StoryIncludes/Collaboration in 2.0?

mrfb

Are there any equivalents to the StoryIncludes feature in 2.x? I'm helping to organize a bunch of student teams to work in pairs to make their own Twine games, and my gut sense is that we should stick to 1.x so that collaboration is easier.

Alternatively, has anyone had any success with alternative collaboration workflows in 2.x?

greyelf

For the Twine 1.x StoryIncludes feature to work the code that assembles the story passages together to create your HTML file needs to be able to process the contents of the other (TWS) files referenced in the story project's StoryIncludes special passage.

As far as I am aware the Twine 2 application currently does not do this and there is currently no way for a Story Format developer to influence the build process to include this functionality and I would guess this is why SugarCube does not support the StoryIncludes special passage when used with Twine 2.

The issue is that all the data for a story project is stored within your web-browser local storage which is on your machine (even if you are running the hosted version of the application), there is no remote storage option built into the Twine 2 application.

If the collaborators on a project are working in serial, only one person is updating the project at a time, then the 'latest' version of the project could be passed from one person to the next. The first person would use the Publish to File option to create a copy of the project which they would pas to the next person and the next person would use the Import from File option to update their local version of the project.

As soon as two or more people are editing the story's contents at the same time you start to have the issue of having to merge the different versions of the contents together to for the 'latest' version. There are version control tools that can help with doing this merge but it would still be part of a manual process.

Claretta

The way of passing a Twine file back and forth seems inappropriate for students since they're likely going to be at a point when they want to both work on something at once, and that is not possible in Twine 2.

The only real way of true real-time collaboration in Twine 2 is to designate someone as a "coder" who always has the responsibility of putting the text in game, and no one else works in the game, but rather write their text in Notepad to pass along.

mrfb

Thanks, folks. Pair authoring with a driver/navigator or having someone as the designated mergemaster is an excellent suggestion and may be a viable option in either case, but I think the export/import shenanigans will be too much chaos in a 300-person class.

Claretta

Unless you reeallly want to use Harlowe, there's no compelling reason for Twine 2 over Twine 1.

The main improvement that Twine 2 brings in general is the CSS and JavaScript is a bit easier to handle with its dedicated areas for such. But other than that, the SugarCane/SugarCube story formats are the same.

mrfb

Just had a thought: StoryIncludes in Twine 2 could actually make just as much sense, given that Twine 1 can already import from web. e.g.:

::StoryIncludes
l.j-factor.com/twee.twee

...which would make Twine 2 actually viable for collaboration.