Writing Interactive Fiction with Twine

Foreword

Some people set out to change the world when they build something new. I didn’t. I built the first versions of what would become Twine with an audience of one in mind: myself. I had experimented with writing traditional interactive fiction (IF), the kind exemplified by games like Zork, that ask the reader to explore a world by typing commands. I wanted to try experimenting with IF in a different way, to create something that ran lighter on puzzle solving and heavier on storytelling.

The best reference point I had was an immensely popular series of books I had devoured when I was in elementary school, Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA). Though many of the stories they told were haphazard and madcap, there was something inescapably intriguing ...