# Do you Twine?



## Lord Camomile (Mar 12, 2015)

I first discovered Twine via an interview with Seth Kriebel, who writes and performs The Unbuilt Room (sort of a text-adventure/D&D performance game... thing).



> Twine is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories.
> 
> You don't need to write any code to create a simple story with Twine, but you can extend your stories with variables, conditional logic, images, CSS, and JavaScript when you're ready.








(I've just noticed that's titled "cam's story" - it's not mine, honest  )

I had a poke around and it seemed really interesting, but then I got distracted by something else, as I do. I was reminded of it listening to One Life Left this morning and thought I'd re-investigate.

Figured it was the sort of thing some folks on here might be into, either playing or building their own games/stories. Any recommendations or creations you'd like to share?


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## Citizen66 (Mar 12, 2015)

Porpentine has done some interesting stuff with Twine. I'm trying to build a TA using Quest.


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## Lord Camomile (Mar 12, 2015)

Citizen66 said:


> Porpentine has done some interesting stuff with Twine.


Holy crap, her website's front page is a visual assault from the 90s  

Looks like there's plenty to explore though, plus a Twine 101 tutorial 


Citizen66 said:


> I'm trying to build a TA using Quest.


How's it going?


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## Citizen66 (Mar 12, 2015)

Very slowly. hopefully it'll be finished by Q4 2016


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## Citizen66 (Mar 12, 2015)

How did you come across Twine? The Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (IFComp) is probably the best place to start to see what's being made with the various systems.


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## Lord Camomile (Mar 12, 2015)

Citizen66 said:


> How did you come across Twine?





Lord Camomile said:


> I first discovered Twine via an interview with Seth Kriebel, who writes and performs The Unbuilt Room (sort of a text-adventure/D&D performance game... thing).






Citizen66 said:


> The Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (IFComp) is probably the best place to start to see what's being made with the various systems.


Ooh, nice one, cheers  Looks like there's plenty on their site to read up on.

urban IF story, anyone?


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## Citizen66 (Mar 12, 2015)

Shippou-Sensei did an ad hoc manga one in the community forum years ago.


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## Buddy Bradley (Mar 12, 2015)

I downloaded it ages ago and have been intending to do something with it, but so far I've never got around to it. I only recently realised it was what Depression Quest (the game that effectively kicked off the whole GamerGate thing) was built on.


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## Shippou-Sensei (Mar 12, 2015)

Citizen66 said:


> Shippou-Sensei did an ad hoc manga one in the community forum years ago.


I will never know why those were so popular.


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## Citizen66 (Mar 12, 2015)

Everyone loves a bit of manga D&D deep down.


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## DotCommunist (Mar 12, 2015)

Shippou-Sensei said:


> I will never know why those were so popular.


'go to the bedroom\bathouse\changing rooms' was a popular request as I recall.


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## Shippou-Sensei (Mar 12, 2015)

Not quite as much as you might think.


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## FridgeMagnet (Mar 12, 2015)

I've done quite a lot in Twine. I used to use Inform and try to write parser-based stuff but even knowing it quite well I found it impractical to do anything complicated with, not because it wasn't capable but because you had to do so much work. And I'm a programmer. Twine lets you write things extremely quickly and also offer choices which would take forever to allow in Inform.


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## Citizen66 (Mar 12, 2015)

Did you use inform 6 or 7? Inform doesn't appeal to me because it looks so long winded to do anything. I've been messing around with Quest which has its own language (although the next re-write is going to be JS) which resembles (?) XML.


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## FridgeMagnet (Mar 12, 2015)

Citizen66 said:


> Did you use inform 6 or 7? Inform doesn't appeal to me because it looks so long winded to do anything. I've been messing around with Quest which has its own language (although the next re-write is going to be JS) which resembles (?) XML.


Both. I actually found Inform 6 easier to write in—I find it impossible to remember the syntax of the natural language stuff in inform 7 for anything complicated.

To be fair 7 is very sophisticated in terms of its world structure and time and scenes etc and if you were writing a large and serious piece of parser IF it would probably save you a lot of time and effort over systems with less built in, and work very well. But I have enough trouble getting my act together to even write Twine.


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## Citizen66 (Mar 12, 2015)

It's very time consuming. I've been wanting to learn to code as a hobby since forever and messing about with IF gave me that opportunity, as there has to be a reason for it. Learning how to add or subtract integers in js is pretty boring if there's no kind of goal for doing it. Quest has a bit of  bad name but it's more than capable from what I can see. Twine isn't really of interest as I'm wanting to do old style parser stuff rather than branching CYOA.


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## FridgeMagnet (Mar 12, 2015)

If I had a big parser project that actually had a serious design behind it I'd put a bit more time into I7 which might help remember how to tweak verbs and all that stuff. Clearly people _do_ do things in it with great success.

One of the things that Twine did emphasise to me though was how overkill and unsuitable parser games are if you want to make something that's more linear-narrative led, which is quite a lot of stuff, even some famous Inform games. In a lot of cases that sort of game seems to end up just using the parser to put in timewasting puzzles, which I generally hate, and I hate "guess the verb" too. RenPy was interesting in that way as well though less accessible than Twine.


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## Citizen66 (Mar 12, 2015)

Guess the verb is a design problem. I agree that most parser games are basically a linear narrative with various roadblocks slowing the tale and giving the appearance of player agency. Ultimately I want to make branching ones but that's a tonne of work so maybe not for my first project. I guess the art is to make the fiction interesting and the puzzles engaging and use good theatre scene changing skills to hide the linear rails running underneath. I hated the old school parser games where you got stuck forever on something. The flow of the story should take priority over fiendish puzzles, imo, although some people prefer the latter if the solution makes sense.


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## Shippou-Sensei (Mar 14, 2015)

Humm might use this as part of my games design course.


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## Citizen66 (Mar 15, 2015)

Depression Quest which apparently kicked off the whole GG crap is also a Twine game.


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## Lord Camomile (Mar 15, 2015)

I already need a dictionary for this thread


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## Citizen66 (Mar 15, 2015)

GG = #gamersgate 

Surely you know about that?


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## Lord Camomile (Mar 15, 2015)

Oh yeah, I know GamerGate (though actually didn't connect it with "GG" ), it's all the other stuff upthread


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## Citizen66 (Mar 15, 2015)

Parser just means the games where you type "go north" as opposed to clicking something that says go north


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## Lord Camomile (Mar 15, 2015)

Aha, well that's one off my list. So "guess the verb" refers to where you have to work out the correct instruction, e.g. "go north", "walk north", "run north", "amble in a northerly direction"?


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## Citizen66 (Mar 15, 2015)

Yeah, you might type "strike match" or "light match" and then curse the dev when you find that "use matchbox" is the only thing that works.


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## FridgeMagnet (Mar 15, 2015)

Shippou-Sensei said:


> Humm might use this as part of my games design course.


Twine is used a lot in teaching, not specifically for game design courses either.


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## Shippou-Sensei (Mar 24, 2015)

It had a really positive effect in both the classes I ran it in....


Well if you overlook the offensiveness of the produced stories.


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## Kid_Eternity (Mar 27, 2015)

Nope but I know someone who designs their RPGs using it.


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