Task
The goal of this task was to create a game using Twine.
Background Info: What is Twine?
Twine is a free, open-source tool for creating interactive, nonlinear stories using hypertext links. It allows users to build “choose your own adventure” style games through text and hyperlinked navigation. No coding experience is required to create simple stories, though knowledge of CSS, logic, and JavaScript can enhance your projects. Twine automatically generates an HTML file that you can upload to your own web space (Twine, 2025).
Task Introduction
This task was so much fun to do! We were first introduced to The Temple of No, an interactive and humorous fiction game created in Twine by Crows Crows Crows. It gave us a basic idea of what Twine can do. After completing a quick tutorial called How to Use Twine to Make Your Own Text Adventure Games, I jumped right in.
The Creation Process
For this assignment, I thought it would be interesting to see if Twine could serve as a useful study tool for the ETEC 540 course. I used our Week 5 notes as a test example to explore how study materials might work in Twine and decided to add a humorous twist to make it more engaging.
My project is called, “Choose your own ETEC 540 Week 5 Adventure” using our course notes.
Here are the steps I took:
1. I started vibe-coding with ChatGPT to get the ideas flowing.
- I entered the following prompt: “Can you make a quick, funny, choose your own adventure text game with hyperlinks? I’d like to make a game in Twine with the following text:”
- I copied and pasted our course notes from Week 5
- ChatGPT returned code
2. I started a new Twine file.
- I imported the Twine code into a new file.
- There were a few errors with the ChatGPT code. It was missing some notes and didn’t quite work the way I wanted it to work, so I fixed it up.
- I created the missing nodes.
- I edited the text for clarity and to remove all the placeholders.
- With a few tweaks, I was able to get it working the way I wanted.
3. I customized my game with some CSS programming.
- I did a few cosmetic changes with the colours of the background, text, active hyperlinks, visited hyperlinks, font styles, and font sizes.
4. I increased usability by:
- Adding extra navigation links back to the main page.
- Customizing links (internal links were blue, external links were pink).
- Added spacing.
Here is what my Twine workspace looks like:
Here is what the html code looks like in browser:
I have a background in computer programming, so I found the code easy to debug. However, it didn’t take long for me to realize how quickly usability can go out the window. The limitations of hyperlinks became apparent during the creation process. Once you’re about three levels deep into the links, it’s easy to get lost. Without a menu system, the experience eventually feels linear, even though it begins as non-linear navigation.
Creating my choose your own adventure game opened up limitless possibilities for all kinds of games or topics or storytelling. During this process, however, I kept thinking of Bolter’s (2001) arguments on how the hyperlinks are giving the user “the illusion of control” and that these predetermined hyperlinks “deny the reader the choice of making her own associations” and that maybe the printed text does give us students more freedom to interact with the course notes after all.
This task with Twine deepened my understanding of hypertext theory in practice, and highlighted the tension between interactivity and authorship. Even having digital “choice” is not really a choice.
Download and Play
> Download & Play "Choose your own ETEC540 Week 5 Adventure" html file (.zip) >> Download "Choose your own ETEC540 Week 5 Adventure" twee file (.zip)
AI Disclaimer: ChatGPT was used to generate the initial code for the Twine game. I imported it into twine and made edits to the generated code as well as my own css coding. ChatGPT was also used to edit my writing for grammar and clarity. All final edits are my own.
References
Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Five College
Digital Humanities. (2016, June 30). How to use Twine to make your own text adventure games! [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M41FFlLqu_M
OpenAI. (2025). ChatGPT [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/
The Temple of No. [Twine]. (n.d). Crows Crows Crows. https://crowscrowscrows.itch.io/the-temple-of-no
Twine. (2025). Twine / An open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories. https://twinery.org/