I have a confession to make. I have been unreasonably afraid of game engines for a while. I find the UIs intimidating and the supposed “tutorial” material dense and obscure.

Forums I have visited have been tainted with toxicity of varying degrees, questions around basic functionality mocked and the questioner admonished to “git gud”.

But I recently started one of my many Unreal 5 courses that I have bought on Udemy. That course 1 and, I think, a state of more clarity of mind than I had previously had for a while, made me much less afraid. I’ll get back to the fear at some point.

So, after having been a patreon supporter of Chris Klimas for almost two years with the intent to get into Twine, I am finally getting into Twine. It took a kind, and gentle, and I think, very basic, course to get me to overcome my engine fear.

Sure, I have messed around in proprietary engines and I have a smattering of scripting languages ferreted away somewhere in my brain, and I’m definitely not a stranger to learning things quickly, but usually the proprietary stuff I learnt was throwaway and the scripting is no more than what anyone can find out using Google. Knowledge like that also ages very quickly.

Anyway. Twine is interesting in that it will allow me to actually implement a few of the very early games I designed for mobile. I’m still learning, and more than likely it will be a few weekends before I can post anything (because one of the games is literally building a “game engine” shell in Twine before I can implement the actual mysteries).

I like it. It’s been a while since I did anything practical beyond design work. This feels good.

  1. Unreal Engine 5: The Complete Beginner’s Course