For Porpentine‘s Twiny Jam, I made a teeny tiny Twine game about painting your nails. The summary of the jam rules run as follows:

Make a tiny Twine (300 words or less)!

i picked this theme because i feel like low word count is a way to feel less intimidated about making something (i get stuck a lot on the vague feeling that a project should have something More) + focus on each individual detail and why it’s being included.

After speaking to the members of a friend’s class who were on the verge of making their first Twine games in a class-based game jam, and seeing how intimidated many of them were by the project, I think a challenge like this is especially clever. For people experienced with Twine, it provides a good encouragement to focus on the fine grain of a compact project, and for people inexperienced, it gives a good, low-risk invitation to try something fairly manageable.

The cover for Unpolished.

The game I made, Unpolished (play for free at the link), took an hour or two in total from the time I sat down to get started to the time I hit “publish.” I also used this opportunity to figure out a bit about how to adjust styles in Twine, which I hadn’t done before. I didn’t do much — just changed a text size and some colors — but I’m still happier with the finished product as a result. Personally, I might not have been willing to take on that on a larger scale project straight out of the gate.

So, fun jam. A+. Would jam again. But, also I think it’s a nice reminder of the value of small projects. They’re more manageable, they present their own interesting challenges, and as evidenced by so many of the entrants in the Twiny Jam, they can yield really lovely, strange results.