Twine

Item

Title
Twine
Description
Twine (and Twine 2) is the most widely-used tool for interactive fiction authoring. It is an open- source HTML-based tool that’s user-friendly intuitive and easy to learn. Twine highlights the visual structure of a hypertext story: the interface is based around creating and editing hypertext units (“passages”) and controlling their organization in an abstracted space. New hypertext units are created by typing in existing ones either through links or conditional logic.
Form filler
Yotam Shibolet
Creator and affiliation
Chris Kilmas
Current owner
Open source run by Kilmas alongside a community of volunteers
Current ownership type
Community-run/Fully open-source
Year of first release
2009
End-product media type(s)
Interactive text
Main target audience(s)
Students
Amateurs/enthusiasts
Professional interactive narrative authors
Creative people (no programming skills)-targeted tool
Available modes of creation
Nodes and links creation mode (e.g. Twine)
Role of coding in creative process
Optional
Life status
Alive (actively moderated and updated and/or active community of authors)
Product portal
https://ifdb.org/search?searchfor=system%3Atwine&searchgo=Search+Games
Homepage URL
https://twinery.org/
Reference citations/URL(s)
Kolb David. "Narrative hypertext on the level." In Proceedings of the 3rd Narrative and Hypertext Workshop p. 3. ACM 2013.

Hahn Richard. "Collaborative Creative Writing in the L2 Classroom Using the Software Twine." In Conference Proceedings. The Future of Education p. 137. libreriauniversitaria. it Edizioni 2016.

Friedhoff Jane. "Untangling Twine: A Platform Study." DiGRA Conference. 2013.

Ruggiero Dana and Laura Green. "Make good choices: exploring narrative game design with young people in prison." Proceedings of the The 15th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children. ACM 2016.

Salter Anastasia. "Learning Through Making: Notes on Teaching Interactive narrative." Syllabus 4 no. 1 2015.

Starks Katryna Dakoda Barker and Alayna Cole. "Using Twine as a Therapeutic Writing Tool for Creating Serious Games." Joint International Conference on Serious Games. Springer Cham 2016.
Use license cost
Free license
Publishing license model
Unrestricted publishing
Programming language written in
Written in Javascript
Author-facing programming/scripting language(s)
HTML authoring
Authoring tool work platform(s)
Windows
Mac
Linux
End-product work platform(s)
PC/Macintosh support
Android support
Browser support
iOS support
Available supporting technical resource(s)
https://github.com/klembot/twinejs

https://github.com/tweecode/twine

https://github.com/pypa/twine
Self-containment
Fully Self-contained
Primary design focus
Nodes & links (linking between individual segments e.g. Twine)
Primary authoring action(s)
Manipulating extendable objects\blocks (e.g. Twine)
Main interface window(s)
Individual lexia editor
Nodes & links graph
Designable general element(s)
Nodes and links structure (any medium)
Interactive text paragraphs
Audio/sound
Props/items
Abilities
Rules/Constraints
Environmental/Character States
Designable narrative specific element(s)
State-triggered story events
Built-in preset element(s)
Layout presets of the final product
Overall difficulty assessment
Easy authoring difficulty
Work environment/design interface intuitiveness
Highly intuitive
Learning curve complexity
Easy to learn
Advanced authoring complexity
Medium complexity
Depth of advanced authoring
Large depth
Degree of narrative specific emphasis
Central narrative-specific emphasis
Role of procedural authoring
Nonexistent procedural authoring
Types of available procedural authoring
Randomized integers
End-product control interface
Mouse & keyboard