Making games with Twine

Twine makes text games, and it is the lowest barrier to entry in the whole of game development. You open a website, drag boxes around, type words in them, link them together, and you have a game. No installation, no account, no code.

That sounds like a toy. It isn't — *Depression Quest*, *Howling Dogs* and a large amount of interesting experimental work came out of it, and it's used in teaching, training and prototyping far beyond games.

Who it's for

Writers, absolutely anyone making a first game, teachers, and anyone who wants to prototype branching structure before committing to art. It's also the fastest way to find out whether a story idea holds up — you can test the shape of a branching narrative in an evening rather than after three months of building.

What it's good at

• **You can start in thirty seconds**, and that's not an exaggeration.
• **Seeing the structure.** The map view shows your whole story as connected boxes, which is the best visualisation of branching narrative any tool offers.
• **Output is a single HTML file.** It runs anywhere, forever, with no dependencies.
• **It scales up when you want it to.** Harlowe, SugarCube and Chapbook are the main story formats; SugarCube in particular supports variables, inventories, combat and save systems for people who want to push it.
• **CSS and JavaScript** are available if you want to restyle or extend.

Where it fights you

• **Text-first.** You can add images, sound and CSS, but this is fundamentally a text medium.
• **Large stories get tangled.** The map view that's so useful at fifty passages becomes spaghetti at five hundred. Naming discipline matters early.
• **Three story formats with different syntax**, and tutorials often don't say which one they're using. Pick one and stick to it — **SugarCube** if you want power, **Harlowe** if you want simplicity.
• **Browser storage for saves** unless you do extra work.

Your first hour

• Go to **twinery.org** and click *Use it online*. Or download it if you'd rather not trust a browser tab with your work — and genuinely, do download it, because browser storage can be cleared.
• New story. You get one passage. Write a sentence.
• Type `[[Go north]]` and Twine creates a linked passage automatically. That's the whole core idea.
• Add a variable and a condition when you want state. The format's documentation covers it.
• **Back up.** Regularly. Archive → save the file. This is the one real risk with Twine.

Shipping it here

Build → **Publish to File**.

• You get a single `.html` file containing the entire game.
• Zip it before uploading. A lone HTML file works but a zip is consistent with everything else and avoids browser download oddities.
• If you've used external images or audio rather than embedding them, include those in the zip with the same folder structure, or the published file will have broken links.

Where to learn more

• Twine cookbook — recipes for common things
• SugarCube documentation
• Harlowe manual