Twine?

imjustmike

Has anyone used Twine before. It's a nifty little bit of open source software for creating interactive narratives.

Or, in other words, a quick way to prototype choose your own adventure games.

I love gamesalad because it makes things very easy to prototype, but it still does take some time to do some complex stuff.

In theory, if you're good at CSS and HTML you could use it to make full blown games, and some have. But for me, I might start using Twine to test a story arc and interactions before then going ahead and building in Gamesalad for added functionality. I managed to get a simple text based prototype done in about half an hour (all of it was written). And I immediately could test it and found some holes in the story. It would have taken a couple of hours to do that in Gamesalad, and more to then go and fix.

I'm not saying it's a replacement for GS, but I'm certainly going to be using it alongside to make prototyping even faster.

If anyone is looking at doing story based games, you should check it out: http://twinery.org

The_Gamesalad_Guru

You can find holes in the story by doing what we do in screenwriting and that is by doing and outline of your story arc and by writing a treatment.

tatiang

I tried Twine out a while ago and wrote a choose-your-own-adventure for my kids, which they enjoyed "playing." I can see how it might be useful for game design.