What is Twine?

Twine is a free downloadable software that can be used to create interactive fiction or text-based games. Interactive fiction is a type of fiction that requires input from the person consuming the media. For example, visual novels are considered a type of interactive fiction because you click on things to progress the story and you often make choices about what happens in the story.

The mechanics of a Twine game, at their very most basic, simply comprise of clicking on links to get to new pages. You can include variables and more complex mechanics, but this is beyond the scope of this website.

Twine requires very little knowledge of coding to be able to use it. The main thing you would do for making a personal database in Twine is creating pages and typing [[double brackets]] around them to turn them into links.

Twine has multiple languages, but they're all fairly similar to each other, and none are really better or worse for making a personal database. However, we create all our databases in Sugarcube 2, because we prefer the sidebar that it has. Harlowe is set up in a way that makes some forms of text customization easier, but if you know HTML, it should be easy to achieve those affects in any Twine language.

You can also use CSS to customize how a Twine game looks. You can change the background or font color that way. This is done using the "stylesheet" option available from the toolbar. Emojis and unicode both display in Twine and can be used for page decorations.

The Twine website has documentation that shows you how to create things in the software. There is also a Neocities site that provides a Twine tutorial. Because these are easily accessible, this website will not spend much time discussing how exactly to build things in Twine.

When you build a Twine game, you can test play a version of it that launches in your web browser. You can also export it as an HTML file. This is how you access the database itself after you create it. You cannot edit a Twine program from the window in which you are playing it, but you can edit it in the workspace as you play it in the browser.

You can also send the HTML file of your database to others - e.g. friends, therapists, etc. - or even host it on your Neocities, if you want to make it public. You do this by exporting the Twine game as an HTML file (it's automatically an HTML file when it exports), uploading it as a file on your Neocities, and including a link somewhere on the site to that HTML file.