But after a while you start wanting to incorporate some more advanced features like actors and inventory. Twine is… just passages of text. Increasingly you gravitate from ‘Harlowe’ and ‘SugarCube’ (the two major ‘formats’ for writing in Twine) to ‘Snowman’ which is a plain wrapper. And then you start making your game mainly by writing Javascript.
The day comes when you realise that Twine isn’t actually offering you very much.
I would like to disagree on this on a few things if you don’t mind.
You can do a lot more than just passages of text in Twine, even while mainly staying with the base macros of the format. Inventories and NPCs (I think that’s what you mean by Actors?) can be done with either of the more basic formats (there are many new users asking for helps for their Combat Systems or how to manage inventories in the Twine Discord).
And there are a lot of resources for Twine to help customise the basic format. Some even create custom macro so you don’t have to deal with coding JavaScript.
See:
I’m gonna plug: DOL-OS and The Thick Table Tavern that rely heavily on visuals and manipulations of elements on the screen. There may be some jQuery coded in the first, but over 95% of the code in both these projects were done in SugarCube.
Twine is a good tool for a lot of people, and it does offer a good starting base for many getting in the community. Some formats might not offer enough for some (which is why there is Snowman to help you do stuff from scratch, and why other people create their own format), but I fail to see how Twine doesn’t offer much with the kinds of games created in Twine…
Or were you just describing your experience with Twine?