Twine

Twine is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories. Twine publishes directly to HTML, so you can post your work nearly anywhere. Anything you create with it is completely free to use any way you like, including for commercial purposes.

You don't need to write any code to create a simple story with the app, but you can extend your stories with variables, conditional logic, images, CSS, and JavaScript when you're ready.

It was originally created by Chris Klimas in 2009 and is now maintained by a whole bunch of people at several different repositories.

What Can You Build With Twine?

At its heart, Twine for PC is a tool for creating hypertext. The difference between hypertext and a linear story, the kind found in books and magazines, is that it allows the reader to have some measure of agency. In other words, the reader has some ability over what he or she reads next.

In a story about a haunted house, for example, the reader might be able to tell the protagonist to Turn around and run or Venture deeper into the mausoleum. In a nonfiction piece, the reader might ask to learn more about my aunt who went missing. The convention that has emerged over the past three decades is that readers navigate hypertexts by clicking links. In this sense, you're already a seasoned hypertext reader. You clicked several links to reach this text, after all, and you've probably clicked an uncountable number of links in your life so far.

Can you build games with Twine for Desktop? Of course! Twine has the capability to do conditional logic, so if the protagonist finds a key in an early part of the story, he or she can use it to open a door later on. It can also incorporate variables, which encompass the traditional trappings of games such as hit points and scores. These, along with the agency, are foundational concepts of interactivity, the currency of game design.