It’s halfway through the month and it occurs to me that I still haven’t started my One Game a Month entry for April. (I’m not being lazy. I’ve just been busy working on Mind Strike, doing a tour of local doctors’ waiting rooms, and fighting off yetis armed with nothing but a snow shovel.)
As much as I enjoyed working with Stencyl for last month’s game, I’m thinking I might want to use a tool that’s more suited to my strengths. I’m thinking about Twine.
Twine is described by its maker as “a tool for creating interactive stories,” which seems as good a description as any. Specifically, its simple interface lets you create “choose your own adventure” style games that track variables and export as HTML. Working with such basic building blocks, you can create some pretty amazing games. (And if you actually have programming chops, the guts of the thing are lying open for you to dig around in.)
At first glance, Twine looks pretty similar to Inklewriter, which also lets you create interactive text games (and I’ve used before). But games you create on Inkle stay on Inkle, and people have to visit that website to play them. (Unless you shell out $10 to have the fine folks at Inkle convert your story to Kindle format, which seems like a reasonable way to monetize the thing.)
If Twine sounds like something you’d like to mess around with, here are a few links to get you started:
- Download it here.
- Read a simple tutorial.
- Play a bunch of other people’s games to see what it’s all about.
I’m downloading Twine now. If it’s as easy to use as they say, I should have a story-game thing by the end of the month. If not… well, I’m still learning to accept failure — and to start my games before the middle of the month.
