Using Twine to Make Narrative Games

Twine has been in the back of my mind for years… but it’s only these last few years where I’ve really been using it to make games, and maybe not in the traditional way people have been making games with the tool. Twine allows writers to write branching stories in a visual way. It’s also free and open-source.

I had started using another writing tool called Yarnspinner in our games at Bodeville, but I was having a hard time understanding the branches while I was writing in a more traditional IDE. Yarnspinner uses nodes, but you have to edit in a document instead of nodes. This problem has popped up a few times throughout my career especially on Peridot at Niantic, where we needed branching for a trait and a quest system. Both branched off to different types of content when they were attained or completed. We just never got around to fixing that problem while I was there.

Fast forward a couple of years, and we were using Yarnspinner for Chief Emoji Officer. I was struggling to jump back and forth in a document to see where the dialogue led. So I suggested we take a look at integrating Twine to make the process for writing chapters more visual. That way, we’d be able to clearly see branches, where specific choices happened, and where we unlocked new content like channels, emojis, and achievements. Once we did it got much easier to write quickly and analyze what we were missing in each chapter.

We’ve got a blog up on our game studio’s website for integrating Twine and Yarnspinner, but today I’ve got an even simpler Twine to Unity plugin for you, which cuts one whole tool out of the equation.

Hope it’s helpful. Feel free to reach out if you need any help with it.

Simple Twine Dialogue Importer for Unity

Easily add branching dialogue to your projects using Twee files made with Twine.