Recently on social media I saw some mention of Twine, an engine for creating “interactive fiction” games. I've seen it talked about before, but mostly gave it a pass. I've played some interactive fiction games before, but haven't really been part of that scene recently. For whatever reason, seeing it mentioned this time gave me the idea that one of my RPG design ideas might actually work better as interactive fiction than as an RPG (it's a game about journalism and what is or isn't real, originally envisioned as a one-player/multiple-GMs RPG). However, in order to do that game the way I think it needs to be done I'd want it to be structured in a much more fluid way than the normal “decision-tree” style that most IF does. I think that's possible, but trying to do something that's highly nonstandard seemed like it would be a bad choice for my first IF project, I think it makes more sense to learn the ropes before breaking the rules.

Needed a more straightforward idea

In casting about for ideas for a more conventional IF project it took me an inexplicably long time to come up with a back-to-basics solution from the RPG world: do a dungeon crawl. The Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks were a big part of my youth, and they're essentially a choose-your-own-adventure format which should map just fine to the standard Twine approach (and the kind of game mechanics you need for an FF-style combat encounter should be easy to put into Twine, if necessary). My first thought for creating a dungeon-y IF game was to try to take one of Dyson Logos's free maps and use that as the basis, but none of them jumped out at me. As I was looking, though, I remembered that I had prepped some material for an old Dungeon World campaign that only got partially used. So now my plan is to build from that. That expands the scope a bit from a dungeon crawl to a broader adventure, but the premise of “build from a traditional D&D-style adventure” is still the same.

Getting Started

Last night I started familiarizing myself with the Twine tools by creating a “prologue” section of the game which introduces the overall hook of the campaign. You can check that out in playable form here if you'd like. Here's what it looks like in the Twine UI (with the details blurry enough to avoid excessive spoilers):

A bit like a standard CRPG, the game will have a few location-based hubs that will put the story through some chokepoints. My next step will be to develop a real beginning to the story with much more meaningful choices, where you'll gather some supplies before heading off to explore a dungeon. I think I'll also be able start implementing some simple RPG-style game mechanics into the game. Since I'm extracting a lot of the source material from my old Dungeon World notes I'm leaning toward using DW mechanics as my guide to how to structure “action” scenes and combats, at least as an initial stake in the ground before I have any experience trying to code stuff in a way that works with Twine.

My ultimate goal is to end with a fun, playable fantasy adventure interactive fiction, and to leave with enough experience with the tools that I can decide whether my more experimental game about journalism in a fractured reality will be workable in this format.