Twine

Today, I spent a few minutes reading about Twine.  Twine is a tool used to facilitate the creation of text adventures.  I've never played a text adventure game, but I'd like to make one (or a dozen).

Text adventure games are games presented to players entirely through text (or so I'm told).  Players interact with the text to solve puzzles, discover story elements, and progress towards some endgame condition.  Successful text adventure games connect passages of text in logical and clever ways.  Today, many text adventures utilize hypertext.  Hypertext is computer text that contains references to other pieces of text that users can access through mouse clicks.  Twine is a tool for writing hypertext so it's a perfect fit for managing a text adventure.

Twine comes with a nifty graphical interface to layout every passage of text in a story.  Passages linked in a story are connected visually in the interface.  Twine also informs users when broken links (links that don't connect to corresponding passages) are present.  Twine understands variables, conditional statements, and expressions.  These features can be used for simple things like inventory management or for more interesting things, like introducing randomness to a scenario.

Another cool thing about Twine: Twine publishes completed works in html.  This means the only thing your friends need to play through your stories is a Web browser.  Sharing doesn't get much easier than that!

I haven't made anything with Twine yet.  But I did go ahead and ask the Internet to borrow a copy of it for my desktop.  You can do it too!

Cheers,

Danny