Twine: The Future of Web Teasing?

[figroll]

Twine is an open source, interactive story editor.

-- It's very easy to use. Seriously your Mum could use it (which might well work for those with an Incest interest )

-- It's widely used and in on-going development by a wide variety of people so will only get better.

-- Editing is done in a browser (From v2.0) so no installs are required.

-- You can do all your editing offline on your local PC in a standard browser (although you need a modern one) so you can do it all outside of a website with no issues of privacy, content ownership, etc.

-- When you publish it generates plain HTML which the reader can just open in their browser. No flash, no separate app like TeaseMe/GuideMe.

-- Out of the box it has a lot of features Milovana teases typically use (choices, branching, variables, conditional expressions, etc). This picture will give you the basic idea:


-- It supports HTML, CSS so authors with a standard web knowledge can make their teases look very good/different.

-- It supports Javascript so programmers can easily add the features Milovana users would need and make them available to all authors as macros that can be used in the standard editor. For example, there is a basic timer here http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5108

-- It has a concept of Story Formats that add features that can then be used be Authors. So a Milovana story format would be doable support for randomisation, timers, metronomes, etc.

-- It's often used to create full blown games. So the sorts ideas we see in the more ambitious GuideMe projects are very much possible to do here.

-- Since it's just HTML (plus CSS, mp3s, jpgs etc) it would (I am almost certain) be very easy to integrate into Milovana site so there could be voting, TOTM, etc.

For more see these links:

MAIN SITE => http://twinery.org/
VERY READABLE GUIDE => http://www.auntiepixelante.com/twine/ (v1.4)
V2.0 DETAILS => http://chrisklimas.com/twine2-beta/
RANDOM EXMAPLE => http://tarasue.makiyamazaki.com/

Maybe this has already been mentioned? I did do a search but twine gets a lot of hits on this site for tother reasons

Googling will reveal lots more information and lots of examples.

[Ms. Julie]

Very cool idea! Too bad the example doesn't demonstrate some more of the features. Like images, video, audio? I assume it can do that. It would be neat to see an example showing that.

[1885]

Is Twine the future of webteasing?

No. No, I don't think it is.

[Ktulu]

I tried it yesterday. It's a decent app especially if you're looking into creating stories with text and links. I think the best feature was the very user-friendly graphical user interface, and the fact that it exports HTML-files.

Pros:
+ Easy to use, easy to debug the story
+ HTML-tags can be used on each page, optional CSS can be used to change styles
+ Syntax for macros (their name for functions) is quite understandable. Variables and basic control structures related to them available.
+ The app itself takes no installation. The story can be saved for further editing or exported as an HTML-file -> very universal file formats
+ A page can contain elements that appear, disappear or change, all kinds of JavaScript-type interactivity (like reacting to mouse movement) is available.

Cons:
- Custom macros (or functions) seemed to be not available in current version, which leads to...
- Some essential webtease related functions are missing, for example getting a repeating sound is cumbersome:

Code: Select all

(live: 1s)[<audio autoplay> <source src="metr.wav" </audio>]

While I'd really want to use something like this:

Code: Select all

repeat_sound(1.0, 40, "metr.wav")

- Documentation didn't have anything on some features. Maybe further documentation is on the way, since the 2.0.2 is still quite new.
- Getting pictures on the pages where you want them requires some fiddling with CSS. Nothing too difficult though.

As I said before: very easy and fast to use app. Well worth trying.

Can't wait for 1885's superapp though, whatever that will be

[d3vi0n]

@1885
the best author on milovana works on a Tease program himself? damn :) now i'm curious!

@figroll
twine as future of web teasing? Not for now. twine is more of a text adventure editor. Everything with advanced game logic / scripting, file handling or extensive use of media (images, video, gif...) is complicated and fiddly in twine if possible at all. I don't think i could create a tease like Hearts Club in twine, at least not within the same amount of time. I surely would loose any benefit of the twine editor, because the editor has no use for such a tease. I would have to ignore or find ways to work around the editor all the time to implement the scrips and media. So in short: a story based tease without many "game mechanis" besides branching story lines? Something like a webtease on milovana? Twine could be fine. But a flashtease? Maybe with more work. But a advanced GuideMe Script? Not at the moment.... But maybe i'm wrong and just don't understand how twine works.

[figroll]

Cool, thanks for the replies.

Ultimate, it's a browser, HTML5 and Javascript so pretty much anyhting is possible and certainly anything you can do in Flash. And the missing bits we would need (timers, metronomes, etc) can easily be packaged up into easy to use macros.

If I get some time I'll have a play see what I can put together.

[figroll]

Just to add that this thread is in the spirit of can this be useful for teh community, not Hey this is awsome we should do this.

And thanks very much to d3vion for his excellent work on GuideMe and Hearts Club.