Hello everyone! I’m Harry, 24yo. I’m fairly new to the world of Interactive Fiction and very excited to learn. I’ve been a writer for a few years now and frequently DM my own stories for Homebrew D&D games. It’s exciting to discover such a way to incorporate my games and stories in a digital, choice-based environment, that (to my view) very much resembles Telltale games, which I’ve come to love.
However, any advice on how to go about this? I’ve been through the basic tutorials and am somewhat familiar with Markdown and HTML, but I still find myself confused. I haven’t really gotten story formats and what their differences are, so I’m not sure which one to use in making my first game.
Any advice on where to start on? Has anyone else tried to incorporate their D&D campaigns on Twine? If so, what else should I keep in mind?
Thank you all! Really glad to be here!
While there isn’t one tutorial to help you make a D&D-like game with Twine, there are a bunch of resources here that you might find helpful to start with Twine (and one of its formats) or to customise your project.
Note: some of the text formatting will resemble Markdown, but each format has its own coding structure, with different formatting.
My advice is to look through the documentations/guides and see what formatting works best for you, maybe test it with a short story (4-5 passages, some variable creation/change, a few conditional statements) - since technically, all formats can make D&D-style stories (essentially: choice list, roll dice, some stat tracking).
Variable tracking.
It can be simple as having a bunch of clearly named singular variables ($thisIsAVariable) or have more complex (but maybe more organised) variables like array and objects ($npc.health or $options = ["this one", "that one"]).
So keeping a list of variables created, what it tracks, whether it changes, when it is unset, and so on…
Thanks! This is extremely helpful! To be honest, I wasn’t so sure as to whether I should keep health stats and such mechanics in this project, since it might turn out to be a little boring to hold detailed combat in this format.
But I’ll definitely try this out!
No worries! Don’t hesitate to ask here whenever you are stuck with the implementation!
And a lot of projects started in the Twine Discord server (when people ask for help there) often look like RPG with a combat system. So we’re not strangers to the concept
Detailed combat can be fun! It’s all in the formatting and writing when actions are processed
Having to balance stats (health/attack/whatnot) is an interesting gameplay
(I think Wayfarer might be the closest D&D-inspired game I know? But it’s more text-focused with some check-rolls than combat itself).
But whether you keep health tracked or not depends on the gameplay of the game as a whole, and the mechanic you want to implement (e.g. just one choice combat or multi-turn combat system with ticking down health).
I’ll keep that all in mind. You’re making some great points. And Wayfarer is an amazing source of inspiration I wasn’t aware of!
I’ll check into Discord too!
Thank you so much once again, I’ll probably be back with more questions soon.
Cheers!
I’d like to see a might and magic tile based game done in twine. The tricky thing with it would be keeping track of the facing as you go through the map. For instance consider the basic square map below:
1 2 3
4 5 6
7 8 9
There are 9 possible locations in the map, but each one would need 4 different graphics depending on the player facing (N,E,S,W). The navigation and facing could be controlled by arrow keys.
This is a very interesting idea, although I am still not sure how I would go about doing such a thing. But a tile-based navigation is definitely a great fit for this.
Honestly, if you want to do stuff like roaming on world maps, turn-based combat and stuff like that, I don’t think Twine is going to be a very good fit for you, even though it can be done.
A more full-fledged game engine like Godot might have a higher learning curve at the outset, but offers you a far more powerful scripting language built for complex games and a lot more flexibility in how to present information - for example, it has powerful support for tile maps. Even RPG Maker might be a better fit for you
You can make a full-fledged RPG in Twine, absolutely, but you’ll have to do a lot of stuff “on foot” and you are going to struggle against its design goals and constraints a lot.
NB: Godot is free open-source software, just like Godot.
A turn-based combat isn’t exactly uneasy to create. I know some games using one, and not a very simple one at that.
However the question would be: what do you want in your RPG? DnD can be played very different ways depending on DM and/or groups, so it’s unesasy to give directions if you don’t first tell what you intend.
I don’t use D&D (got my own rule systems made expressly for computer RPGs) but I made a couple of text-based games using Tweego and Sugarcube. Shameless plug: here and here. Source code is available; links to itch/io because my site doesn’t stay up very well these days. They have examples of pop-up dialog boxes, character sheets, dice rolls and combat calculations, but not moving on a map (they do something different). Hope this helps!
