Twine vs. Portal-Hosted Interactives

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Twine vs. Portal-Hosted Interactives

Postby CuddleSlut » Mon Dec 07, 2020 12:50 pm

Disclaimer: This thread is in no way meant to disparage the time and effort of people using the site's interactive story function, the quality stories and passages hosted here or the work of the programmers who have established the site's interactive story function and provided this platform for creators.

So, after building and releasing my first Twine game (see my signature), I've been reflecting on the differences between building a story with Twine and writing an interactive story here on site, and I'm rapidly reaching the conclusion that usin Twine is flat-out better. Skimming over Twine's pros real quick:

-Far greater freedom of color and formatting for text and background
-Allows use of variables
-Allows integration of multimedia elements
-Completed Twine games can be downloaded and played offline

Twine is free and isn't much harder to use than the Interactive Story-Builder here, and Eka IS system doesn't seem to have much advantage. Yes, Twine takes a tiny bit of fiddling MegaUpload or Mediafire or whatever to make the game available to other people, but in my experience such an upload takes less than two minutes. Open contribution to your IS from other Eka's members sounds nice in theory, but in practice, very few members seem very interested in adding full routes to other stories, and often, when contributions are added, they lead to jarring shifts in style, quality and apparent effort (not all of them, but a lot of them). Not to mention that if the site is having problems, or if a would-be player is having trouble with their internet connection, your story is inaccessible until the issue is fixed.

I've made two interactive stories on-site so far and one Twine game, and am pretty thoroughly convinced to just Twine from here on out. I've ever considered taking prior interactives stories and remaking them in Twine. If you're an Interactive Story maker, are you considering abandoning the site's IS interface and using Twine? If you are still using Eka's Interactive Story system, what features does it have that you prefer to using Twine?
Play the latest release of Hell's Perversions, my demon, vore and transformation Twine game, here.
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Re: Twine vs. Portal-Hosted Interactives

Postby dreamweevil » Tue Dec 08, 2020 7:25 am

I've railed against the Portal's interactive story software before. It's miserable. It's not that Eka's is particularly worse than the typical IS system: it's just that they're mostly all bad.

What's the worst problem? You can only add onto the existing story. You can't improve upon existing chapters (in most systems, even if you wrote them yourself). If anyone can extend a story and there's no practical way to "fix" or improve upon existing text, anyone can then ruin a story, which is how most of them end up. And since everything lasts forever, you end up with hundreds or thousands of barely-started, "garbage" stories that make finding the few interesting ones a needle-in-a-haystack exercise. The same is true for interesting sections of a larger interactive: they get buried among pointless choices and pages.

The other problem with interactive fiction of the Eka's variety is the fan-out. So many authors set off to build a mansion with one pick-up truck full of lumber from Home Depot! The combinatorics work against you terribly, which is why so many ambitious writers set out to build that beautiful mansion end up with an unfinished shack (I'll put that roof on any day now).

Having variables and logic within the story makes all the difference. Yes, you can have a lot of passages but you don't have to write a new passage for every single choice you give the player. The story itself can be "smart"; the characters can react based on past events; returning to the same passage doesn't mean simply repeating the same experience. I'm playing with such a thing right now and really have to give Twine 2.0 a big thumbs-up for usability and completeness. Perhaps, since it's open source, someone will eventually combine that system with something like the Portal - to enable shared authoring and online integration?
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Re: Twine vs. Portal-Hosted Interactives

Postby MerrySue1982 » Tue Dec 08, 2020 10:33 am

Agree! The eka's software is just messy. You can't find stories. There is no way to see if a story allows page adding. (allowing page editing is also way too complicated) Even deleting your old projects is kind of complicated.
And I admit I'm at fault too, as I often lose interest in my projects if nobody can really suggest anything to it. If you plan to write your story alone anyway, Twine is definitely the better choice.
If you want to build a full text adventure I would suggest trying Quest out.

One interactive story site that looks promising is "infinity stories". The story owner/owners. Can search for death ends etc. other users can suggest chapters, but they are not added right away. Instead, the story owners can first edit the suggestion or decline them fully if they don't fit.
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Re: Twine vs. Portal-Hosted Interactives

Postby Trebortron3 » Tue Dec 08, 2020 5:25 pm

Hah, this is an amazing coincidence. After spending years without ever thinking of Twine, I decided to finally give it a whirl for a vore interactive and have been cobbling something together for the past couple of days. I started it literally a few hours before you posted this thread!

As such, I've not had much experience with Twine yet, but what I have done so far I've really enjoyed. As soon as you learn how to do basic variables and conditions, you can really quickly do some lovely stuff! I'm playing around with optional kinks, so for example if you select an option to look at another character's feet, it ticks a hidden 'foot kink' variable, and from then on characters might have more direct foot fetish options or descriptions might focus more on their feet. But if a player isn't interested in that option, that particular fetish content stays hidden, and they aren't even aware of it. I'm hoping it works to be more immersive and offer a more personalised game.
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Re: Twine vs. Portal-Hosted Interactives

Postby corecat » Tue Dec 15, 2020 4:54 pm

I feel like I’m kind of in the minority here, but with the way I use interactive stories, I really prefer Eka’s!

Not because of some feature it has, but more because of what it doesn’t! I like writing IS chapters super casually, without very much forethought. It’s pretty hard to get lost in the game design side of an Eka’s interactive, because... There really isn’t any.

I also like the way overviews look on Eka’s, since it’s pretty fast to see where there are chapters to be added. And I like being able to wander off and add to a different story when I want a change of pace.

For non-vore stuff, I actually prefer Ren’py, since I usually like drawing more than writing, and it’s a bit better for very visual-heavy stuff than Twine is.

Twine is pretty great, but I just haven’t found myself using it in a long time! But maybe if I end up finishing my interactive one day, I’ll port it into Twine just to make it easier to share.
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