I've been interested in Twine 2.0 since it emerged onto the IF scene in 2009. But I only recently (August 2019) revisited it and began to experiment with it in earnest. As I nail down concepts, achieve insights, and come up with snippets of script that work, I'm collecting them here.

Some credit goes to Chapel and the code and examples he's made available on the Twine lab under this license.

I keep a copy of the Windows version 2.3.3 of Twine here. It's an 84.8 Mb download.

If you want a zero-install Twine engine, with some additional story formats and an extractible Web-to-Exe that can turn your Twine stories into stand-alone applications, get this. It's an 85.8 Mb download. You can put it wherever you want on your hard drive (excepting the Program Files directory) and pin a shortcut to the Twine executable to your Start Menu or Desktop.

If you experiment with Twine and decide you want to spend some extended time using it, you may want to peruse Chapel's custom macros. You can put together a custom download of the macros you like here.

I've discovered the blog of Mr. Riley, a web programmer. He has lots of great Twine code examples.

Mr. Riley is a teacher. He has a good starting point example of a combat system for a Twine game called Twine Fray.

I plan to scour his blog for learning purposes.

Lately, I've been reading some articles put out by prominent researchers in the SETI at Home project: Here is an explanation of the Drake Equation. And here is an article of what we might expect from E.T.

For a while now, I've had my desktop PC (which I don't use on a daily basis but do leave running) executing BOINC and assisting the SETI @ Home program to process telescopic data.

BOINC downloads scientific computing jobs to your computer and runs them invisibly in the background. It's easy and safe.

About 30 science projects use BOINC; examples include Einstein@Home, IBM World Community Grid, and SETI@home. These projects investigate diseases, study global warming, discover pulsars, and do many other types of scientific research.

I'd estimate I'm probably halfway through the development of Glaive Seeker, a play-in-your-browser game I'm authoring with Squiffy for the player in my Earth Apotheosis game on r.rpol.net.

I've not been impressed with the robustness with which Squiffy handles variables. Twine seems more robust in that regard. In fairness, though, I just wrote a very brief example source file, and variable incrementing worked as expected. So perhaps I have syntax errors in the game I'm writing. I'm not experienced using Squiffy, after all.

I'm thinking that Twine is a more mature tool, certainly in terms of its age. However, in doing some reading about the new v3.01 Harlowe story format, it seems far more complicated than what I want to fool with or need. At the time of this writing, I'm thinking future games or tutorials might best be fit by the SugarCube2 format for Twine.

Incidentally, the nodes screenshot above was taken from a layout created using Twine. That's right, I'm using Twine to help visualize the flow of my Squiffy story.

I shared the above screenshot with my player on 9/16/2019 (note that this assertion conflicts with the date shown above this post's title; that's because Flatpress uses UTC time) in msg 120 of a private message thread and will be interested in the player's reaction.