Special Mintrest: Twine

My off season Mintrest presentation on twine


In the blaseball discord, every off season the Kansas City Breath Mints have special mintrest presentations, which are presentations for random topics to be enjoyable, fun, and maybe a bit informational! This is my entry into this off season!

Beefox's Special Mintrest Presentation (on using twine), woww
twine is a great piece of software, it is pretty good! it lets you write stories like choose your own adventure (but you can't call them that because a company owns that name 😢 darn capitalism)
this is what it looks like (image containing a small example of a twine story layout with 4 nodes)
but it can get complicated! (another example of a twine story, this with several hundred connected nodes)
there are two main types of interactive fiction, Trunk Stories and Branch Stories (i made up these names just now they aren't "official" or even "common")
trunk stories are stories that have small loops off the main story, but are mostly linear, you might make a few big decisions but the outcome of the story is relatively the same, there may be two or three main endings but the route to them is the same most of the way, games like "Minecraft story mode", walking dead, life is strange, Detroit become human,
branch stories are stories that branch heavily, and not only have many different endings but many different routes to those endings, with most of your choices heavily impacting which of the many endings you get, and the path of which you get to them! games like Undertale, the Stanley parable, and the original choose your own adventure books are good examples of this!
branch stories are often more fun to play, as the absorb you more and have a higher replay-ability , but that doesn't mean trunk stories aren't fun too! a trunk story allows for more time and effort to be put into one central story, and the choices being part of what helps you feel like you are part of the story!
twine makes it really easy to make these stories! but it is also really flexible too! this is an example of what writing a passage looks like: you come across a locked door, next to it is a doorbell, and a small sticky note above it that says "do not ring" you: knock on the door → knock, ring the doorbell → ring
which becomes: you come across a locked door, next to it is a doorbell, and a small sticky note above it that says "do not ring", you: knock on the door, or ring the doorbell
twine exports things as HTML files, which are basicly just web pages! you can also edit the css to change how it looks and all that! an html file means that it is super easy to upload places! a great place is to upload it on itch.io, you just need to make sure to check this button: "this file will be played in the browser
so go out and make some stories or something, but it is lots of work! but it is also worth it! it allows you to really make the reader feel like they are part of the story, and explore many different things! Thanks for reading!

You can find out more about twine here