I’m trying out a number of CYOA systems, including Twine, since there seems to be a bit of a buzz about it at the moment. I’m porting over an old game to test it out, and so far I’ve been impressed with the ease of use, but I’ve started to run into problems. Once I reached around 70 passages I noticed that they were appearing further and further away on the map, in fact the last few I added are actually outside the scrollable area. When I reached 85 the passages themselves disappeared from the screen leaving only the arrows. At this point it became very difficult to do any further work.
I’ve noticed that most Twine games are quite small; am I just pushing the software beyond its intended limits? I can’t find anything much on the Google Group relating to this so I thought I’d ask you guys. I’m using the Windows version.
Nope, you’re not exceeding any limits - my twine game has about 150 passages with no issues at all. What you want to do is drag your passages around into an arrangement that suits you (you can drag and select a bunch at a time), so you know where the various bits of your story are. This is really helpful once you get to grips with it. Also use the clean up passages function to make it look tidy. You’ll still need to scroll around, but I’ve never had a passage appear outside the scrollable limits - when you click the new passage icon it should make one at the top left corner of the visible area, which you can then drag to wherever you need it.
The problem is that I can’t see my passages any more (I can still see where they are because the arrows are still visible) and though I can still drag them around, I can only drag them one screen-length at a time, and some of them have been created hundreds of screen-lengths away. I’ve tried it but it’s too tedious for words. The program has also slowed down to a crawl. I think I might be giving up on this one.
FWIW, Twine can sustain a game of any length, but most of its competitors (including ChoiceScript and Undum, and presumably Quest though I’ve never used its gamebook mode) are easier to work with when your game gets into the realm of hundreds of nodes and tens of thousands of words.
I think that if I use it again I shall work on much smaller projects. I’d like to stick to the better known systems, and Inklewriter has impressed me the most so far, though I would have preferred something open-source. The option to release for Kindle is a big draw.
I am genuinely sorry to derail this tangent, but I had to ask the OP if he’d tried using twee to assemble his twine project, which would probably remedy some of his problems
Wow! An apology for un-derailing a derailed thread? This is forum etiquette gone mad! Hopefully J.J. hasn’t given up following the puns, because the twee option should certainly negate the GUI issue.