ZDNET’s key takeaways

• Twine is a free development tool for interactive fiction and text-based games.
• The open-source program is supported by a robust community of users and developers.
• With HTML-based code, Twine allows you to publish your finished work on the web.

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If you’ve got a solid idea for an indie game, there is no shortage of both free and paid professional development tools available.

Both Unity and Unreal Engine offer free versions of their programs, allowing you to take advantage of sophisticated logic trees and integrate multiple systems for more in-depth player experiences. GameMaker and RPGMaker have been around for decades and are favorites among old-school 2D game fans. But the biggest drawback of each is that it requires in-depth knowledge of programming languages like Python, C#, and Java.

That’s where Twine comes in.

What is Twine?

I first became aware of Twine a few years ago when GameGrumps did an episode about a popular community game called The Uncle Who Works for Nintendo, which was made using the program. While the story is fairly standard creepypasta fare (you’re sleeping over at the house of a friend who is anticipating the arrival of the titular uncle; things get spooky pretty quickly), I wanted to know more about how Twine works for creating interactive narratives.

What I found is an incredibly intuitive desktop browser app that feels more like an outlining program for novelists than a tool for budding game developers. It runs on HTML, so if you’re an Elder Millennial like me, you can shake the rust off those old MySpace profile customization skills. And with the simplified textbox interface, putting together a narrative that captures your ideas is about as pain-free as it gets.

I highly recommend keeping a link handy for the Twine Cookbook, a free community-sourced guide. Not only does it cover everything you need to know about getting started, but it also has dozens of examples of game elements that you can recreate to get an idea of what Twine can do in terms of visual novels and branching narratives. You can even create loading screens, add in RPG and combat elements, or add your own art and music to bring your ideas to life.

You don’t have to know the first thing about coding in HTML to start working on your indie game ideas, but the program also offers an option for more advanced users to show the full code for debugging and fine-tuning. And when you’re ready to publish, the Twine Cookbook has step-by-step instructions for how to set up an Itch.io store page to get your finished game in front of an audience.

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Free and open source (and no AI in sight)

In addition to being completely free to use, Twine is an open-source program. Not only does that mean you’ll see regular updates with things like bug fixes and UI adjustments, but you can access the full source code to build your own Twine-based game dev engine for future projects. Or you can search sites like GitHub for modified versions to download if you don’t want the hassle of building it yourself.

Being open-source also means that Twine has a very robust community of users, modders, and code fixers. If you’ve got a bug that no one has encountered before, or an idea for a new game element to add support for, chances are you’ll find many like-minded modders online who are working on similar problems so you can rubber duck your code with actual people.

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You can also share your works in progress and finished games, and the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation (IFTF, the company that operates Twine) even has a gallery of featured projects that you can browse for ideas. Featured games range from cut-and-dried visual novels to sprawling multimedia endeavors that aim to push you out of your comfort zone, so you’re sure to find something that sparks your imagination or gives you an idea for a breakthrough on a current project.

There’s even a community Discord server so you can connect with other devs and game fans in real time.

Twine doesn’t incorporate any sort of generative AI into either the browser tool or desktop app, and while the IFTF has not publicly taken a stance for or against the technology, the concept is antithetical to its mission to help legally protect and educate writers and creators turning to interactive fiction to show off their work, as AI-generated works are generally barred from copyright and trademark protections.

Two ways to use Twine

If Twine sounds right up your alley, there are two ways you can get started: via the browser-based application, or you can download a desktop program from GitHub. And don’t worry if you’re not on a Windows machine; there are MacOS and Linux versions available as well. (Sorry, Chrome users!)

The in-browser app is the quickest and easiest way to get started, and it even gives you a helpful link to the Twine Cookbook and a warning to save your work. Since it only saves your work in your browser, if you delete your Chrome or Firefox data cache, you’ll lose your work — so be sure to use the Archive button often.

The desktop app is almost identical to the browser version, so if you want to move your work offline, you won’t have to worry about relearning Twine. Importing your work is as easy as a few button clicks, so you won’t have to spend an afternoon combing through dozens — if not hundreds — of story blocks to make sure everything is present and accounted for.

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I’ve really enjoyed poking around the program and testing out ideas for how a story should flow. The dashboard lets you drag-and-drop modules just about anywhere you’d like to place them for better visual flow, organization, and grouping passages together in a similar way to the web outline format you were taught in school for writing essays. This makes it very easy to visualize how each section of your narrative should be built and how individual modules are connected to one another.

It does take a bit of getting used to, and — as I mentioned before — the Cookbook guide is immensely helpful for total newcomers like myself. But once you’ve gotten a solid foundation for game design, you might be able to branch out to other indie game dev programs like RPGMaker or even Unity for more complex ideas.

Building on a solid foundation

“Game” might be an inflated description of what you can create in Twine, but the app does scratch the itch for old-school text-based adventure titles from the MS-DOS era.

With a bit of patience and trial-and-error, you might craft something akin to a spiritual successor to Zork that forces players to return to pen-and-paper maps to navigate settings and keep track of inventory. There are command strings you can add to trap players in endless time loops, force them to choose specific narrative paths, and even add probability outcomes to raise the stakes of your writing.

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These can be tricky to implement at first as you’re learning how to properly set them up within a passage module, but as you get a feel for the program and reference the free user guide, you’ll quickly learn how to craft more interesting interactive narratives.

The drag-and-drop drafting process is a godsend for a visual planner like myself, allowing me to move my modules around in just about any configuration I can dream up for workflow customization. Highlighted arrows make following passage connections very simple, especially when used in tandem with the color-coded tagging system.

The entire interface is relatively simple to pick up and play, but will take a lot of time to fully master as you learn to create different connections between passages and incorporate various gameplay elements.

Being able to choose your story structure is wonderful for trying out different ideas, but not all of them are meant for beginners. Harlowe is the most robust format, allowing you to add all kinds of visual flair to your text with font colors, bolds and italics, and hyperlinks. This makes it ideal for deeper text-based games and interactive fiction where you need to convey emotions, themes, and ideas without a lot of support from music and images. It also features a drop-down menu in your module editing windows for quick access to HTML macro code strings, helping you build your ideas into a full-fledged experience.

Once you’ve chosen a macro, Twine will automatically drop it into your module, allowing you to mentally connect the code and the outcome. This was great for me as I desperately needed a refresher on HTML code (since the last time I really used it was to customize my MySpace page back in college).

The Chapbook, Paperthin, Snowman, and SugarCube formats are nearly identical in that they strip away the ability to add color and align text, as well as the HTML macro drop-down menu, making them better suited for game devs and interactive fiction writers with more experience.

The game I made is “finished” and theoretically ready for publishing, but I think this one is going to stay in my drafts. I’m still getting a handle on how HTML coding works, and my creative writing skills could use more polishing before I’m willing to subject my ideas to the public. The outline-style organization made it really fun to try out branching dialogue paths and consequences for player choices, and didn’t make it feel like such a loss or waste if it didn’t pan out and needed to be cut or reworked.

I also adore the fact that Twine was built and is maintained by the IFTF, a non-profit that serves as an archival and maintenance team preserving the tech infrastructure (like Twine) that interactive fiction writers depend on to share finished works.

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Interactive fiction is highly susceptible to becoming lost media when projects are posted to personal accounts or websites that could be hacked or shut down without warning. The IFTF helps interactive fiction writers by providing guidance on retaining legal ownership of projects and on long-term preservation. While they don’t offer any sort of grant assistance for developing new IF games, it’s still a vital resource for creators who may need help navigating the legal web of online spaces and digital ownership. Twine and the IFTF will also assign each new project built in the program a unique ID number that works like an ISBN for book publishing. That way, creators and writers have legal protections against plagiarism and IP theft.

Where Twine falls short

While it is possible to add music and images to your builds, there isn’t a way to do so in the browser or desktop app. Instead, you have to export your game as a test build file, then go into the folder for the specific module you want to zhuzh up and drop in your .jpegs and .mp3s. You then have to re-import the build to Twine for testing — and sometimes it just doesn’t work.

Not only is it an annoying process, but not every image or audio file type will play well with modern HTML coding, so it can turn into a tedious slog of exporting and importing only to find that your image is in the wrong module, or that the audio clip you wanted to use is simply refusing to cooperate.

The process is best used very sparingly to add that extra bit of punch to important plot beats in your narrative: jump scares, emotional peaks and valleys, or special treats and secrets for players to find.

If you’re hoping for a dev tool that gives you complete control over the entire creative process, you’ll have to turn elsewhere.

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There’s also no way to divide your story into more manageable groups or “chapters,” making the sprawling web of a finished project’s modules difficult to navigate if you want to make changes to a particular section of the story.

You can create color-coded tags to visually group modules and make it easier to distinguish interactive passages from text meant for exposition or to move the plot forward. But you can’t create supergroups that lump scenes together into chapters or chapters into acts, so you’d better make sure you have a good tag system in place to keep your thoughts organized and your story flowing smoothly.

At the end of the day, Twine is a tool for writers, not auteurs. While there is a lot you can do in terms of story structure, there is just as much you can’t when it comes to game development outside of narrative and worldbuilding. It’s a great jumping-off point to see whether a story idea will work the way you want before fleshing it out into a more complex experience in another program — or if you’re looking for new ways to approach traditional fiction and poetry writing.