The basics of Twine and Ink

  • To start creating narrative games, you only need to know the information on this page and use these free tools.

  • When you create a new Twine project, you’ll already have a passage in which you can write the starting text for your game. See step 2 below on how to automatically create new passages with choices. You can also click +Passage in the Twine UI.

  • In your passage, writing [[“insert choice here”]] with the brackets either side will create a link to a passage of that same name.

    So if I write [[Updog]], there will be a clickable link labelled Updog in my game.

    If I haven’t created any passage or text for this choice yet, then doing the above will automatically create it in Twine - so if I exist my passage, I should see Updog waiting for me.

    So:

    The king died.

    [[The queen was upset]]

    [[The queen was delighted]]

    Would be a viable start to an interactive story. The two options at the bottom would be clickable entries that, if the player selected one, would represent a branch in the story.

  • Actually, it doesn’t. You just have to do 1-2 above. Sure, Twine allows for more complicated behaviours, but the core of a great interactive experience is entirely possible with just this.

  • Once upon a time...

    * The king died. -> kingdied

    * The queen died -> queendied

    =kingdied

    Everyone was happy, yay

    -> END

    =queendied

    Everyone was sad, boo

    -> END

  • In step 1’s example, clickable choices are created by putting an * asterisk at the start of a line along with a -> to point towards the name of the section you want the choice to point to.

    New sections are denoted by lines beginning with = an equals sign.

    When you want the game to end, put -> END at the bottom of the final sections. This will mean those sections will finish the game.

    So, the following symbols are all you need to know:

    * Choices

    -> redirect

    = to sections

    until they

    -> END

  • Again, it doesn’t. You just have to do 1-2 above. As with Twine, Ink allows for far more complicated behaviours, but the core of a great interactive experience is entirely possible with just this.

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