GOTO Considered Good, Actually (or: i made a tool for writing casio calculator games using twine)
2026-02-09
i got an old casio graphing calculator at goodwill a few years back, and recently i felt like playing around with it again - there's something really neat about having a little programmable computer that fits in your hand and is powered by AA-batteries, you know?
anyway, i was messing around with casio basic and i realized that the language's affordances (branching with GOTO, simple text input and output) would lend themselves well to making twine-style interactive fiction
so i decided to make a twee-to-casio-basic transpiler - it has some limitations (small maximum story size, no macros, etc.) but it works, and you can try it out yourself if you want!
i also used it to make this short interactive fiction piece which you can play on itch.io - there's an emulator to play it in the browser, or if you happen to have a casio calculator lying around you can download the CAT program file and transfer the game to your calculator via USB.
(here's the story graph in the twine 1 editor)
if you play the game or make something with tweeul8r, please and let me know! (you can click reply on this post to send me an email <3)