26 Feburary 2019 News

Releases

  • Twine 2.3.0 beta 2 is ready for testing. This is still a provisional release—please make sure to save a backup of all your work before trying it.
  • Jamie Woodcock has published Working the Phones, a short, interactive experience about working in a call center.
  • Ben Kaestner-Frenchman’s The Meaning of Nalau is about the intersection of language and colonialism, set in a lush, sunny solarpunk-inspired city.
  • From the Chasm has released The Lost Hat, a visually-oriented game inspired by Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night.

In the Media

  • Anya DeNiro has begun writing a regular column for sub-Q Magazine, which regularly publishes Twine works. Her first column is about preservation of Twine works, and in particular, Rat Chaos.

9 February 2019 News

Releases

Learning

29 January 2019 News

First off — behold a tweaked blog template! Hope you find it more readable and aesthetically pleasing.

In The Media

  • Christian Divine talks about writing for Life is Strange, including using Twine to block out narrative beats, in a GDC Europe 2016 talk that was recently published online.
  • Charlie Brooker talks about the development of Bandersnatch, including how Twine was used to create the storyline, on the Empire Film Podcast (skip to 27:55 for the start of the interview).

Releases

Events

  • 20TwineTeen is a casual Twine jam that will run throughout 2019 that encourages experimentation.

13 January 2019 News

Events

  • Science World in Vancouver, British Columbia is putting on a Coding Café on January 17 that introduces K-12 teachers to coding concepts using beginner-oriented tools like Twine.
  • Xian Xian is running Hard-Boiled Wonderland, a monthlog interactive fiction game jam focused on the noir genre, that starts January 24.

Releases

28 December 2018 News

Releases

  • Broom Cupboard Studios, a digital artist residency in Seattle, WA, released their first game, Detective Corgi and the Mysterious Mansion. It’s filled with spooks!
  • Devin Monnens released Twinetroid, a conversion of 1987’s Metroid from the Futabasha Famicom Game Book Series. The gamebook was first translated and then converted into Twine for English-speaking fans to enjoy.
  • Jon Sorce released Fall On Your Knees, a game about Christmas, church, and watching the people you love leave you behind. Gameplay includes: counting the stars; having a bad time; doing your best; the end of the world.
  • Digg.com released You Are A Digg Editor, in which you play an editor trying to sum up the year.
  • Although you’ll need a Netflix subscription to watch/play it, Black Mirror‘s Bandersnatch episode was written in Twine. Wired has a look inside its creation.

Learning Resources

  • Dan Cox has published Procedural Generation in Twine, a summary of some techniques and research into generating content and using passages as storage in Twine with the story format SugarCube and using the JavaScript library jQuery.

15 December 2018 News

Tool Updates

  • Twine 2.3.0 beta 1 is available for testing. It incorporates a new desktop shell, has new localizations and some fixes related to passages being moved on the story map, and offers a preview of Harlowe 3.0.0.
  • SugarCube 2.28.1 has been released. It’s a bugfix release to 2.8.0, which overhauled SugarCube’s audio system and included other features. The release notes go into more detail.
  • Konstantin Kitmanov has released Twine Enhancer, a Google Chrome extension that offers some capabilities not built into the main Twine editor. Note that this extension will only affect the web version of Twine, not the desktop apps.

Game Releases

  • lunaatone has released Book Club, a post-apocalyptic story about stories.
  • Rob Haines’s In Memorium is a Twine adaptation of a short story originally published in a short story anthology named Tales of Eve.
  • Pseudavid has made a post-IFComp page for The Master of the Land, which took sixth place in this year’s competition. It’s a historical fantasy set in the early 19th century Mediterranean.
  • maybe i’ll figure it out next month is a monthly zine by Violet Elder. The most recent issue takes the form of a spooky Twine game about stopping at a small town on a long road trip.
  • Pairidaeza, by Mostafa Haque, is a historic queer romance set in the Abbasid Caliphate.
  • Eva Khoury released SandWitching Hour, a short game about a quest for a late-night snack gone weird.
  • Conor Walsh has released Six Shots, a western-themed, choice-focused adventure game where you can fire on any screen.
  • DWaM released The Vault, an entry in the Ludum Dare 43 game jam, whose theme was “sacrifices must be made.”

Learning Resources & Elsewhere in the IF World

  • Damon L. Wakes has recently collected his Twine for Beginners tutorials in one web page.
  • Cragne Manor, a parser tribute to the community classic Anchorhead, has been released. It’s an exquisite-corpse style game created by more than 80 people collectively.

30 November 2018 News

Releases

Events

Opportunities

  • The V&A Dundee, a design museum in Scotland, is seeking to commission a digital game that explores character development and the idea of self in games. They’re specifically open to games created in alternate game engines like Twine. Learn more and apply on their web site.

15 November 2018 News

Hello again! This is the first of our biweekly news posts. A quick reminder that if you have news you’d like to appear in the next post, which’ll be on November 30, please submit it online.

Releases

Events

  • Judging just ended on IFComp 2018, which means results will be announced soon. Even if you missed out on judging, you can still play all the entries, many of which are Twine works.
  • sub-Q Magazine opened its first game jam on November 15th. The jam runs until December 16th and accepts short interactive fiction pieces (less than 1,000 words) on the theme of “love.” Two winners will be contracted for paid publication in sub-Q Magazine.

Hello!

I’m happy to introduce this site, which we’re giving the prosaic-but-straightforward name Twine News. Its intention is to collect news about Twine game and story format releases, Twine development, related events, and anything else that’s of interest to the Twine community.

Twine News will publish a post every two weeks with a roundup of news thus far. If you have items you’d like to appear, please send us a submission.

The official Twitter account, @twinethreads, will tweet links to posts as they go up, so if you’re on Twitter, you can follow that account to be notified when new posts appear. This site also has an RSS feed which you can subscribe to.

— Chris Klimas