Should I use twine?

angelodias

Hello.

I want to make a interactive story. I found twine just yesterday and started fiddling with Twine 2.
I'm having a real bad time with it. The wiki always talks about Twine 1 and I can't find how to translate things from v1 to v2.
I'm not a coder. I'm a writer and want to get to writing. The problem is that I'm taking my time to understand variables and stuff but when I apply those... twine 2 says it handles it differently -- never saying HOW.

Should I use twine? Is there any other option? I really want to study the shit out of this software and really make nice things out of it, but I just can't understand what the buttons do. There ins't even a red button with "DON'T TOUCH" words. It's all wordless.

I read online that Twine is the better way to start doing gamey stuff. I just want to understand it's language.

Thanks a lot.

tlm

Twine 2 is currently really badly documented, the only real documentation of the language is here and even that is incomplete. Twine 2 is still very new. I personally recommend you to use Twine 1 for now, it works and has more features than 2.x.

TheMadExile

tlm wrote:

Twine 2 is currently really badly documented, the only real documentation of the language is here and even that is incomplete.

Strictly speaking, that's documentation for Harlowe, one of the built-in story formats for Twine 2 (the default).  AFAIK, Twine 2 itself doesn't really have documentation.

The other built-in story format, Snowman, is also pretty different (though, it's also pretty simple).  Not sure about its documentation, though the Snowman for Twine 1 thread would probably suffice.


@OP: It sounds like you'd be happier at the moment with either Twine 1 or SugarCube for Twine 2, which is mostly similar to the Twine 1 vanilla formats (which is what the wiki is about) and fairly well documented itself.

For Twine 1, the wiki documentation should be all you need for the built-in vanilla formats.  Beyond that, SugarCube and Snowman (not built-in this time) are also available for Twine 1.

greyelf

The documentation (what there is of it) for the Twine 2 application (GUI) can be found here in the wiki.

Most of the core functionality of a story built using Twine (1 or 2) is supplied by the Story Format you choose, this may be one of the reasons that the documentation of the Twine 2 GUI is minimal.

angelodias

TheMadExile wrote:

@OP: It sounds like you'd be happier at the moment with either Twine 1 or SugarCube for Twine 2, which is mostly similar to the Twine 1 vanilla formats (which is what the wiki is about) and fairly well documented itself.

For Twine 1, the wiki documentation should be all you need for the built-in vanilla formats.  Beyond that, SugarCube and Snowman (not built-in this time) are also available for Twine 1.

I did upload Sugarcube to Twine 2 but didn't delve into it yet. I'll read it's documentation and try it. I'd love to build my story at work, using my browser, but if it gets too problematic I'll just use Twine 1.

Thank you all.

RobCan

For me the documentation/format/coding etc. come later, especially if you are doing fiction rather than a game. Get the words out first and then mess around with the other issues (linking, formatting) later.