Twine Tool Tutorial
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In this tutorial, we will be learning how to use Twine. Twine is a tool which enables you to create narrative-based text games which you can host and share online for free. For professors wanting their students to experiment with nonlinear narrative, or to produce a creative, public-facing assignment, Twine might be a great tool for you. It can be used for presentations, or even for mapping out the plots of video games or texts. It offers the user the chance to try out producing a hypertext-based narrative. It reminds me of those paperback choose-your-own adventure novels which were so popular in my youth.
Today we will be using Twine 2, the updated version of Twine. You can read it here: https://twinery.org. Twine can either be downloaded to your browser, or used directly on the website. It stores your content automatically.
However!!!! Please be wary that if you refresh your cookies or clean your browsing history, your Twine files will disappear. Make sure to save your work before doing so! To save a Twine file, open up the file on the website. In the bottom left corner, click on the name of your Twine story, and select “Publish to File.” This will save your Twine in an html file which you can re-upload to Twine at any time and pick up where you left off.
To start a new story, select the green +Story button from your Twine homepage. Give it a name, and confirm! This will deposit you with your first box, called “Untitled Passage.” To edit it, hover your cursor over it and press the pencil button.
Once you’ve opened up the box, give it a title. Then, move down to the text section. If you delete the existing text, Twine offers you a useful index of the coding markdown it uses.
Code:
[[to link to another passage]]
Put the name of the passage to link to in the square brackets. To give your reader the illusion of choice, you can link to several different passages here. Depending on their choices, they will move through your Twine in different ways.
If at any point you’d like to return to a previous box, then you can enter the same code. For example, if I want to offer my reader a chance to return directly to the beginning, I could input a code that says [[The Beginning]] and it would bring them back to the original box.
Furthermore, it may be that you want to link to another box, but do not want to use the exact title of the box in your story. To do so, use this coding instead:
As you can see here, the text I want the box to say is “you hear a snuffling behind you.” However, because I’ve input the arrow, it will direct to the box which is titled, “oh no! a bear!”
As you can see here, this is the workflow we’ve set up so far. You can drag the boxes around to alter the view - as you add more and more, it gets more complicated.
If you exit the editing screen, you can see the new boxes you’ve created and the links between the boxes.
To test out the game, just press “Play” at the bottom of the workflow screen.
These are the basics of using Twine. There are tons of options for experimentation, and I hope you will enjoy getting the hang of it and checking out some more complicated tutorials. To conclude, I’ve included an image of the story map of one of my Twine stories, so you can see how confusing and exciting they can become.
To host your Twine, download the HTML. You can either host it on your website or through a spot like Philome.la
You can play my own Twine game, Merry Wanderer here, if interested (kindly uploaded by Allie Watson when my Internet was acting up. I’ve linked to some other games below.
Have fun!
