Twine for class project?

Question

I'm teaching a college level class on conflict management and I'm thinking about having the students create little games (or at least stories) on Twine. I love how easy it is to use! There's very little learning curve to produce something and I think it could work really well. I just have one major concern left.

First, collaboration. If they're working in groups, the fact that twine files are saved locally seems like it could cause some problems. My current idea is that they would have to work on it one at a time, download the file, share it with the next person who would then import it. If they all work on it at the same time, there seems to be no way to merge versions and that would cause problems.

Other the questions I think I'll be asked and would love suggestions on:

How do I do this? - Cheers for a great wiki!

How do we keep track of edits? Re-save with version numbers/dates.

How do I submit this? Send me the html file and I'll import to my twine

How does the instructor check if the requirements are met? If I have the html file, I can see the word count.

 

Anything would be helpful! Thanks!

Sara

Answer 1

note: The following is my opinion and not an official statement by the Twine 2 team.

Neither the install-able release or the web-browser based release of the Twine 2 application is designed with collaboration in mind, but that doesn't mean you can't collaborate on a Twine Story it just means that you have to work a little harder to do so.

One of the major issues you have to overcome is version control of the shared Story Project (which you pointed out) and this can be solved by using Version Control software (like Git or Mercurial) combined with a Source Code Repository (like GitHub or BitBucket). There are also third-party Window Explorer plugin (like TortoiseGit or TortoiseHg) that can be installed to make using the previously mentioned VC software easier.

It is not uncommon for Developers working on a shared project to replace the Twine 2 application with one of the utilities (like TweeGo) that can be used to generate a Twine Story HTML file from TWEE based text files. Doing this allows the Developers to use a Text Editor of their choice to edit the Passages of their share project, and many Text Editors come with built-in supports for the previously mentioned VC software as well as spellcheckers.

The instructor can then view the story project stored on each group's repository and generate a Story HML file from it as required.

Comments

@mira27

I would also recommend some type of online version control like GitHub or BitBucket. 

1. The repos will be public (private repos cost money). That means you can check up on how they're progressing, and the students can always be keeping an eye on their work, and will be able to access it from any computer, with a few steps. 
2. It is very easy to accidentally clear your web storage or "simulate a restart" of the downloaded Twine app. Using some type of version control will prevent a whole lot of data loss. And there's always gonna be at least one kid whose computer explodes or something. 
3. They won't really need to turn it in. When grades are due, you can just grab the files from the repositories. 
4. While some of the features may be a bit too involved for a non-programming class, these systems are built to support collaboration. 

Even if you don't go with "real" version control, something like Google Drive can also work, since files in the same location with the same name "stack", with old versions still accessible, instead of replacing them. 

While TweeGo and the other command line compilers @greyelf mentioned are great, it may be harder for non-programming students to get into it without the intuitive passage interface. It is definitely an option, though. 

This sounds like a fun class, by the way! 

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A small correction to one of Chapel's points:

1. The repos will be public (private repos cost money).

All of Bitbucket's accounts allow for unlimited private repositories, including the free account.  As long as each group doesn't exceed five members, which is the cutoff for free account collaboration, free private repositories are possible.

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@TheMadExile

I had no idea, thanks. I'm gonna have to check out BitBucket more. So far I've only really used GitHub.