Testing Twine’s Strength

I’ve been writing a lot of twine these past few days. I mean, I’ve thrown most of it out, but at its core, Twine is a game engine where ‘I can do a lot of words’ results in a lot of stuff to throw out. It’s fast and easily expanded, and when you write as much as I do, it’s easy to run away recklessly.

The sad thing for me was realising that making basic inventory behaviour, such as you’d find in a game like Zork, Twine is awful at it! If you want to be able to just pick up an item and move it to every other possible location on the map and put it back down again, every single location needs to have this item and for it to hide itself whenever it’s not ‘there’. Every single item needs this.

I do quite like Twine still! It’s best for narratives with highly limited protagonists. It’s where you have someone who will probably only make one of two or three decision, someone who has a very predefined perspective. It’s also best for a story without a map – Twine can do spaces, but it’s much better at doing moments.