8 ms·

Twine is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories

281 points by GordonS 7y ago

yori 7y ago
Twine is also a package publishing tool[1] in Python. With growing number of projects and tools it is inevitable that we are going to have more and more of these name clashes. I wonder if we can arrive at a naming system for projects to avoid such name clashes to improve the brand identity of these projects. [1] https://packaging.python.org/tutorials/packaging-projects/#uploading-the-distribution-archives https://packaging.python.org/tutorials/packaging-projects/#u...
- benmarks 7y ago
  One could look to the rules around trademark. If two things share the same name, but not the same market, they both keep the name. Humans can be relied on to literally coordinate an offering using a mark and market.
captn3m0 7y ago
Cool Project Idea: Make a tool that converts Twine projects to those Twitter-Adventure threads that got viral this year[0]. Last I'd checked, this was complicated by the state-feature (health/features etc) in Twine. But for simple adventures, this should be doable. [0]: https://twitter.com/CORNYASSBITCH/status/1142591156884127744 https://twitter.com/CORNYASSBITCH/status/1142591156884127744
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
thristian 7y ago
For people who prefer the ol' text-editor-and-compiler workflow to a pretty web-based tool, there's a command-line compiler for Twine stories called Tweego[1]. It can compile a source file in the Twee v3 format[2] to a single HTML file that includes the plain-text markup and the JS "story format" engine that parses the markup, renders it to HTML, maintains state, etc. Tweego comes with the same three default story formats that Twine comes with: Harlowe[3], the basic default; Sugarcube[4], designed to provide a smooth upgrade from Twine v1; and Snowman[5], designed to be extended with JavaScript and CSS. I've dabbled a bit with Harlowe, and while it's flexible and powerful, I found it a bit underwhelming as an actual markup language, especially after growing used to Markdown. If I ever write another Twine story, I'm going to try Chapbook[5], which is actually based on Markdown, or maybe event try writing my own engine. [1]: https://www.motoslave.net/tweego/ https://www.motoslave.net/tweego/ [2]: https://github.com/iftechfoundation/twine-specs/blob/master/twee-3-specification.md https://github.com/iftechfoundation/twine-specs/blob/master/... [3]: https://twine2.neocities.org/ https://twine2.neocities.org/ [4]: https://www.motoslave.net/sugarcube/2/docs/ https://www.motoslave.net/sugarcube/2/docs/ [5]: https://klembot.github.io/chapbook/guide/ https://klembot.github.io/chapbook/guide/
- vidugavia 7y ago
  Chapbook looks nice, but even after first glance I see a lot of things potentially missing, such as possibility to redirect to "death passage" from each passage if health drops below zero. Maybe it will be developed in that direction, but for now I feel Snowman should be a default choice for any developer trying out Twine, because you basically code everything in JS.
jordanpg 7y ago
I want to like Twine games and stories, I really do. I always find them underwhelming, though. I can see how these might be of interest to a very young audience, in analogy to the CYOA books of yore. But the appeal to a more mature audience, like the appeal of parser games or really video games generally, escapes me. It's always struck me as odd that these games are compared with traditional IF parser games, because parser games (which have their own problems) seem to me to be in another galaxy in terms of gameplay, scope, and complexity. This is an example of how it's hard for me to even see the potential of the platform. Does this ever get beyond clicking on words, with branching storylines? Are there any examples of Twine games that get beyond simple hypertext storytelling?
- 7thaccount 7y ago
  Agreed that these aren't as good as something like Blue Lacuna, but the intended audience is probably different. Kids like simple CYOA type books and are a natural fit, where games like Blue Lacuna are a bit much. Likewise, some adults just want a simple a fun game with no backtracking and complex puzzles. I played one of these for a few hours on my phone once and it was indeed entertaining.
  - vanderZwan 7y ago
    It's also intended to be something that children can experiment with themselves, and it's pretty good at that.
- RodgerTheGreat 7y ago
  A stand-out Twine game that comes to mind is _Horse Master: The Game of Horse Mastery_: https://tommchenry.itch.io/horse-master https://tommchenry.itch.io/horse-master It is a slow-burn science-fiction horror story with light elements of simulation and random chance which liven up the CYOA formula.
- jccalhoun 7y ago
  I agree that these are pretty limited. I taught a class on interactive narrative last year and I really wanted to have my students make something like Zork but there just isn't anything user friendly enough (The class had no per-requisites so I didn't want to assume the students had any technical knowledge and many didn't) so I chose twine. I was pretty happy with what they did because there was a really wide range of topics that aren't usually seen in gaming (one was making dinner, another was going to the mall, another was a text based football game. There were a number of games about more-traditional topics too).
webappguy 7y ago
Looks cool reminds me of that tool might have been called bigboard or something. Had a yellow logo got bout by a company starts with an 'm'. Anyone recall? Just a giant whiteboard to pin things, create mind maps etc
Igelau 7y ago
Interactive Fiction isn't a genre I'm well versed in, but Seedship by John Ayliff stood out to me as particularly effective, and I know that was made with Twine. http://philome.la/johnayliff/seedship/play http://philome.la/johnayliff/seedship/play
cproctor 7y ago
There's some argument that the limitations of this format (compared to open-ended parser games, or the very open-ended AI Dungeon posted here last week) are a benefit. Ian Bogost's piece in the Atlantic a couple of years ago, "Video Games are Better Without Stories" [1] argued that narrative in games can't deliver on its promise--you can't craft a story while also letting the player explore. To my taste, games like Inkle's 80 Days and Heaven's Vault, and Nicky Case's games like the Coming Out Simulator [2], make effective use of the constraints of the medium. They do feel more like literature than games, which might feel overly conservative to folks primarily interested in the phenomenological possibilities of games. My project, Unfold Studio [3], makes use of the affordances of Inkle's Ink language for teaching CS in the context of students' existing identities and concerns. Here, the limitations of the format are again useful. Students can create small playable worlds in a way that's still manageable and which makes CS concepts rhetorically powerful--they are immediately useful for creating particular experiences for the user. Here's an accessible piece [4] on how this approach could support marginalized youth in developing criticality: understanding and challenging unfair techno-social conditions. I'm always looking for collaborators! [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/video-games-stories/524148/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/video... [2] https://ncase.me/cos/ https://ncase.me/cos/ [3] https://unfold.studio https://unfold.studio [4] https://chrisproctor.net/publications/proctor_2019_voice.html https://chrisproctor.net/publications/proctor_2019_voice.htm...
- aidenn0 7y ago
  > narrative in games can't deliver on its promise--you can't craft a story while also letting the player explore. Roger Ebert made a similar argument[1] a while back. While I agree that interactivity and narrative are in tension, I don't agree that they are incompatible. There was plenty of exploration in Planetfall, but also a very emotional scene. While many have argued that that scene should be discounted because it's in a non-interactive portion of the game (e.g. [2]), the impact of the scene exists because of the relationship that was built-up with Floyd mostly through interactive moments and exploration. In the realm of non-computer games, there are all sorts of highly interactive story-telling games and RPGs, and while I think Ebert would claim that those don't count because the narrative is accidental rather than intentional, I find that to be a somewhat arbitrary distinction. 1: https://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/video-games-can-never-be-art https://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/video-games-can-ne... 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20081109044017/http://www.raphkoster.com/2005/12/07/the-pixar-lesson/ https://web.archive.org/web/20081109044017/http://www.raphko...
Aperocky 7y ago
It looks like we’ve ran out of names. I would tell you it’s the python package uploader if you asked for twine
- chipotle_coyote 7y ago
  To the best of my knowledge, Twine the game system predates Twine the Python package publisher by several years. (The first release of the game system was 2009; the first release of the packager appears to have been 2013.)
jccalhoun 7y ago
The maintainer has a patreon that I support. https://www.patreon.com/klembot https://www.patreon.com/klembot I'm impressed by how diligent he is with sending updates out to backers. He's currently updating twine and I'm sure he would like some support.
phrotoma 7y ago
For the Black Mirror fans, Charlie talks about using Twine to help write Bandersnatch in this interview: https://www.wired.com/story/black-mirror-bandersnatch-interactive-episode/ https://www.wired.com/story/black-mirror-bandersnatch-intera....
melvinroest 7y ago
I wrote my thesis on something similar [1, 2]. My thesis asked all kinds of questions [4]. It was about XIMPEL which had a lot in common with SMIL (a former W3C standard), mostly because they were developed by people who were a bit rivals of each other. Here is a showcase of XIMPEL [3]. [1] https://melvinroest.github.io/ximpel/documentation/theses/master_thesis_melvin_roest.pdf https://melvinroest.github.io/ximpel/documentation/theses/ma... [2] An introduction with some background context is here: https://melvinroest.github.io/ximpel/ https://melvinroest.github.io/ximpel/ [3] https://www.ximpel.net/category/showcase/ https://www.ximpel.net/category/showcase/ [4] What happens when you introduce applications in non-linear storytelling? Answer: you can recreate CodeCademy.com. What happens when you allow for media to be played in parallel: you're opening a can of worms that has a lot of implications on user experience and architecture of non-linear stories. You'll see some of the implications later on. Is ReactJS suitable as a framework for non-linear storytelling compared to vanillaJS? Answer: yes, because ReactJS is component-based, so the components will be based on media items for which you can tell a story. I also think it's possible to make story/content components. How do you measure frustration in a non-linear story framework? Answer: you could do it via the webcam if the user consents. Since mouse clicks and watch time is not enough. Non-linear stories are not applications, but they can be (in XIMPEL at least), when media is passively consumed, you need facial expressions (and user consent). Now that we have parallel media playing how to do time scrubbing? Answer: in my thesis I outlined multiple options. The biggest question is: do you want to have a time line or a time graph? Now that we have parallel media playing does that mean that a subject point in the story should be able to survive subject point in the story that comes after it? If it makes sense, content-wise, then yes. If you wouldn't have parallel media playback, this would not make sense. (ok, I'm butchering this answer, can't summarize it well, you can always read my thesis ;-) [1]) Is XIMPEL Turing Complete? Answer: almost! If we allow for the user to disambiguate certain issues, then yes. What helps a lot with this is that XIMPEL allows the use of integer variables. And you can get very far with 2 integer variables, since you can represent 2 integer variables as 2 stacks, and 2 stacks makes a tape. Where it fails with XIMPEL though is knowing which story/subject point to jump to.
failrate 7y ago
Making Twine games is super fun and interesting. It has a mostly intuitive programming language.
snvzz 7y ago
Like ren'py, onscripter, kirikiri2 and so many others.
ErotemeObelus 7y ago
My best friend was writing a twine about his ordeal before he died. I'm so happy someone on Hacker News brought it up.
immigrantsheep 7y ago
I like Twine but I ended up using Ink and Inky much more https://www.inklestudios.com/ink/ https://www.inklestudios.com/ink/
- gladimdim 7y ago
  Haha! We did the same with our interactive-fiction game. At first we started with Twine but quickly switched to Inky format. But their libs for Java/Objective-C are not very good so I had to create my own ports to it. In the end we ended up with creating are own interactive fiction JSON format. All editors can do JSON, you do not require a special software to do it (ASAIR Inky required .NET SDK to be installed...)
- vorpalhex 7y ago
  I like Ink when I'm writing the story but by god is it's parser and intermediate representation a frickin' mess. I PR'd to fix the official docs a while ago and got rejected which is frustrating when the official docs are so damned terrible.
quotemstr 7y ago
I've been wondering why we don't apply modern NLP techniques to the traditional parser-based interactive fiction format. In particular, part-of-speech tagging ought to be very robust by now, so we should be able to handle sentences with complex relative clauses and homonyms pretty well now, making the whole experience less frustrating.
- samcodes 7y ago
  You either hand some of this over to a ML model to handle, and lose some control / deterministic-ness, or you write a ton of code to handle the combinatorial explosion of potential parses of the sentence.
- currymj 7y ago
  usually a good-sounding idea like this, if it hasn't been tried, must have some hidden pitfalls. but the number of people writing parser-based interactive fiction is ludicrously small, so probably just nobody thought to do it.
- TulliusCicero 7y ago
  I guess AI Dungeon 2 sort of does this, though it's more like an advanced chatbot in the guise of a text-based adventure game, rather than an actual text-based adventure game.
- curiousdannii 7y ago
  Various levels of NLP do get applied in IF, but it doesn't necessarily help much. Being able to parse input is an important step, but the game/story needs to be able to do something with those verbs and nouns. For a good player experience the author needs to communicate clearly what range of input will be acceptable, making sure all nouns mentioned in text can be interacted, any actions implied in the text or by the nouns themselves are recognised, etc. If you do that well then you can have a good player experience with a purely handcoded parser.
Rudism 7y ago
I created a related set of tooling called Ficdown (ficdown.com) that lets you write simple choice-based interactive stories using Markdown syntax (headings to represent scenes, anchors to represent choices and variables, and so on). My focus was on supporting the creation of stories that could be compiled into static ebooks to be read on e-readers that wouldn't support systems requiring a custom engine to run.
gladimdim 7y ago
My friend and I used the Twine and then Inkle formats for our interactive fiction game. But these formats produce unreadable JSONs and require custom editors to edit them. Also, their libs for Java/Objective-C had a lot of bugs :( And learning a new DSL to write a book takes too much time... As a result we created a new interactive fiction format: https://github.com/gladimdim/GladStoriesEngine#human-readable-json-data-structure https://github.com/gladimdim/GladStoriesEngine#human-readabl... It is already used by the https://locadeserta.com/index_en.html https://locadeserta.com/index_en.html And it has a Dart implementation: https://pub.dev/packages/gladstoriesengine https://pub.dev/packages/gladstoriesengine. It can be used with Flutter apps in web and native!
- bloopernova 7y ago
  As someone who played a lot of SCUMM adventure games "back in the day", I want to applaud you!
  - scrollaway 7y ago
    Check out the Deponia series for a bit of modern scumm-like LucasArts adventure games :)
    - bloopernova 7y ago
      My wife has played some of those! She's a huge fan of the point and click adventures, I should see if her Steam library is sharing. Thank you for the reminder :)
- dcsan 7y ago
  this looks really interesting as a format; I agree that Twine is hard to engage with, the editor code is a mess and the generated format isn't clean. But it is quite fun and quick to use as a visual story "map" editor. For your file format, I can't see the runtime inside the github repos, is that also available?
- StavrosK 7y ago
  I kind of wish we had a format that was more readable than JSON, with whitespace instead of brackets, but then I start wishing for references and things like that, and realize I've arrived at YAML, which is nobody's notion of a good idea.
jmiskovic 7y ago
How hackable is it? Can we write JS functions to generate procedural worlds?
xchip 7y ago
Another CYOA editor with a unique editor that shows you the whole conversation graph https://aguaviva.github.io/SEMap/SEMap.html https://aguaviva.github.io/SEMap/SEMap.html It was used to create this bot that asks you Socratic questions: https://aguaviva.github.io/SEMap/BeliefExplorer.html https://aguaviva.github.io/SEMap/BeliefExplorer.html I hope this interests somebody one day!
parisidau 7y ago
If you're interested in writing stories in a language like this, I've been working on a project called Yarn Spinner (https://github.com/YarnSpinnerTool/YarnSpinner https://github.com/YarnSpinnerTool/YarnSpinner) that basically implements a Twine-like system for dialogue in Unity. A few indie games are using it - most notably, Night in the Woods (https://nightinthewoods.com https://nightinthewoods.com). We're pretty pleased with the results that people are getting from it.
- phreack 7y ago
  Heh, I looked this up back in the day and thought how confusing it was that it had the same name as the yarn package manager since I was using it in my build process. Does it have a way to export to JSON or another structured format? My game's built by building a website from Twine exported to JSON with Twison and it's not ideal.
  - parisidau 7y ago
    We can’t do that yet but we’d be interested in knowing what kind of structured format you need? E.g., do you need the nodes? the lines? The structure of the interconnecting nodes? something exotic like the parse tree? Let us know! We'd love to help out. Yarn Spinner predates the Yarn package manager by about 1 year!
    - phreack 7y ago
      My game is basically an interactive story told in chat format, so what I use with Twison is a list of nodes and I use the node text content, the nodes it points to, and a set of tags to organize which node correspond to which conversation. I'm currently working on a way to set variables when entering a node but that's all done 'client side'.
- breakingcups 7y ago
  Heads up, the https link doesn't seem to work. Http works fine.
jakequade 7y ago
Firewatch devs used this for the intro - and it's beautiful. Nice work team.

281 points by GordonS 7y ago

yori 7y ago

Twine is also a package publishing tool[1] in Python. With growing number of projects and tools it is inevitable that we are going to have more and more of these name clashes. I wonder if we can arrive at a naming system for projects to avoid such name clashes to improve the brand identity of these projects. [1] https://packaging.python.org/tutorials/packaging-projects/#uploading-the-distribution-archives https://packaging.python.org/tutorials/packaging-projects/#u...

benmarks 7y ago
One could look to the rules around trademark. If two things share the same name, but not the same market, they both keep the name. Humans can be relied on to literally coordinate an offering using a mark and market.

captn3m0 7y ago

Cool Project Idea: Make a tool that converts Twine projects to those Twitter-Adventure threads that got viral this year[0]. Last I'd checked, this was complicated by the state-feature (health/features etc) in Twine. But for simple adventures, this should be doable. [0]: https://twitter.com/CORNYASSBITCH/status/1142591156884127744 https://twitter.com/CORNYASSBITCH/status/1142591156884127744

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

thristian 7y ago

For people who prefer the ol' text-editor-and-compiler workflow to a pretty web-based tool, there's a command-line compiler for Twine stories called Tweego[1]. It can compile a source file in the Twee v3 format[2] to a single HTML file that includes the plain-text markup and the JS "story format" engine that parses the markup, renders it to HTML, maintains state, etc. Tweego comes with the same three default story formats that Twine comes with: Harlowe[3], the basic default; Sugarcube[4], designed to provide a smooth upgrade from Twine v1; and Snowman[5], designed to be extended with JavaScript and CSS. I've dabbled a bit with Harlowe, and while it's flexible and powerful, I found it a bit underwhelming as an actual markup language, especially after growing used to Markdown. If I ever write another Twine story, I'm going to try Chapbook[5], which is actually based on Markdown, or maybe event try writing my own engine. [1]: https://www.motoslave.net/tweego/ https://www.motoslave.net/tweego/ [2]: https://github.com/iftechfoundation/twine-specs/blob/master/twee-3-specification.md https://github.com/iftechfoundation/twine-specs/blob/master/... [3]: https://twine2.neocities.org/ https://twine2.neocities.org/ [4]: https://www.motoslave.net/sugarcube/2/docs/ https://www.motoslave.net/sugarcube/2/docs/ [5]: https://klembot.github.io/chapbook/guide/ https://klembot.github.io/chapbook/guide/

vidugavia 7y ago
Chapbook looks nice, but even after first glance I see a lot of things potentially missing, such as possibility to redirect to "death passage" from each passage if health drops below zero. Maybe it will be developed in that direction, but for now I feel Snowman should be a default choice for any developer trying out Twine, because you basically code everything in JS.

jordanpg 7y ago

I want to like Twine games and stories, I really do. I always find them underwhelming, though. I can see how these might be of interest to a very young audience, in analogy to the CYOA books of yore. But the appeal to a more mature audience, like the appeal of parser games or really video games generally, escapes me. It's always struck me as odd that these games are compared with traditional IF parser games, because parser games (which have their own problems) seem to me to be in another galaxy in terms of gameplay, scope, and complexity. This is an example of how it's hard for me to even see the potential of the platform. Does this ever get beyond clicking on words, with branching storylines? Are there any examples of Twine games that get beyond simple hypertext storytelling?

7thaccount 7y ago
Agreed that these aren't as good as something like Blue Lacuna, but the intended audience is probably different. Kids like simple CYOA type books and are a natural fit, where games like Blue Lacuna are a bit much. Likewise, some adults just want a simple a fun game with no backtracking and complex puzzles. I played one of these for a few hours on my phone once and it was indeed entertaining.
- vanderZwan 7y ago
  It's also intended to be something that children can experiment with themselves, and it's pretty good at that.
RodgerTheGreat 7y ago
A stand-out Twine game that comes to mind is _Horse Master: The Game of Horse Mastery_: https://tommchenry.itch.io/horse-master https://tommchenry.itch.io/horse-master It is a slow-burn science-fiction horror story with light elements of simulation and random chance which liven up the CYOA formula.
jccalhoun 7y ago
I agree that these are pretty limited. I taught a class on interactive narrative last year and I really wanted to have my students make something like Zork but there just isn't anything user friendly enough (The class had no per-requisites so I didn't want to assume the students had any technical knowledge and many didn't) so I chose twine. I was pretty happy with what they did because there was a really wide range of topics that aren't usually seen in gaming (one was making dinner, another was going to the mall, another was a text based football game. There were a number of games about more-traditional topics too).

webappguy 7y ago

Looks cool reminds me of that tool might have been called bigboard or something. Had a yellow logo got bout by a company starts with an 'm'. Anyone recall? Just a giant whiteboard to pin things, create mind maps etc

Igelau 7y ago

Interactive Fiction isn't a genre I'm well versed in, but Seedship by John Ayliff stood out to me as particularly effective, and I know that was made with Twine. http://philome.la/johnayliff/seedship/play http://philome.la/johnayliff/seedship/play

cproctor 7y ago

There's some argument that the limitations of this format (compared to open-ended parser games, or the very open-ended AI Dungeon posted here last week) are a benefit. Ian Bogost's piece in the Atlantic a couple of years ago, "Video Games are Better Without Stories" [1] argued that narrative in games can't deliver on its promise--you can't craft a story while also letting the player explore. To my taste, games like Inkle's 80 Days and Heaven's Vault, and Nicky Case's games like the Coming Out Simulator [2], make effective use of the constraints of the medium. They do feel more like literature than games, which might feel overly conservative to folks primarily interested in the phenomenological possibilities of games. My project, Unfold Studio [3], makes use of the affordances of Inkle's Ink language for teaching CS in the context of students' existing identities and concerns. Here, the limitations of the format are again useful. Students can create small playable worlds in a way that's still manageable and which makes CS concepts rhetorically powerful--they are immediately useful for creating particular experiences for the user. Here's an accessible piece [4] on how this approach could support marginalized youth in developing criticality: understanding and challenging unfair techno-social conditions. I'm always looking for collaborators! [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/video-games-stories/524148/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/video... [2] https://ncase.me/cos/ https://ncase.me/cos/ [3] https://unfold.studio https://unfold.studio [4] https://chrisproctor.net/publications/proctor_2019_voice.html https://chrisproctor.net/publications/proctor_2019_voice.htm...

aidenn0 7y ago
> narrative in games can't deliver on its promise--you can't craft a story while also letting the player explore. Roger Ebert made a similar argument[1] a while back. While I agree that interactivity and narrative are in tension, I don't agree that they are incompatible. There was plenty of exploration in Planetfall, but also a very emotional scene. While many have argued that that scene should be discounted because it's in a non-interactive portion of the game (e.g. [2]), the impact of the scene exists because of the relationship that was built-up with Floyd mostly through interactive moments and exploration. In the realm of non-computer games, there are all sorts of highly interactive story-telling games and RPGs, and while I think Ebert would claim that those don't count because the narrative is accidental rather than intentional, I find that to be a somewhat arbitrary distinction. 1: https://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/video-games-can-never-be-art https://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/video-games-can-ne... 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20081109044017/http://www.raphkoster.com/2005/12/07/the-pixar-lesson/ https://web.archive.org/web/20081109044017/http://www.raphko...

Aperocky 7y ago

It looks like we’ve ran out of names. I would tell you it’s the python package uploader if you asked for twine

chipotle_coyote 7y ago
To the best of my knowledge, Twine the game system predates Twine the Python package publisher by several years. (The first release of the game system was 2009; the first release of the packager appears to have been 2013.)

jccalhoun 7y ago

The maintainer has a patreon that I support. https://www.patreon.com/klembot https://www.patreon.com/klembot I'm impressed by how diligent he is with sending updates out to backers. He's currently updating twine and I'm sure he would like some support.

phrotoma 7y ago

For the Black Mirror fans, Charlie talks about using Twine to help write Bandersnatch in this interview: https://www.wired.com/story/black-mirror-bandersnatch-interactive-episode/ https://www.wired.com/story/black-mirror-bandersnatch-intera....

melvinroest 7y ago

I wrote my thesis on something similar [1, 2]. My thesis asked all kinds of questions [4]. It was about XIMPEL which had a lot in common with SMIL (a former W3C standard), mostly because they were developed by people who were a bit rivals of each other. Here is a showcase of XIMPEL [3]. [1] https://melvinroest.github.io/ximpel/documentation/theses/master_thesis_melvin_roest.pdf https://melvinroest.github.io/ximpel/documentation/theses/ma... [2] An introduction with some background context is here: https://melvinroest.github.io/ximpel/ https://melvinroest.github.io/ximpel/ [3] https://www.ximpel.net/category/showcase/ https://www.ximpel.net/category/showcase/ [4] What happens when you introduce applications in non-linear storytelling? Answer: you can recreate CodeCademy.com. What happens when you allow for media to be played in parallel: you're opening a can of worms that has a lot of implications on user experience and architecture of non-linear stories. You'll see some of the implications later on. Is ReactJS suitable as a framework for non-linear storytelling compared to vanillaJS? Answer: yes, because ReactJS is component-based, so the components will be based on media items for which you can tell a story. I also think it's possible to make story/content components. How do you measure frustration in a non-linear story framework? Answer: you could do it via the webcam if the user consents. Since mouse clicks and watch time is not enough. Non-linear stories are not applications, but they can be (in XIMPEL at least), when media is passively consumed, you need facial expressions (and user consent). Now that we have parallel media playing how to do time scrubbing? Answer: in my thesis I outlined multiple options. The biggest question is: do you want to have a time line or a time graph? Now that we have parallel media playing does that mean that a subject point in the story should be able to survive subject point in the story that comes after it? If it makes sense, content-wise, then yes. If you wouldn't have parallel media playback, this would not make sense. (ok, I'm butchering this answer, can't summarize it well, you can always read my thesis ;-) [1]) Is XIMPEL Turing Complete? Answer: almost! If we allow for the user to disambiguate certain issues, then yes. What helps a lot with this is that XIMPEL allows the use of integer variables. And you can get very far with 2 integer variables, since you can represent 2 integer variables as 2 stacks, and 2 stacks makes a tape. Where it fails with XIMPEL though is knowing which story/subject point to jump to.

failrate 7y ago

Making Twine games is super fun and interesting. It has a mostly intuitive programming language.

snvzz 7y ago

Like ren'py, onscripter, kirikiri2 and so many others.

ErotemeObelus 7y ago

My best friend was writing a twine about his ordeal before he died. I'm so happy someone on Hacker News brought it up.

immigrantsheep 7y ago

I like Twine but I ended up using Ink and Inky much more https://www.inklestudios.com/ink/ https://www.inklestudios.com/ink/

gladimdim 7y ago
Haha! We did the same with our interactive-fiction game. At first we started with Twine but quickly switched to Inky format. But their libs for Java/Objective-C are not very good so I had to create my own ports to it. In the end we ended up with creating are own interactive fiction JSON format. All editors can do JSON, you do not require a special software to do it (ASAIR Inky required .NET SDK to be installed...)
vorpalhex 7y ago
I like Ink when I'm writing the story but by god is it's parser and intermediate representation a frickin' mess. I PR'd to fix the official docs a while ago and got rejected which is frustrating when the official docs are so damned terrible.

quotemstr 7y ago

I've been wondering why we don't apply modern NLP techniques to the traditional parser-based interactive fiction format. In particular, part-of-speech tagging ought to be very robust by now, so we should be able to handle sentences with complex relative clauses and homonyms pretty well now, making the whole experience less frustrating.

samcodes 7y ago
You either hand some of this over to a ML model to handle, and lose some control / deterministic-ness, or you write a ton of code to handle the combinatorial explosion of potential parses of the sentence.
currymj 7y ago
usually a good-sounding idea like this, if it hasn't been tried, must have some hidden pitfalls. but the number of people writing parser-based interactive fiction is ludicrously small, so probably just nobody thought to do it.
TulliusCicero 7y ago
I guess AI Dungeon 2 sort of does this, though it's more like an advanced chatbot in the guise of a text-based adventure game, rather than an actual text-based adventure game.
curiousdannii 7y ago
Various levels of NLP do get applied in IF, but it doesn't necessarily help much. Being able to parse input is an important step, but the game/story needs to be able to do something with those verbs and nouns. For a good player experience the author needs to communicate clearly what range of input will be acceptable, making sure all nouns mentioned in text can be interacted, any actions implied in the text or by the nouns themselves are recognised, etc. If you do that well then you can have a good player experience with a purely handcoded parser.

Rudism 7y ago

I created a related set of tooling called Ficdown (ficdown.com) that lets you write simple choice-based interactive stories using Markdown syntax (headings to represent scenes, anchors to represent choices and variables, and so on). My focus was on supporting the creation of stories that could be compiled into static ebooks to be read on e-readers that wouldn't support systems requiring a custom engine to run.

gladimdim 7y ago

My friend and I used the Twine and then Inkle formats for our interactive fiction game. But these formats produce unreadable JSONs and require custom editors to edit them. Also, their libs for Java/Objective-C had a lot of bugs :( And learning a new DSL to write a book takes too much time... As a result we created a new interactive fiction format: https://github.com/gladimdim/GladStoriesEngine#human-readable-json-data-structure https://github.com/gladimdim/GladStoriesEngine#human-readabl... It is already used by the https://locadeserta.com/index_en.html https://locadeserta.com/index_en.html And it has a Dart implementation: https://pub.dev/packages/gladstoriesengine https://pub.dev/packages/gladstoriesengine. It can be used with Flutter apps in web and native!

bloopernova 7y ago
As someone who played a lot of SCUMM adventure games "back in the day", I want to applaud you!
- scrollaway 7y ago
  Check out the Deponia series for a bit of modern scumm-like LucasArts adventure games :)
  - bloopernova 7y ago
    My wife has played some of those! She's a huge fan of the point and click adventures, I should see if her Steam library is sharing. Thank you for the reminder :)
dcsan 7y ago
this looks really interesting as a format; I agree that Twine is hard to engage with, the editor code is a mess and the generated format isn't clean. But it is quite fun and quick to use as a visual story "map" editor. For your file format, I can't see the runtime inside the github repos, is that also available?
StavrosK 7y ago
I kind of wish we had a format that was more readable than JSON, with whitespace instead of brackets, but then I start wishing for references and things like that, and realize I've arrived at YAML, which is nobody's notion of a good idea.

jmiskovic 7y ago

How hackable is it? Can we write JS functions to generate procedural worlds?

xchip 7y ago

Another CYOA editor with a unique editor that shows you the whole conversation graph https://aguaviva.github.io/SEMap/SEMap.html https://aguaviva.github.io/SEMap/SEMap.html It was used to create this bot that asks you Socratic questions: https://aguaviva.github.io/SEMap/BeliefExplorer.html https://aguaviva.github.io/SEMap/BeliefExplorer.html I hope this interests somebody one day!

parisidau 7y ago

If you're interested in writing stories in a language like this, I've been working on a project called Yarn Spinner (https://github.com/YarnSpinnerTool/YarnSpinner https://github.com/YarnSpinnerTool/YarnSpinner) that basically implements a Twine-like system for dialogue in Unity. A few indie games are using it - most notably, Night in the Woods (https://nightinthewoods.com https://nightinthewoods.com). We're pretty pleased with the results that people are getting from it.

phreack 7y ago
Heh, I looked this up back in the day and thought how confusing it was that it had the same name as the yarn package manager since I was using it in my build process. Does it have a way to export to JSON or another structured format? My game's built by building a website from Twine exported to JSON with Twison and it's not ideal.
- parisidau 7y ago
  We can’t do that yet but we’d be interested in knowing what kind of structured format you need? E.g., do you need the nodes? the lines? The structure of the interconnecting nodes? something exotic like the parse tree? Let us know! We'd love to help out. Yarn Spinner predates the Yarn package manager by about 1 year!
  - phreack 7y ago
    My game is basically an interactive story told in chat format, so what I use with Twison is a list of nodes and I use the node text content, the nodes it points to, and a set of tags to organize which node correspond to which conversation. I'm currently working on a way to set variables when entering a node but that's all done 'client side'.
breakingcups 7y ago
Heads up, the https link doesn't seem to work. Http works fine.

jakequade 7y ago

Firewatch devs used this for the intro - and it's beautiful. Nice work team.