TWINE ePub

idiotandroid

Hello. I've just learned of TWINE for the very first time, and I was asked by the Twine Threads Twitter account to ask my question about TWINE here.

I'm an author of short fiction, and I was thinking of giving TWINE a try as I would love to do something interactive. I am curious as to whether this is purely web-based? Would it be possible to create a TWINE story in ePub format?

Kindest regards!

Stew

Hello Mr/Mrs Android,
I'm just starting to learn TWINE as well.
I must admit, if it is possible to make an ePub TWINE story, the possibility's are very interesting.
Hopefully someone knows
Stew

greyelf

The ePub 3 specification states it supports scripting (java-script) but

a. ePub 3 is not supported by all eReader devices or software.
b. If the device or software does support ePub 3 if may not support java-script
c. If  the device or software does support java-script it may not support all of it.

mth

Would you need a lot of interactivity? If just hyperlinks is enough, one could write a converter to output static XHTML and package that in an EPUB file. In that case, Twine would be used only as an authoring tool, not as a runtime.

loopernow

I'm very interested in this topic. Inklewriter is another platform like Twine (e.g. for writing CYOA games/stories), the owners of which will convert your Inklewriter story to an ebook for $10. Inklewriter games have the ability to contain logic (if/else, variables, counters...), and there's no mention of the ebooks being limited in any way, so I assume the ebooks would also contain logic. The company is not shady whatsoever, so I have no doubt this is the case. Jon Ingold (interactive fiction author) is one of the creators of the platform. Neat stuff.

greyelf

You can definitely build a CYOA as an ePub file, where each passage is just a page in the book and you use the hyperlinks to travel between pages.

Having unknown/no scripting language support would mean that you could not conditionally add/change content (links, text, css, etc) based on the users interactions, you would have no variables, may not have undo, and the only save would be the built-in last page viewed feature (if supported)

veryalien

loopernow wrote:

I'm very interested in this topic. Inklewriter is another platform like Twine (e.g. for writing CYOA games/stories), the owners of which will convert your Inklewriter story to an ebook for $10. Inklewriter games have the ability to contain logic (if/else, variables, counters...), and there's no mention of the ebooks being limited in any way, so I assume the ebooks would also contain logic. The company is not shady whatsoever, so I have no doubt this is the case. Jon Ingold (interactive fiction author) is one of the creators of the platform. Neat stuff.

Jon Ingold does indeed know his stuff! The Inkle ebook solution is a clever way to simulate different conditions. It actually goes through each and EVERY possible route and condition in your story and, with some optimization of duplicate situations and compression, it converts the story into a completely static (and relatively large) HTML file. Which you can then convert into Kindle or epub format. The assumpition is, just like in many e-book readers, there is no javascript or anything dynamic, you just follow links from one place to another. All the logic is hard-coded into lots of possible paths within the overall story.

If you read carefully, Inkle say that it might not be possible to convert very complex stories. I assume this is if you have lots of counters or perhaps many objects to find within something like an adventure story. Imagine all of the possible conditions in the story and how tricky the links in the HTML will become to cover every possible situation. The huge HTML story file is not the problem for most e-readers, they just follow the links as you click them. The logic to build the tree of all the possibilities becomes the problem.

It's still a clever approach to try to add 'state' to 'stateless' HTML. If all you want is a branching story then it will easily work in epub. If there is a complex story with interwoven scenes and things depend on what you did earlier, then you might get stuck.

Twine is built on small parts of Tiddlywiki which itself is javascript so, in my opinion, you can't easily use Twine to create a static HTML file. Tiddlywiki has a permaview function to create a static HTML version of it's internal wiki. But I don't know if that's a good starting point for an epub conversion (I never tried it).

Stick with Twine! It's easy to use and the stories run in many modern browsers, even those in the more sophisticated e-book readers!

loopernow

Woah, very cool, I didn't realize that's what was involved. Neat! ;D

You have a very good point about Twine's interoperability. I'm drawn to inklewriter's epub/Kindle capability because of my knowledge of people's success "self-publishing" books in the Amazon marketplace. I'm a bit of an Amazon junkie myself, and I own a Kindle. I'm also familiar with the popularity of the "Choice of Games" line of CYOA books (and others) on the Kindle platform.

So if anything, if and when I write an interactive story that I gather might have commercial appeal, I'm definitely going to think about "porting" it via the Inklewriter service. Thankfully, using Twine makes Inklewriter that much more intelligible to use. The concepts are the same, and Inklewriter is more limited in functionality, so that helps.

Sharpe

There's also this: http://www.ebookmaestro.com/

It makes an EXE file out of the HTML file and (unfortunately) uses Internet Explorer 9 to run it by default no matter what browser is installed, if what I read is correct. I really don't know anything about it, but it's something to consider.

bawpie

Greyelf discussed a way to get ebookmaestro to work here I think: http://twinery.org/forum/index.php/topic,1534.msg2986.html#msg2986