Writing Interactive Fiction With Twine

Interactive fiction is coming of age, and the open source Twine program is today's most exciting tool for creating it. InWriting Interactive Fiction with Twine, Melissa Ford teaches all you'll need to create great interactive fiction with this breakthrough tool.

Ford shows how to imagine and implement each element of the great interactive story, from strong settings to interesting characters, foreshadowing to symbolism and backstory. Building on this storytelling frame, she introduces Twine's powerful tools for tracking variables, creating conditional statements, setting up randomized text, and more. She accompanies key tasks and concepts with writing prompts and practice exercises, so you get plenty of hands-on practice without ever having to face a blank screen, struggling for story ideas.

One step at a time, Ford shows you how to build compelling, well-structured Choose Your Own Adventure stories and role playing games. She covers both Twine 2.0 formats, Harlowe and Sugarcube, showing when to use each, and illuminating their relative strengths and weaknesses. By the time you finish this book, you'll know how to build a text-based world, bring characters to life, drop players into puzzles of your own creation, and much more. Plus, there's a bonus: as you become comfortable creating interactive stories and games, you'll also master programming skills you can use to write any type of software you want.

Melissa Ford is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction. She has been a huge interactive fiction fan since 1982, when her dad gave her a copy of Zorkto help her become a better speller. She is the blogging and social media editor at BlogHer, a contributor at GeekDad, and the Twine mentor at her local computer club. She is also the author of the award-winning blog Stirrup Queens. She earned her MFA from University of Massachusetts—Amherst.