Click the image below to experience my Valentine’s Day Twine Story!
Please note that mobile phones may disable the auto play option. If you are asked for a login, please watch on your laptop!
Reflection
Twine is a free, open-source software tool that allows you to create interactive, nonlinear, text-based stories. With Valentine’s Day approaching, I chose to explore Twine through a choose-your-own adventure story about a Valentine’s Day date. This was a highly iterative process. Unlike the potato printing project from last week, which had to be carefully planned out in advance and executed correctly the first time, using Twine was a constantly evolving process. The story line that I originally started with, changed over time as the project developed.
I began by creating my Twine account, which was fairly straightforward. I found the platform easy to use and appreciated the flexibility it offered, allowing me to drag items around to reorganize the slides.
I initially struggled with adding interactive elements like sound and transitions, but with the help of ChatGPT (Open AI, 2026), I was able to learn how to code the text to achieve the effects I wanted.
A drawback to Twine is that you are unable to upload files directly to it. The program does not save anything to the cloud, and the entire project lives in your browser cache (Five College, 2016). This caused me a great level of anxiety! What if I accidentally closed my screen? All my work would be deleted! It took many hours to complete my story and the entire time, I was worried it would all disappear and I would have to start over.
As all files must be live on the web for Twine to use, I found the easiest way to add audio files was simple to use YouTube videos and hide the video so that only the sound would play. As an example, this is the code I used for the restaurant background audio:
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<iframe width=”0″ height=”0″
src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/zRrkB2DeqBQ?start=168&autoplay=1&loop=1&playlist=zRrkB2DeqBQ”
title=”YouTube audio player” frameborder=”0″
allow=”autoplay; encrypted-media” allowfullscreen></iframe>
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You can see that the width and height are both set to “0,” so that nothing is visible on the page, and the allow=”autoplay; encrypted-media” lets the browser play the audio automatically, even though the video is invisible. ChatGPT was extremely helpful when trying to get the correct coding for these types of elements.
Once my Twine story was complete and I was able to save it as an html file, I needed to figure out how to host it on a site so that it could be shared. I found this part frustrating. I initially tried to host in on a Google Site as I am quite familiar with the platform. I could embed the code and get the story to play, but not with sound as, Google Sites does support automatic play options. I then attempted to create a GitHub account to host the file there, but ultimately ended up using itch.io to host the file. In the end, while this part was frustrating, I’m glad for the experience, as I now understand how these online tools work.
References
Five College Digital Humanities. (2016, June 30). How to use Twine to make your own text adventure games! [Video]. YouTube
GitHub. (n.d.). GitHub [Computer software]. https://github.com/
OpenAI. (2026). ChatGPT (GPT-5.2) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/
Twine. (n.d.). Twine [Computer software]. https://twinery.org
Hi Megan,
Your Twine is super cute! I like how you kept the story simple and relevant, and the media you added really make it more immersive. (My first first date failed in the end; my second one ended up more successful 🙂
Your experience with Twine was almost identical to mine!I had the same anxieties about accidentally deleting my work, so I ended up downloading it over a dozen times. Considering the cloud-based nature of online programs these days, I found it surprising that Twine hasn’t updated to be more user-friendly to those of us who are on the less-technical side.
I also used AI to help me with the coding aspects; what would have been far above my head otherwise became a matter of simply refining ChatGPT’s outputs. I also wanted to use audio, and I’m impressed with your outside-the-box approach. Will remember this for my next Twining!
Our experiences were also similar in the final hosting aspect. I also went to Github and it worked perfectly, though not without some head-scratching and frustration first, and like you, I’m glad I was able to learn some new tools through this assignment.