Hi, Ive never used Twine before and have only just downloaded it. Would it be worth getting The Twine Cookbook to work alongside ? I had a look at a bit of the online version and its got several coding languages. How much do these enhance the possibility of things to do ? How hard are they to follow and use? I do have a tiny bit of experience MS Basic, made some adventure games 40 odd years ago. I know Twine does most of the work for you but I presume the code makes other options available. Cheers.
Hi Steve,
First, welcome to using Twine! It’s my personal fave program to make IF with, and I hope you’ll have fun with it too.
Each story made in Twine requires you to choose a Story Format, which I think is what you mean by the coding languages mentioned in the Cookbook. They each have their own quirks, capabilities, and syntaxes. The default format when you create a new story in Twine is Harlowe, which is very beginner-friendly, especially to those without a programming background, thanks to the built-in toolbar and syntax highlighter, but has limited extensibility. There’s also Sugarcube, which is popular among more power users and allows more use of JS to extend its capabilities, and Chapbook, which I think of as being in-between Harlowe and Sugarcube in terms of capabilities/limitations, and has a very polished out-of-the-box UI. There are more purpose-specific formats as well, like Gordian if you want to create printable gamebooks.
The Cookbook is a great resource, but a bit outdated as Twine and a few of the story formats have received major updates since its last version. @manonamora has a hefty Twine-specific resource post here on the forum with guides to each format and links to their documentation if you want to see which, if any, stand out as immediately more your style.
My suggestion would be to try making a very simple barebones story so you can get a feel for just the basics and how you might want to use the program/format.
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Cheers for that, going to start having a crack today.
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As someone who used to use RenPy, Twine is much more straightforward. I love it because I can just focus on writing without everything needing some kind of coding attached.
I highly recommend using sugarcube. It doesn’t take that much know-how compared to Harlowe and it comes with a save feature built in. Here’s a great guide I recommend: https://manonamora.itch.io/twine-sugarcube-guide
I find sugarcube can be as simple or as complex as you’d like without the limitations of Harlowe.
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If you do elect to start with Harlowe, get Melissa Ford’s book. But give SugarCube a spin, first.