Twine is intended for creating interactive branching stories, which is mostly used to develop text-adventure games. One of the best things about the app is that, no matter how difficult creating a game may look, it allows you to do it without even needing to write a line of code. However, this does not mean you cannot enrich your games with more advanced features, like variables, images, CSS and JavaScript. Unfortunately, the application does not come with help documentation. Still, there is a supporting community that maintains some repositories.
The resulting game or story can be viewed as a series of interconnected text slides. However, to get there, you have to follow some basic steps. You can start by creating a passage, which you need to give a title and optionally provide some tags. Normally, this would be the first slide, but you can change that later. Then, you can type or paste the desired text. This operation may be repeated as many times as there are fragments in your narration.
At this point, you can see all the passages on the story grid. Fortunately, you can simply move them to a position that matches the organization you want to give to your story. Still, you should notice that passages are not connected with each other. So, an important step is creating links between them. Luckily, the app supports a Wiki-like syntax to create links, so you just have to type [name of the target passage]. In this regard, it is a pity that there are not any buttons to do this, or just as simple explanation of the syntax. Just by closing the editing window, the tool automatically saves your work and shows an arrow linking the two passages. There is an easier possibility: if you create a link to a non-existing passage, it will be automatically generated.
The workflow described above creates basic nonlinear stories. Yet, this does not mean you cannot add more interactivity or customize the appearance of the slides a little further. For instance, you can embed objects like images, video and audio. Likewise, the tool allows you to add JavaScript, edit the source HTML code or modify the CSS stylesheet.
All in all, Twine is a great choice for creating text-adventure games due to its simplicity. The resulting story is actually a series of interlinked webpages. Therefore, you can preview your work on your web browser at any time. Once it is ready, you can save it to a folder on your local network and make it accessible to other users. Luckily, there is no cost involved in creating or distributing your stories. Just a final tip, there is an investment platform with the same name, please, do not confuse them.
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