Twine stories?

I’ve been taking a look at Twine just to see what it’s all about, and the first problem I ran into is that I can’t figure out where they’re keeping all the stories. I mean, I managed to find TwineHub, but that hasn’t been updated since May and seems to be just a simple archive with a forum attached, also the main topic of conversation on every board there seems to be where to buy wholesale antique bathroom faucets and discount African American wigs…

Does their community not have a semi-official place to hang out and run contests, or something like the ifdb where you can play, review, and upload games? That’s kind of disappointing. :frowning:

I don’t think there’s an “official” place to put Twine games. I believe part of the appeal of Twine is that the output is a (usually) small html file that can be distributed or posted anywhere. I believe you can submit them to IF Archive. I was surprised when I submitted my .gblorb game that they produced a parchment-playable online version without me needing to ask.

Alternately, you could host it in a public folder of a dropbox until you find a more permanent location for it.

twinehub.weebly.com/ was announced several months ago. But the site says it’s being moved and I don’t know how long it’s been like that.

You can submit a Twine game to the Archive, but I think we prefer .zip packages rather than web-playable pages.

IFDB has many entries for Twine games, but the playable links point to author’s web sites, not to the Archive. As noted above, DropBox works fine for this (as long as your game doesn’t turn into an Internet meme).

The problem with Dropbox is that it’s much more volatile than other hosts on average, so it would be great if there were some centralized location for the stories.

You can take a look at adventurecow.com - this is a site where authors of Twine stories can post links to their story. (But the stories are usually hosted at the author’s own website or dropbox.)

Edit: And discussion of Twine is usually on the Google Group: groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/tweecode

I made a free website on Wix, which lets me make a website with their editor and templates. You can upload files such as pictures, but I wasn’t able to figure out if there’s a way to put up a raw html page or set up a parchment-type situation.

I know if I write something I can find a place to upload it somewhere or other, but first I’d just like to read some of the better games out there, and the problem with that is I have no idea where to start. Unless we’re talking about Porpentine’s stuff, reviews seem pretty few and far between.

Definitely hanging on to that link to Adventure Cow though, there’s some good stuff there. :slight_smile:

I think that saying that Twine has a “community” would be an overstatement. Users of complicated tools need to band together to figure out how the tools are used… Twine is straightforward enough however that creators can live up to their basically reclusive nature.

I find Twine games by googling phrases that are automatically included in stock generated games, but that’s a far cry from an endorsed, reviewed, curated collection.

I believe the Quest fellow has offered to host Twine games at textadventures.co.uk

I have the exact same issue about Twine. Currently, if you want to keep up with Twine games, you have to check the following websites:

IFDB
Quest
TwineHub
Twine Garden (twinegarden.tumblr.com/)
Very occasionally even the IF Archive
ifwizz.de/ (only way I heard of the Berlin Twine Jam)

It’s all over the place, basically.

I might recommend checking Porpentine’s posts at freeindiegam.es, but it looks like that isn’t mostly Twine games at the moment. Still, that’ll give you some curation. (Unfortunately, there’s not a tag system that lets you filter for Twine games. You can search the site for “Twine” and it’ll find any game that has Twine in its description.)

It strikes me that this site would be an ideal place for links to Twine games and other systems. It’s the central location for most of the IF talk on the internet, after all. Why not have a separate section which contains links to every IF system out there, the games written with said systems and any resource sites?

Because that’s what the IFDB or the IF Wiki is for. Those two are already kind of redundant, no one wants to maintain a third database!

But this is a forum which people visit every day. They’re more likely to see a series of links here than they are on IFDB or IFWiki. I check out IFDB every now and then, and IFWiki once in a blue moon, but I log into this forum at least once a day just to see what’s going on.

Forums are good for announcing new games, but they’re terrible for maintaining a complete collection of links. Search is slow (and limited), browsing is painful, updating old posts is awkward, there’s no support for groups of people to collectively edit a list… the whole point of IFDB is that it’s optimized for all of that.

If the problem is that you don’t visit IFDB every day, then visit IFDB every week.

It’s a good idea for authors to announce their things here (and I’d like to see that happen more with more things such as twine games), but I agree with Dannii [edit: and Zarf who posted while I was typing my post] that we don’t need a third database.

I also doubt that adding a new section to the forum would attract use by people not already posting here. Wasn’t the problem that the various authors aren’t making contact with us? The can already add their game to the IFDB, the wiki and post here. They question is: why don’t they? Are the IF sites not known by twine-users, or are they perceived as irrelevant to things without a parser?

Fair enough. I just thought it would be handy to have all the links and resources, etc, on a site that was commonly used as opposed to sites with much less traffic.

Going off on a tangent here, but I wonder which site has the less traffic? (Like David, I visit here more often than the other sites, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that IFDB is more frequented. I have no idea.)

One suggestion might be to link IFDB, IFWiki, etc. on the long-dormant intfiction.org front page.

@twinethreads on Twitter is a good account to follow for new games and Twine news.

The issue (although I don’t see it as a negative per se) is that not everyone who makes things with Twine consider themselves part of the IF community, nebulous as that may be!, or even making IF at all. Many do (even tangentially) but certainly not all–which is not to say that the games that ARE created by these people would not be of interest to the IF community. But that’s the reason many Twine games don’t make it to IFDB; likely many creators don’t know about it, or that’s not the audience being reached.