Last updated: 11 Jul 19 09:41:17 (UTC)
A Catalog of Twine Story Formats – m. c. de marco
A Catalog of Twine Story Formats
I’ve written and heard of quite a few indie story formats for Twine, but not of a comprehensive listing of them (there’s a need-to-know summary in the Twine wiki). So I decided to make one myself. If you’re not entirely sure what Twine story formats are, I give a brief introduction to Twine versions and story formats here. These lists are generated live in your browser from JSON source, also available on GitHub. (If you can’t see the lists, try a newer browser.)
Twine 1-only formats are grayed out in the list, while the official formats are greened in. Formats are tagged if they are in beta or unavailable, well-documented, also available for Twine 1, and/or support markdown or stretchtext (where new passages are added to the existing text rather than replacing it). Utility formats (which are not intended to produce a playable story) are listed separately after the regular story formats. The icons link to the story format; if there is no icon, then the story format is not hosted online and you may need to download it or build it yourself in order to use it.
- (L)Adventures* by Longwelwind*docs
“allows writers to add RPG elements such as health, items, golds and more to their story”
a new format “designed to be easy to work with as an author and generate output that is a pleasure to read by players”
- Dramaturge* by Emma G. Kowalski*demostretchtextunavailable
an unreleased format including dialog boxes, with plans for stretchtext
- Foil* by Kevin Groat*
similar to Snowman, and undocumented at the moment
- Gately* by Furkle Industries*unavailable
a rumored story format
the default Twine 2 story format, pretty and opinionated
a built-in Twine 1 stretchtext story format
a horizontal variant of the Twine 1 stretchtext story format Jonah
a rumored story format
- OldFashioned* by Blair MacIntyre*
an experimental “authoring tool for 3D Augmented, Mixed and (eventually) Virtual Reality stories”
a Jonah-style stretchtext story format for Twine 1 and 2
- (L)Protagonist* by Massive Danger*docsmarkdown
“A Twine story format with power!”
a built-in Twine 1 story format based on Sugarcane that was supposed to be more responsive (in the mobile-first sense)
- (L)Screentastic* by Sean Simon*
A Twine 2 Story Format for creating Interactive Screenplays.
- Sisal* by Henry Soule*unavailable
a rumored story format
“creating a merger of Snowman and Harlowe”
a bare-bones built-in Twine 2 story format for those fluent in JavaScript, upon which many indie formats have been based
a built-in Twine 1 story format that was very popular in its day
the most flexible and powerful story format
a chat story format
- Twize* by Derek Timm-Brock*stretchtext
“an opinionated Twine StoryFormat designed for building and displaying interactive comics”
- Wasteland* by Jessica Paoli*
“a semantic Twine [1] Story Format focused on readability”
Proofing and other utility formats
Twine 1 had no notion of a proofing format; these are all Twine 2 formats, though some do support Twine 1 as well. Several of them are intended to export to Twee, a task that can also be accomplished with Twee2 or Tweego, but the proofing formats that do this only require interacting with the Twine GUI, not installing a command-line conversion program. (Twine 1 featured built-in twee import/export.)
displays a graph of your story, with several options for color-coding, clustering, and labeling nodes; it also detects unreachable nodes and terminal leaves
a DotGraph-like format that converts your story into a Scapple mind-map graph and includes a subset of DotGraph’s rendering options
exports a Twine 2 story into a MultiMarkdown format used for importing into Scrivener or Scree
exports a Twine 2 story into the twee plain text format and automatically downloads it as text
the original twee-ifying story format for Twine 2
an “experiment in producing a proofing format for Twine 2 that offers more functionality than a simple text dump”
the built-in proofing format for Twine 2
A proofing format.
converts a Twine 1 or 2 story into a MultiMarkdown format used for generating eBooks
- TwineJson* by Cauli Tomaz*
exports a story to JSON, possibly in hierarchical format
- TwingeX* by Ben (that guy) Winding*
a JSON exporter that also has a headless (command-line) option
another JSON exporter whose goal “is to make it easy to use Twine as a frontend for forms of storytelling that differ from Twine’s default hypertext output”