink engine side. And since we're both humanitarians and doesn't know much about programming, we decided to keep the interface as simple as possible and instead concentrate our efforts on writing poems! And now we're happy our work made you happy :)
I don't know if you've played Kentucky Route Zero but reminiscent of a couple of moments where it asks you to arrange a poem or song by grafting together disparate passages.
Take care
after the wicked old woman Priscilla, because she
was your kind aunt Prissy many years before
her silver curls were black as night, and
you used to weave flowers into them
Thank you for commenting our game! Your poem is wonderful, by the way :)
We didn't play KRZ, but I've heard enough about it to it maybe influence the design unconsciously. Now I'm really curious about how they've implemented this feature, so thanks for the reference!
I love the poem generation and the recommend listening added a lot. There was something soothing about choosing the lines and molding the tone of the poem without having to write it. Even lines that I thought were repeat options generated new ones. And I really dig how the opening Take care takes on a lot of different meanings depending on what follows. This is very cool!
One of my favorite poems from the game:
Take care
for eternity
the cool walls of the temple grow up to the sky
God moved to the basements of the temple
God whispers a secret to us:
my name is Elvis and here's the music
Thanks for the reply and for the poem!
I'm glad that you liked the recommended music. Adding it into the game instruction was experimental to us, and I'm glad that this experiment has yeilded positive results!
I dug the recommended listening. Witch is strange because I'm not much of a blues fan. I can see how the theme brought it to mind.
Thanks for playing our game!
The creation of this game consisted mostly of a collective poetic improvisation for us, so we decided that blues was a fitting sound accompaniment :)
I like references to different poems (at least I think they are there :D), and it's a pretty meditative experience. Although the font is not easy on the eyes, I understand that it's part of the 'retro' aesthetic.
Here is my poem!
Take care
instead of next step
and when the sun rises, do not take care: let it go free
drift on the currents of your thoughts
but inevitably the planet rotates, reliable the day is dying out
if you don't enter the same river twice, then he doesn't catch you
and you'll slip through his fingers, like a small jellyfish
Thanks for making and posting the game!
Thank you for playing the game! We're glad you've liked the experience :)