DEV Article: A Modern Developer's Workflow For Twine

Authoring Twine
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I was intrigued to see a Twine article pop up in my Microsoft.Source newsletter:

https://dev.to/lazerwalker/a-modern-developer-s-workflow-for-twine-4imp

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That’s a surprisingly comprehensive introduction to Twine (at least the build side of it, not the coding side). I think that’d be a pretty decent link to throw at newbies that want to step away from the Twine IDE.

Also, I didn’t even realize Github did page hosting. :sweat_smile: I think I’ll have to set that up for the examples with my engine thingy instead of hosting them on my web server.

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Me, I think that would be a pretty intimidating thing to throw at newbies. But it’s a great article for anyone willing to work through the whole thing. Very thorough, plenty of context, screenshots for the things where that would be helpful, etc. The author’s Using Data to Improve Your Narrative Games is a good article too, if you haven’t seen that.

This got me curious, so I tried making a stripped-down version, just Tweego and VSCode and creating a project with a build task so you don’t have to mess with the command-line directly. I got it down to 1000 words (about a third of the above article) but it’s still a pretty good chunk of text. Funny the complexity of things you take for granted after a while. “Just install Tweego and a text editor.” But even this basic setup would probably take someone 10 minutes.

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Oh, it would definitely be intimidating for an absolute newbie. But a person new-ish to Twine that wants to leave the IDE behind generally knows enough of other development systems that I don’t think this would be intimating to them. Although that may be assuming too much.

For some reason, I really dislike using the built-in build features of text editors like VS Code, Sublime Text, Atom, etc. As a windows users, I usually go the batch file route.

For twine/tweego I created a batch file that could do various things like compile/watch a directory, archive that directory into a .rar/.zip file, turn the twine file into markdown and create a .epub file from that markdown (like a gamebook), count the lines of your project, create a node graph from your twine file, etc. Kind of an “everything and the kitchen sink” batch file. That’s more my style.

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@tayruh,

Would you be willing to share your batch script? I’m particularly interested in your epub code. I’ve struggled with Sigil and Calibre but they’ve been less than cooperative. :wink:

FWIW, I currently use a trivial bash script (under Cygwin) to initiate twego’s monitoring of a directory while I use emacs to edit its .tw files.

#! /usr/bin/sh -x
tweego -w $1 -o $1.html

Thanks.

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Here’s the batch file. I had to zip it up in order to share it on here. It’s almost 230 lines with comments so I didn’t want to just paste it. :stuck_out_tongue:

Hopefully it’s pretty self explanatory. I have the necessary files linked at the top of script.

tweego.bat.zip (2.6 KB)

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Thanks!

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@tayruh
Your script doesn’t mention where you got the story format “prepub-1”.

I found M.C. de Marco’s prepub site at http://www.mcdemarco.net/tools/scree/prepub/ Is that what you’re using?

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Yeah. That’s the one. It looks like I had the site linked at line 20, FWIW.

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thanks! You’re right. I’m blind. sigh

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