Is there a market for Twine games?

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rikiya
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Is there a market for Twine games?

#1 Post by rikiya »

I've dabbled in Twine a bit for a class of mine, but I'm curious as to whether or not there's a large market for Twine-based games? I've seen a few on itch.io but beyond that not many. A search of Youtube turned up a few gameplay videos. I'm interested in knowing if there's a market (demand) for games made with Twine and also if it's profitable from a game maker's standpoint.

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Re: Is there a market for Twine games?

#2 Post by felix »

You've seen a few? Look more closely. :) Twine is wildly popular among game developers. As for whether it's viable to sell games made with Twine... you could ask the same question about Inform 7. Some people do it. No idea how successful they are. But there's a market, which is more than can be said about the period between, say, 1995 and 2015. And it's not like any other authoring system would guarantee that your game is salable, let alone profitable. All you can do is try.

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Re: Is there a market for Twine games?

#3 Post by Zelan »

Twine is a great engine to use for interactive fiction, and there's definitely a market for that. The company Choice of Games has a huge library of interactive fiction games, many of which are even available on Steam. So yeah - the "stereotypical gamer" may not be interested in a Twine game, but there are lots of fans of VNs and IF that make up a decent market for them.

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Re: Is there a market for Twine games?

#4 Post by rikiya »

Thanks for the responses guys. I'm slightly interested in Twine and I wanted to know if there was a niche market for it or not compared to say visual novels, 2D/3D, platform, virtual reality, etc. I will look into it more as I only have basic knowledge of it and I'm curious as to how far Twine can be pushed as far as interactivity goes. I'll definitely check out Choice of Games and search around more on itch.io.

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Re: Is there a market for Twine games?

#5 Post by felix »

What Twine can do depends on the story format. There are many, though only a few ship bundled with the IDE. So far I used a couple of them successfully:
  • Sugarcube 2 is by far the most powerful. It has modal dialogs, save slots and a sidebar with room for stats or a custom menu, among other things. It also has some serious scripting chops.
  • Chapbook is much lighter, easier to learn and use. It has a minimal paper-like UI and simplifies things like setting stats or rolling dice.
Both support headers / footers and forms, e.g. for character creation. Also both are highly customizable. Another common feature you might find interesting is text that changes or expands when you click on it.

Multimedia support goes without saying.

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Re: Is there a market for Twine games?

#6 Post by trooper6 »

Just for the record, Choice of Games doesn't use Twine, it uses its own engine.
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Re: Is there a market for Twine games?

#7 Post by tinysamm »

This is an older thread, but I thought it'd be worthwhile to include my 2 cents here as well. While Twine doesn't have the same set of robust features that other visual novel tools and engines may provide, it makes up for it in two major ways: it's lightweight nature and benefits of limitation. While there is plenty in the way of unique or specialized features you can accomplish in Twine with enough work (and knowledge of JS + CSS), I've found the fact that you can only do so much with it in a given time frame to be a blessing for production.
-tinysamm

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