1_gettingstarted_twineguide2-1_hammond

© 2017 Adam Hammond adamhammond.com 
THE TWO THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW TO MAKE A TWINE GAME  The following handout explains what a passage is in Twine and how to create links between them. These instructions apply to any story format in Twine, including the default Twine 2.1 format, Harlowe, and my preferred story format, SugarCube 2.   The concept of a passage  Twine games are made up of “passages” — discrete chunks of texts. (In classical hypertext theory, these are called “lexias.”) Playing a Twine game involves moving from one passage to another. Passages have two elements: a name and content. The passage name is never shown to the player; it’s just used behind the scenes by the writer to create the “architecture” of their game. The content, on the other hand, is what the user actually sees when they reach that passage of the game.   Making links  To make a Twine game, all you need to know is how to make links between passages. Twine makes this pretty easy. While editing a passage, create links with [[double square brackets]]. For example,    You are in a room with two doors. You can either enter [[the door on the left]] or [[the door on the right]].   Twine is smart and will automatically create two new passages to match what you’ve typed, one called “the door on the left” and one called “the door on the right.” Players of your game will be able to click on the words between the brackets, which will bring them to the corresponding passages. If you would like simpler passage names, you can use | (the character you get when you type Shift-\). For instance, you could type,   You are in a room with two doors. You can either enter [[the door on the left|leftdoor]] or [[the door on the right|rightdoor]].   Here, within the [[double square brackets]], the text before the | is what the reader sees and clicks on, and the text after the | is the name of the passage you’re linking to. Twine will create links to passages called leftdoor and rightdoor, which are slightly easier to work with than the unwieldy longer names.  There are lots of ways to make your Twine game look better (with CSS) or behave more like a game (by adding variables and doing some programming). But even if all you do is make a bunch passages tied together with links, you’ve totally made a Twine game — don’t let anyone tell you any differently!