Interactive, nonlinear stories == interactive fiction (IF) == text adventure games in the style of 1980s Infocom.

It's interesting that the Twine website seems to actively avoid calling them IF or text adventures or games, and prefers "stories" instead. Maybe the community feels that those labels are too limiting. (I haven't played any contemporary IF or any Twine experiences, so just observing as an outsider.)

I've always wanted to try using Twine to prototype a product.

Apropos of nothing, here's Julia Evans using Twine to teach debugging practices: https://computer-mysteries.netlify.app/slow-website.html

Twine is nice, I am using it to create the story for a game with visual novel elements in Unity.

I'm using a heavily modified version of Cradle[0] and it works great.

However, I personally had a bad experience while trying to contribute to Twine. I encountered a severe bug that made me lose all my stories and only happens if you have Twine in another language than English. I read the code, identified the issue, wrote a detailed issue and sent a PR[1]. I got no answer until a year later saying "not applicable anymore" since the app basically got a rewrite.

At least I'm happy a lot of it got rewritten however it still seems as unstable as before, with random crashes and stories that can disappear on their own.

[0] https://github.com/daterre/Cradle

[1] https://github.com/klembot/twinejs/issues/898

There's a text-based representation called twee. You can use tweego (https://github.com/tmedwards/tweego) to convert between twee and html/twine.

Any tool that allows lots of people to make stuff easily is good in my book. And Twine has allowed to do that. Twine has helped professional production companies to sketch interactive stories before full blown production: Black Mirror's Bandersnatch used Twine to sketch the choices that players can make (https://www.pcgamesn.com/black-mirror/charlie-brooker-twine). That also means that there is a lot of bad stuff too, but that's fine, that's part of what a good tool allows to do.

I used this a couple years ago for teaching a college class on intro to game narrative class and I didn't want to assume any of the students knew any programming. Since many in the class weren't gamers some of them came up with some interesting topics like trying to do a story-based game about whether a college football player should go pro or not or getting ready to go out for the night.

Since then I've contributed to his Patreon and out of all the people I support on patreon he is the most consistent with sending out weekly updates on his progress.

Related:

Twine is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21771022 - Dec 2019 (50 comments)

See also: https://storyboard.viget.com/ which was built to provide an even easier editing interface for choose-your-own-adventure style fiction.

I've enjoyed using Inklewriter myself.

https://www.inklewriter.com/

It's free software, and I've always enjoyed using it.

A nice game made in Twine is "Chuk and the Arena" [0]. I'm playing through it with my young son currently (having completed it myself before). It's not extremely easy but not very difficult either, and rather forgiving. It's also kind of sweet in a way. Except for the obvious bad guy(s), people you meet are kind, they help you and each other.

Another very impressive Twine game by the same author, 4x4 Archipelago [1], was fun to play, a randomly generated RPG with multiple plots. But it's wayy too long and requires some grinding.

They're both kind of like standard IF in that you have an inventory, you can use stuff from the inventory to do things and complete tasks, and you have to rely on hints to figure out what to do. Also both of them have no time-based elements and it's very obvious where to click.

[0] https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=2fa5imp327k84ox

[1] https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=nmg570ycyex4mty0

Neat! I don't see many fiction-based apps on HN and I love it when I do :)

Shameless plug, but: I've been working on a site with similar aims (although not exactly the same): Storylocks.com [https://www.storylocks.com/]. It's not exactly IF, but a simple way for multiple people to write stories together. Fiction writers unite!

I run a competitor: https://fiction.live/

A fun recent twine project (not mine):

"Malefactor” is a strategy text game in which the player takes on the role of a Sauron-style Lord of Darkness with the goal of conquering the world."

https://adeptus7.itch.io/dark-reign

If you're into a weirder side of twine I highly recommend works by Porpentine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porpentine_(game_designer)

In my list of ideas is one for a Twine-compatible Twitter-Adventure Maker[0]. Remember those "choose your own adventure threads" that showed up on twitter and got viral a while back[1]. It would be great to be able to use Twine for authoring those.

[0]: https://github.com/captn3m0/ideas#twitter-adventure-maker

[1]: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/media-trend-choose-your-own-a...

Has anyone experience using this or similar tools for e-learning / in-house "edutainment" solutions? Like walking a stakeholder through how to write a user story, or introducing how to do a certain task with in-house systems?

Not to be confused with Meta's "twine" cluster management system (which isn't actually called that, except where trademark lawyers can hear).

https://research.facebook.com/publications/twine-a-unified-c...

This is amazing. It's exactly the sort of thing that I can use with my children who enjoy digital literacy (i.e not social networks) but crave play based learning.

The language, the tooling.. it all communicates effectively with the way my children think and approach things. Imagine a world of interactive literacy (note: not IF!)? This is a gamechanger for us.

Thanks for bringing this to my attention, I had totally forgotten about this when Charlie Brooker spoke about it as plotting out Bandersnatch.

I am a Senior Learning Technologist and currently working with lecturers for good ways for plotting out virtual home visits etc for health workers, and this is going to be a much better solution than what I was constructing at the time.

Maybe off topic but after playing with some of the examples, I can't help but find some of them jarring from a UX standpoint. There is not often consistent indication of what is interactable or clickable, and half of the pages are time based (with no indicator of progress or waiting) and half of them require clicking.

I've been looking for something Twine-like, but with non-HTML output. Does anyone know of an alternative tool that can output structured data, like JSON or XML?

Essentially, I'd like to find a non-technical-writer-friendly UI for interactive stories that can output data appropriate for consumption in a game/app/system.

We really need to get working on more advanced AI based tech for this kind of stuff. Content of all kinds in general. Especially in games where we can create large open worlds, but have corp run devs/pubs who don't want to spent time filling those worlds with stuff.

So, this plus StabilityDiffusion equals?

Thank you so much for sharing this! I've been waiting for years for such tool. Is it Friday yet?

I believe this was used by Charlie Brooker to build that interactive episode of “Black Mirror”.

I fail to find an example.

Is this a "call-and-response" AI writing assistant? Or most just to structure a story you write yourself? I went digging on their website but couldn't find the answer.