Word Up! Twine 2 Released

Psst, hey, here's a fun idea for the holidays: make a thing. Not a vow to e.g. stop drunktexting - everyone finds that charming, I'm sure. Nor do I mean assembling a weird toy a young nephew received. Make a thing wot people can play and go "Coo I thought you were a worthless lump, but look at you now, some kind of literary giant with these fine words and lawks a lummy look at the clever design you've got going on." Or keep it a secret all for yourself. Just make a thing.

After a fair while in beta, Twine's update/remake/"sequel" Twine 2 has launched. You could use that. It's a fairly big overhaul of the write-o-game-maker tool.

Twine 2 is now browser-based, for starters, yet seems to run faster and feel easier than the old standalone for me. It's also introduced a new form of text marking, going away from the scrappy one based on TiddlyWiki. Don't listen to folks who say that Twine doesn't require coding, but it all seems pretty simple. You can read more about the new TwineMarkup this-a-way.

Twine games are sometimes unfairly dismissed as a genre, but the medium allows, well, anything you can make with words. Perhaps have a browse over Twine games we've posted for inspiration. Or perhaps don't - go in fresh as a daisy, finding a blank page and writing whatever comes to mind.

Here's a vid introducing Twine 2 a bit: