[Choosing a Twine Story Format]

after some learnings, im starting to notice twine is not actually an easy software to use, one large point of friction is having to chose a ‘story format’

but many softwares have a long way to go, so its ok

there are no good softwares that make you chose like this, it’s very confusing - this is an extremely large point of friction and is one of those things that would be made better over time

but worst, there doesnt seem to be any helpful comparisons of the ‘story format’ anywhere since i guess the userbase is very small

so does anyone know about ‘story formats’, and able to help others chose a ‘story format’?

looking for easiest

I don’t know how the existence of story formats makes Twine harder to use.

Twine is over ten years old. Also, the presence of story formats is by design, not some mistake that will be patched out some day. And plenty of programs have concepts similar to story formats, though Twine does lack a sort of standardized feature set outside of links, so it is a bit unusual. Just think of Twine as an editor, the story format is the actual game engine.

This is asked all the time, and is addressed in several dozen places. Every Twine community on the web has at least one answered question regarding choosing a story format. This is briefly addressed in the cookbook, along with dozens of examples with code written for each format. It is also addressed in the Twine wiki and in my Twine resources list.

See:
https://twinery.org/cookbook/introduction/story_formats.html
http://twinery.org/wiki/twine2:how_to_choose_a_story_format

“Easiest” is a loaded term. If you’re trying to make a text-based JRPG with inventory and combat, you’ll find SugarCube or Snowman easier to work with. If you just want to make a basic choice-based IF game, Chapbook or Harlowe may be easier to get started with. You’ll need to learn to use whatever format you choose. Difficulty is an early problem that goes away after a time, but the limitations of the format hang around long after. You are much better off making the choice based on the project you want to make.

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Q. what is story format?

  • each story format has a default look. if you do not plan to do a lot of customization, this could be a major reason to pick a format. start with a hello world story and change the format to check them out.

  • each story format uses a very different markup language you have to learn and come with different supporting libraries which would be very very useful. sugarcube looks like HTML. harlowe looks like some other coding language. I guess picking the markup language that you feel comfortable is the most important point.

  • sugarcube and harlowe seems to have a larger user-base. pick them if you are trying to put time into getting your project better. if all you want is a basic interactive PowerPoint, twine itself could be significant and it really doesn’t matter all that much.

if you ask me, sugarcube is definitely the easiest, well supported and with a large user-base.

disclaimer: I have spent decades using sugarcane (discontinued, twine 1, a few years experience), then switched to sugarcube (twine 1 and recently twine 2, a few years experience) with a slight touch on harlowe (twine 2, a few hours) so I could be biased.

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there’s this thing call celestory.io
imma give both a try and see which is easier

‘each story format has a default look.’
that’s imporant to know

where do we see examples of visual novels or w/e its call of each of the ‘story format’ so we can choose?

very different markup languag

whats it use for, a bullet point list of things it does for example

and most imporantly is it needed?

what it do? a list of things is helpful

most important

  1. no whats most important is what these things do
  2. and if they’re needed

if you’re asking what is the minimal basic requirements heres a list to help you help me:

  1. absoutely has to have arrow keys to turn ‘pages’ (and has to be easy to be done)
  2. absotuely has to have images / gifs
  3. absotuely has to have colored words for specific words you pick (unlike this editor that discourse has that is being used for example)
  4. cant think of any other minimals atm

optionally being able to embed youtube would be a plus, not needed

trying to put time into getting your project better.

i dont know what is meant by this

on this comment

someone said ppl need to see examples of what a software produces

  • since this app has 4 options that makes it extremely difficult (see op)

  • difficulty is a problem, difficulty needs to be improved on and made better

so we need to see examples of each of the so called ‘story formats’ or w/e its called

prior to being able to choose

a few couple examples of each ‘format’ would suffice

another big problem is excessive terminology that is needless to be used, ‘twine’ has a lot of excessive terminiology, again another thing that can be imporoved on

what r vn examples of each of the ‘story formats’ or w/e its call’ pls link

link

I provided several links above that answer most of these questions.

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this does not answer the questions i asked

there are nothing to examples of things that are created for each of the so called ‘story format’

and there’s still no answwers to this basic question

we cant choose without this

to answer ppl’s questions there needs to be an answer to what particular question an answer is answring for

this isn’t anywhere to be seen currenlty

isnt there anyone that can answer simple questions that are needed to use a kind of software like this?

we need to know to progress this

What questions? The ones you seem to be complaining about were answered.

Did you even look? The first link he listed, in the section labeled “Twine 2 Examples”, it gives you a whopping forty-eight examples of sample code in different story formats! What more do you want?

(And let’s not even get into why you’re acting oddly dubious by saying, “the so called ‘story format’”.)

Just because you didn’t bother to read the answers give to you, doesn’t mean that they don’t exist.

I’m sorry, but you’re being extremely rude by spamming posts where you demand answers you’ve already been given, falsely claim that your “simple questions” haven’t been answered, and talk about how bad it is that the information you want “doesn’t exist”, simply because you couldn’t be bothered to read those answers.

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it is an abc thing to do it yourself. just go to the online twine 2 https://twinery.org/2. build a hello world story in 5 seconds and check the output changing between story formats.

yes, it is needed. do a google search in google to find out what is markup language.

<<link “next passage” “next passage name”>><</link>> - this is the sugarcube markup language to turn to a second page
<span style=“color:#ff0000;”>red text here</span> - this is the HTML markup language to show colored text
[img[image.jpg]] - this is the twine markup language to display images

the supporting libraries are huge and easy to look up from google. try “sugarcube twine” for sugarcube documents and “harlowe twine” for harlowe documents. these libraries would help you to do certain things easier, say inserting a unique object into an array, or doing certain visual effect.

to your questions. yes, yes and yes.

twine is a language + compiler to make making HTML pages easier. Anything you can do in HTML, you should be able to do it in twine, theoretically. All you have to do is to learn HTML, CSS, AJAX, JQUERY, javascript XML and maybe SQL, server setup and all that to make a professional webpage.

let’s put it this way. twine is more noob friendly than most programming language out there. that said, it is still a programming language. you should at least graduate from high school or have some basic understanding of programming to try this. if you do not meet one of these two requirements, may be you should try out powerpoint and macros instead.

The last time someone asked a question like this, someone provided this for kick start purpose. Twine Cookbook

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I’m pretty sure this person is just trolling, especially given their most recent post. Just a heads up for y’all before you waste any more time.

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