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Let's Create A Game With Twine

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All the links, and a short video how to, are here...

http://digitalcreativitytools.everythingability.com/

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What is an Interactive Narrative?

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twinery.org

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What Are They?

  • Textual
  • Indie ‘games’
  • Deliberately low-fi
  • Focus on story rather than effects
  • In the first/second person, i.e YOU rather than they, or HE/SHE
  • The “You” part is emotive, useful at putting you in someone else’s shoes.
  • Dialogue design for “big games”

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Let’s Talk About Structure

An “always branching” game design will always get exponentially larger and become unmanageable or like this, a very disorientating experience.

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Often, stories branch and then regroup, or even can be entirely linear.

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Roman Malton

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Get Twine

http://twinery.org

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You can use Twine in the browser OR download the app. Both tools are pretty much identical.

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Twine is really a tool to create one HTML file that jumps between Passages, letting you focus on the literary side of the work, not the coding.

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Choose Chapbook Story Format

Twine has lots of languages, called Formats, but Chapbook is the simplest, easiest, nicest looking imo, and easiest to add coding to.

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Before we start: A Short Note About HTML

This is some text <b>and this is bold</b>, but this is <i> italic</i>.

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Whitespace doesn’t count.

You can use HTML in Twine and sometimes it is “better”, easier, more controllable.

<img src=”https://media.pri.org/s3fs-public/styles/story_main/public/images/2020/01/910357290.jpg?itok=GmHAiLQZ” width=”300”>

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Creative Mull Time

  • Who is the “you” in your story
  • What experience or idea are trying to get people to engage with?
  • What “cause” is close to your heart (often a good place to start)
  • What are you strangely knowledgeable about?
  • What is the “end” of your story? (Does it have one?)

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The Basics - All You Need

# A Header

You are on a road that forks to [[The Bridge]] or [[The Well]]

*Unconventional* tastes = italic�**Unconventional** tastes = bold

[[an external link->https://www.apple.com]]

{embed image: "https://www-users.york.ac.uk/~tas509/FlickrEmbedButton.png"}

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The Chapbook full documentation is here.

Cheatsheet here (Download .html then import)

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Coding, Variables and State

money: 0�key: false�inventory: []�--

[if key == false]�You are in a room and there is table, and on it there are papers, some money, a lamp and a key.� {reveal link: 'Pick up key', passage: 'Key'}� {reveal link: 'Take the money', passage: 'Some Money'}�[else]� There is nothing here.�[continued]

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Setting variables

Testing variables

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Example Project

Example project is here:

https://www-users.york.ac.uk/~tas509/ExampleProjectMarionSparkle.html

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And downloadable here:

https://github.com/everythingability/ExampleProjectMarionSparkle

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Tools I used to help

I have relied heavily on these sites for media:

  • Unsplash
  • Freesound.org
  • Flickr
  • https://search.creativecommons.org/
  • Pngimg.com

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Hosting Your Creation

York Personal Web Space - instant hosting�https://www.york.ac.uk/it-services/services/personal-web-space/

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Itch - Become an “indie developer/author”�https://itch.io/

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Glitch.com�https://twine-starter.glitch.me/

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Other tools?

There are a number of alternative tools to Twine, with different approaches and different strengths, but imo Twine is easiest to start cranking out a great textual game. And it’s a great tool for just shaping and curating ideas.

Notable tools worth also playing with are:

  • StudyCrafter is a visual tool aimed at creating choice-based scenario games for user research.
  • Eko Studio is like Twine but a story is composed of small video fragments, more like Bandersnatch.

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Itch.io -> Made with Twine