March 28, 2024

Create interactive stories with Twine

Create interactive stories with Twine

Friday, September 9, 2022, Daniel Scheer

The difference between an interactive and a linear story is that readers have a say in how the story develops. In other words, the reader has some control over what they interact with next. At a certain point in the story, you can decide what the protagonist will do or say, for example “I will turn around and run” or “I will not be afraid and stay”. What used to be cumbersome to print is now relatively easy with hypertext. All it takes is creativity, imagination, plenty of time and a good tool that will allow you to write efficiently. Because hypertexts can branch out a lot, the typing effort is high and it’s easy to lose track.

This is where Twine comes in. This is an open source tool that allows you to create hypertext stories by clicking on links. Much of Twine is geared toward presenting the structure of the work visually, so that the author can see how his readers can read the text. You are not doing point-and-click adventures or 3D animation games with Twine. Instead, images are generated in the head and this trains logic and stimulates one’s imagination.

Creating a is relatively simple and can be broken down into three steps: in the first box you enter an address, then the text and then options to branch as links (using [ [ ] ]format) which automatically creates a new box. The whole thing looks like this in simple form:

Andreas Heydrich from the Creative Group Games Initiative in Hamburg presented teachers with the Twine tool and Reports about itIt is used by students. Bern University of Education also participates Storiesinderschule.ch Create a website to explain and enable the use of Twine in the classroom. There are also some funny things Examples, which can be downloaded as an HTML file and “run” locally in the browser. To collect the final stories there is a so-called TwinBox, where you enable students with a PIN to keep them there. This means that all group stories (like a class) can be collected in one place and seen by everyone.

Twine 1 was only available as a desktop version for Linux and Windows. Twine 2 is available as an online version and an offline version for download at github For Windows, macOS, and Linux.