Playing with Twine

Another project I want to do for MYFest is to share my (amateur) knowledge of Twine, the hypertext storytelling system, and also to extend my own knowledge of Twine at the same time.

Here are some of the Twine projects I've done in the past for my mythology and folklore classes (I did class projects just like my students did, and for some of those projects I chose Twine as my digital storytelling tool). You can find them online... they are all game-inspired, so maybe you will want to pick one and play it!

• The Mouse-Bride. This is the first truly complex Twine story I ever made, based on a very ancient Indian folktale about a mouse looking for a husband. The game is based on simple branching: you make choices and then you see what happens.
• Nursery Rhyme Maze. This is another simple branching Twine. Your goal is to get out of the garden, choosing a direction prompted by each nursery rhyme you encounter.
• Aesop Survivor. This is a Twine game that features 100-word Aesop's fables for the texts. This game uses variables to keep track of your wins and losses as you choose which animal character you want to be in each story.
• The Anansi Game. This is also a game-style Twine where you are collecting trophies as you try to win the game, and Twine keeps tracks of your progress. The texts in this game are 100-word stories about Anansi from my Anansi story collection (free book online!). 
• Cryptid Encounters. This is the most complex game-style Twine I've written so far: you are trying to escape alive from a cryptid-infested forest, and Twine keeps track of the objects you have chosen for protection, along with the outcome of each cryptid encounter.

So, I'll be writing a series of blog posts here with some Twine tips and ideas, and as I learn new things, I'll share those too.