Greetings from Oxford, England! We stayed in a nearby houseboat while in Leiden for a wedding. I enjoyed the chance for a walk through these lovely grounds. TFTC!
I’ve been a huge fan of the “hacker game” ever since I first played 1985’s Hacker on my Amstrad CPC: I’m pretty hardened to the genre, and I can confidently say that not since Uplink
has anything broken through my firewall like Hacknet did. If you’re looking for an easy-to-pick up and compelling puzzle game in a cyberpunk theme, it’s a clear winner: I got 6 hours of
thoroughly enjoyable playtime out of it, and I’m sure I’ll go back and get the same again when I find the chance to go and explore deeper.
There’s a wonderful tool for making web-based “choose your own adventure”-type games, called Twine. One of the best things about it is that it’s so
accessible: if you wanted to, you could be underway writing your first ever story with it in about 5 minutes from now, without installing anything at all, and when it was done you could
publish it on the web and it would just work.
But the problem with Twine is that, in its latest and best versions, you’re trapped into using the Twine IDE. The Twine IDE
is an easy-to-use, highly visual, ‘drag-and-drop’ interface for making interactive stories. Which is probably great if you’re into IDEs or if you don’t “know better”… but for those of us who prefer to do our writing in a nice clean, empty text editor like Sublime or TextMate or to script/automate our builds, it’s just frustrating to lose access to the tools we love.
Plus, highly-visual IDEs make it notoriously hard to collaborate with other authors on the same work without simply passing
it back and forwards between you: unless they’ve been built with this goal in mind, you generally can’t have two people working in the same file at the same time.
Earlier versions of Twine had a command-line tool called Twee that perfectly filled this gap. But the shiny new versions don’t. That’s where I came in.
In that way that people who know me are probably used to by now, I was very-slightly unsatisfied with one aspect of an otherwise fantastic product and decided that the
correct course of action was to reimplement it myself. So that’s how, a few weeks ago, I came to release Twee2.
If you’re interested in writing your own “Choose Your Own Adventure”-type interactive fiction, whether for the world or
just for friends, but you find user-friendly IDEs like Twine limiting (or you just prefer a good old-fashioned text editor), then give Twee2 a go. I’ve written a simple 2-minute tutorial to get you
started, it works on Windows, MacOS, Linux, and just-about everything else, and it’s completely open-source if you’d like to expand or
change it yourself.
(there are further discussions about the concept and my tool on Reddit here, here, here and here, and on the Twinery forums here, here and here)