I’m usually a Twine developer, but I’m starting to plan out a project that I expect will go beyond the tool’s capabilities, so I’m looking for advice on a system that might be able to do what I need.
I’m writing an episodic, asynchronous multiplayer story. Basically, you can think of it as a two-player story with turns. Here’s an example:
Player 1 is playing the Superhero, and Player 2 is playing the Supervillain. Player 1 goes first, and plays an episode about suiting up at their secret base, going around the city fighting crime, and maintaining their secret identity. At the end, there are a dozen or so variables that their actions have set.
Player 2 goes next, and their episode starts with the variables that player 1 has set during their turn. Player 2 creates their death ray, holds someone for ransom, etc. The variables that Player 1 set affect Player 2’s route (e.g. the Superhero captured the Supervillain’s henchman, so when the Supervillain goes to rob a bank, their getaway driver never shows up and they have to flee on foot.) By the time Player 2 is done, they’ve set their own dozen or so variables, which are passed onto Player 1’s second episode, and so on.
Obviously, if you were doing this as a pass-and-play with a friend, I could build it all in Twine: When Player 1 finishes his turn, he passes the computer to Player 2, who’s sitting next to him. But I’d like to make it so two players can connect over the internet and play separately (e.g., Player 1 plays his episode on Monday, and then Player 2 connects to their shared game and plays her episode on Tuesday, etc). Do you know of any system that could handle that either out of the box, or with minimal development?