It's A Zine!

In a previous blog post I mentioned that I had a specific reason for developing a short, narrative focussed adventure in Twine that didn't require specialised coding or the use of any variables. It wasn't just that I was developing in Twine for the first time; I had a second intention for the project - to make it into a zine. Not just a zine, however, but an interactive zine as a little homage to the Fighting Fantasy game books I really enjoyed playing when I was growing up.

While working in Twine I constructed the game in such a way that it would also fit onto 32 pages - both in terms of how many passages I could use in Twine and also how much text I could fit at a maximum. This is because I wanted the zine to be constructed out of one A4 sheet of paper that I could fold and cut to make 32 tiny A8 pages.

I published the game, The Light At The Frankenstein Place, in February 2020 but the zine idea languished as I got distracted and worked on other projects. At the beginning of this year, however, I decided to resurrect the idea and see if all the planning I had set in motion five years ago would actually pan out: I set about converting the Twine passages to pages.

My first attempt was very close to what I had envisioned but I ended up going through a few more iterations of the zine to switch a few passages around to try and keep distance between successive parts of the game and to fill space on some of the pages, as well as be a bit more descriptive with my writing and world building, because it turned out that in some places I had been a little too conservative in my writing when I was being mindful of how much I might be able to fit on such a tiny page size.

(The changes to the text resulted in version 2.0 of the game, which was updated last month.)

I had a good version ready in March, which I used as a zine-swap gift during the Open Book Youth Fest in Cape Town as part of a beginner's zine-making workshop that I co-facilitated with a friend at a local high school.

Continuing the project, there was a lot of running of tests at my local print shop to try to mitigate the alignment problem that is created by the white border that printers add. I had it solved and was extremely happy with the result and then, around May, the print shop was forced to change the paper-feeder method it uses for printing and that threw everything out. The print shop did some fiddling on its side with software settings, and I did some fiddling on my side with layout alignments, and we got it close but I'm still not completely satisfied so getting the alignment right remains an ongoing task and experiment.

I also bought examples of all sorts of A4 brands of commercial 80gsm paper that's locally available in South Africa to see what the quality, colour, and feel was like. That was an education in and of itself.

Finally, I discovered I had 160gsm (thicker) white paper in a drawer, which gave me the idea to make a cover for the zine. It meant breaking my "one sheet of A4 paper" rule, although I had proven that the game does, in fact, fit on one sheet, but I liked the look and feel so much that I decided to add the cover. To fill the new blank spaces in the zine I extended the front and back matter pages, which gave them breathing room and also allowed me to add a bit more information. I also reworked the final two passages of the game into one page in the zine, which wasn't ideal but it was to solve a logistical problem that had emerged.

The zine was then finally complete and I used it as a zine-swap gift again during the Open Book Workshop Week zine-making workshop that I co-facilitated in June. The workshop was a huge success and my zine seemed to be very well received by the participants.

For those wondering about the process of assembling the zine, I print the covers as multiples on a sheet and then cut them by hand. All the interior pages are 1 A4 double-sided sheet, which I cut by hand to 8 A7-sized DPS sheets. I fold each one in half, fold the cover over the 32 pages, and staple it together.

I am now in the process of getting the zine into independent book shops in Cape Town. I should have a blog post up about that soon. I am also going to try an experiment with shipping copies internationally. (This should be on the game page soon. At the moment I'm experiencing a technical problem with getting it to display.) However, if you are interested, please take note: the South African post office is notoriously unreliable and shipping could take 6 to 12 weeks, or even longer.

Ultimately, this project was a challenge and a lot of work but it was extremely fun and a very rewarding experience. I will be making more!