Power to the People: The Text Adventures of Twine

Never go away, Carolyn; your thoughts are always interesting.

Love your off the wall articles.  Keep up the good work.

Thank you Carolyn Petit for this article. I never heard of Twine before and now i'm trying it. And i must say, i'm amazed. It's a great tool for creating interactive fiction. I'll advise it to my students in creative writing class tomorrow.

I have tried Twine and, while good, it does not really fulfill its role as a game creation tool for developers. Check out our Divine Gamebook Creator at divinegames.it and see the difference.

This reminds me of choose your own adventure stories that I used to write in Basic way back in my elementary school days.  I might check this out just for funsies.

Writers block sucks

Brings back memories  as the first game engine I ever wrote was one of these bad boys.

Might dig through and give the code out if I find it.

xyzzy

a hollow voice says 'plugh'

excellent read. Thanks for the heads up, Carolyn. I never played Zork, but I grew up in the 90s playing nearly all of Sierra's text-based adventure games (their trademark Quest series) and the classic Ultima. There's something about well-written script and the power of imagination that really helped create some of the most memorable gaming experiences in my childhood. I'll definitely give Twine a try.

This is an excellent article and I can't wait to try out twine. On the other hand I don't think that gaming is necessarily going to become stagnant. Between Android, Steam, Kickstarter and other open platforms and alternatives to large publishers I think that we will see all kinds of new gaming experiences evolve over the next few years. I don't think that consoles and closed systems are going away just yet but change is happening nonetheless.

Thanks for mentioning this!

I started writing a story as soon as I downloaded Twine. Right now, I'm surprising myself with how morbid it is. The first room already has three ways to die. It's pretty much writing itself, like always happens when I write something.

For anyone who likes interactive fiction, i.e. text adventures, there is one I highly recommend called "Anchorhead".  Just google it, you will find it.

Love you articles, Carolyn. You always write about the non-mainstream issues. That's why I go to Gamespot. :)

This is very cool.   Just might have to make one myself.

Ever since

Shoot'Em-Up Construction Kit was all the rage I've been waiting for decent high level software to create my own games. I feel we're still stuck in the 80s with this however.

As for text adventures there are a multitude of tools for creating those.

Here's a fun example of a game created.

It's a zombie survival text adventure. If you liked The Walking Dead Telltale game it's pretty much like that.

http://www.choiceofgames.com/zombies/

I'm gonna check this out.

Text-based games are still pretty cool, frankly. The good old days of Zork and whatnot...

This is exactly what walking dead is and that won goty for many websites.

Thanks you very much for this. Expecting more articles about game development.

I absolutely love the fact that as time passes more and more creativity tools are being made available for free for people to be able to bring to fruition all kind of entertainment content.  The obstacle for people to let their creativity fly and be experienced by others is their own imagination and the time these can spend on producing such content. 

sounds neat....all I've worked with that actually turned out somewhat successful was Game Maker 

I used to make games all the time using Clickteam's "Click & Play" and "The Games Factory". Read all about it in my latest blog...or don't :p

Nice, also there are other programs that's let's you make games in same ways, like BYOND or RPGmaker though more advanced.

To me, a better analogy would have been, "But graphics aren't inherently better than text, any more than picture books are inherently better than novels."

Carolyn

Thank . you 

Awesome!  Carolyn, thanks for this feature on interactive fiction!!  Too often, I.F. and text-based adventures are seen as "not real games" and not worthy of notice.  I love text-based games and I really appreciate the heads up on this one.  Very cool