Since I just finished drafting a playable link to some of my favorite games that I’ve made, I wanted to take a second to show some behind the scenes for that game, and some of the other Twine games I’ve made to date.

For those unfamiliar, Twine is a narrative game making tool that you can download and use for free. There’s a couple different versions available, with slightly different languages and coding practices, but the baseline code can be found here: https://twinery.org/

I’d highly recommend it as a starting platform for anyone interested in dipping their toes into game design, especially if you enjoy text based adventures, as that’s the easiest type to make in Twine. It’s pretty easy to use, there’s a lot of documentation online for how to use it, and it provides good visualization of what you’re making. What do I mean by visualization?

Stuff like this! In Twine, each box represents chunk of dialogue, or a single screen in a text game. Black text is normal words, while the colored fonts designate game code and variables, and other operations, such as making a link between blocks. Likewise, the arrows help to show the flow of each box into each other, to help authors keep track of what leads to what, and depends on what. It also leads to these cool looking networks of nodes that shows how your game is connected to itself. It may start out pretty simple, but you can eventually make some really complex webs. Some… really complex webs.

Part of what made making The Escape Game so tricky was that I went into it wanting to make a complex game, with as many variables and interesting formats as I could handle in a single semester of college. It let me play with some light HTML coding, like in the Void Chat box Ending (which you can see here as the tall, vertical series of nodes on the far left), or simple text colors as is shown with the different speaking characters in the game, primarily the Hero, or the Writer.

Of course, there’s also the approach of sheer volume.

What’s interesting about A Day at the Bank is the use of perspective to make slightly different stories out of what essentially amounts to the same days events. While the player has the power to change what happens, resulting in different endings (24, to be exact), there is a single ‘true’ day, showing what consistently happened throughout everyone’s stories. And to make everything make sense, to connect up correctly without leaving loose ends? That takes some organization.

So give it a shot! Twine is free, and pairs well with itch.io pages if you want to share your work with a larger audience. What sort of complicated story webs can you make?