Twine Helpful Hints?

Finally biting the bullet and forcing myself to try my hand at making a game. There are probably a dozen other threads like this one, but I just wanted to stick my neck out and hold myself accountable.

I settled on Twine’s SugarCube story format and was wondering if anyone had some beginner tips and tricks. Any links to videos or resources are well appreciated.

One of my all time favorite games on this forum uses SugarCube, [Abducted Plus +] so I thought this would be a good start. (You should totally go check it out if you haven’t already!!)

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Import games that you have already played and analyze the script. I swtg theres so much more I learned by reading preinits than scouring motoslave.net for random commands ill never need.

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Twine when you start out is pretty straight forward. If you stick to a CYOA style play where every step goes to a new passage then it behaves as expected.

However, if you are trying to follow more complex Twine games there are two “difficulty spikes” you may encounter:

  • Using JavaScript and classes - unless you’ve a ground work in object oriented programming this is going to need a lot more knowledge like picking up OO programming basics, and also how Twine persists data in save games.
  • Any thing that manipulates what is shown without going to a new passage. This exposes the HTML/DOM/TiddlyWiki core of Twine. The passage isn’t re-rendered so any sugarcube conditions you put in are not re-evaluated just because the player’s screen changed (all evaluation is done before the new passage is displayed).

If you’re just starting out, then I’d stay away from these things until you’ve got the basics under your belt - even if the games you like are doing cool stuff using these techniques.

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