Story engine

Twine 2.1.3

Twine is a little different from typical games because it's not a pure game. Instead, it's a way to construct nonlinear stories that could be interpreted as a game but could equally be a piece of interactive fiction or a book similar to those "choose your own" adventure novels from the 1980s. At the heart of the story creation is basic chunks of text and links to different passages. You could offer the reader a description of a location, for example, and then offer a series of links for them to decide how they want the story to develop, such as whether you go north, south, east, or west. It's very similar to web design, using HTML and CSS, and that makes Twine equivalent to an IDE, helping you manage the various elements of a story, change links, and even add extras, such as health or inventory management, without needing to worry about cookies or code like JavaScript. Each location becomes a node in a story map showing how each node relates to each other and how you progress from one location to another. Creating games puts the emphasis on imagination and writing, making it ideal for children. It could even be useful for people planning to write a book, because you can use nodes to hold locations and characters and experiment with how they interact through the text and an evolving story. The final output can also be seamlessly hosted online, just as you might a website. The great thing about this approach is that it means almost anyone can create a game, but it also means that those games are going to be a little different, and certainly not of the first person shooter variety.

Project Website

https://twinery.org/

Many example games and free games written with Twine are hosted on The Interactive Fiction Database (http://ifdb.tads.org/).

Strategy