Twine for Traditional Paper Gamebooks?

Authoring Twine
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Hi all!

Very new here (Mac user), so I’ve been reading a lot, but there’s a lot to read (nice problem to have!). Not sure I have all the terminology down yet so forgive me if I sound like a hopeless noob.

My question is primarily: is Twine the tool I need if I’m writing a traditional paper gamebook, something like Fighting Fantasy? Or is there a better tool out there for that specific purpose?

I can see the topic regarding exporting from Twine to make a paper gamebook, but my question is more about whether or not Twine is the best place to create it in the first place.

Ideally I want to be able to:

  1. See/ be assisted with the structure of the branching narratives.
  2. Incorporate illustrations.
  3. Have the sections shuffled once the writing is complete.
  4. Ultimately have it in a format that Amazon or other online PoD providers can use so I can self-publish and get it out there.

Thanks for looking at this!

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You might be interested in the Gordian Format :slight_smile:

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Thanks for that. Yes read about this utility. Just wondering if, rather than use Twine then a bunch of jiggery-pokery to convert it into gamebook format, there might be a dedicated “traditional paper gamebook” authoring tool to complete the job without third party conversion?

I’ve no aversion to learning Twine, by the way. I’m not bad with HTML. And I’ll probably want a digital version sooner or later. I just didn’t want to be using a sledgehammer to crack a wallnut at this point. Just want the quickest and easiest way to a gamebook right now.

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If you’re making a smallish game (less than 100 pages) or you’re willing to spend some money you could try Crumbly Head Games’ Gamebook Authoring Tool.

If you don’t mind fiddling with command-line stuff there are things like pangamebook which lets you write in markdown and use pandoc to convert to epub or pdf or html or whatever.

I think there have been a few other tools over the years. They tend to be pretty easy to create and then not get a lot of attention and then after a while is the author even still using them? So you don’t know what state they’re in… I looked at a couple other bookmarks I had and they seem to be gone now. But there also might well be others that I’m missing…

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Thanks Josh, that looks absolutely perfect and worth £39, however I should have said I’m a Mac user and they don’t have a Mac version :frowning: Have updated my OP.

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