Twison

Twison is a story format for Twine 2 that simply exports to JSON.

It is inspired by Entweedle as a model for how Twine 2 story formats work.

Installation

From the Twine 2 story select screen, add a story format, and point it to the url https://lazerwalker.com/twison/format.js.

From within your story, set the story format to Twison. Choosing "Play" will now give you a JSON file.

Output

Here's an example of its output:

{
  "passages": [
    {
      "text": "This is a passage that goes to [[No Where->nowhere]].\n\nor is to [[somewhere]]?\n\nHere's a [[third link]]\n\nClick [[me->someNode]]",
      "links": [
        {
          "name": "No Where",
          "link": "nowhere",
          "pid": "3"
        },
        {
          "name": "somewhere",
          "link": "somewhere",
          "pid": "2"
        },
        {
          "name": "third link",
          "link": "third link",
          "pid": "4"
        },
        {
          "name": "me",
          "link": "someNode",
          "pid": "5"
        }
      ],
      "name": "First passage",
      "pid": "1",
      "position": {
        "x": "553.3333333333334",
        "y": "38.333333333333336"
      },
      "tags": ["tag", "second-tag"]
    },
    {
      "text": "You found me!",
      "props": {
        "foo": "bar"
      },
      "name": "somewhere",
      "pid": "2",
      "position": {
        "x": "893.3333333333334",
        "y": "241.66666666666669"
      }
    }
  ],
  "name": "Test",
  "startnode": "1",
  "creator": "Twine",
  "creator-version": "2.3.5",
  "ifid": "1881C2BE-C764-4D33-ACC6-7BAEBB6D770A"
}

It aims to maintain all fields provided in Twine's internal XML data, while augmenting with other information where possible. For example, it doesn't touch a node's text contents, but it does parse links to provide a dictionary of links and destination nodes.

Interoperating with other systems

The goal of Twison is to make it easy to use Twine as a frontend for forms of storytelling that differ from Twine's default hypertext output. While being able to copy/paste your JSON from Twison's output into some other system is doable, it's easy to imagine how a tighter integration with external systems could make it a lot easier to use Twine as a prototyping tool.

The hope is that this will eventually take the form of some sort of module system that will make it easy for you to create an integration between Twine/Twison and your own engine.

In the meanwhile, if you want to see what a custom integration of Twison might look like with another IF tool, check out Tinsel, a tool that allows you to write telephone-based IF games. Although you can use Tinsel by writing game scripts in its own format, you can also create Tinsel games in Twine, by means of the Tinsel-Twison project.

Capabilities

As mentioned previously, in addition to Twison parsing the basic internal XML data, additional features have been baked in:

Links

Links are available via the standard way of linking in Twine 2. These will be extracted out into a links array on the relevant passage.

Props

Props are available by adding them as so to the passage text: "{{foo}}bar{{/foo}}". Props are parsed from the passage text and added to a props object on the relevant passage. For instance, the previous example would yield the following addition to the passage:

  "props": {
    "foo": "bar"
  },

One can add "nested" props to create more complex objects. For instance, an example like "{{foo}}{{bar}}value{{/bar}}{{bar2}}value2{{/bar2}}{{/foo}}" would yield:

  "props": {
    "foo": {
    	"bar": "value",
    	"bar2: "value2"
    }
  },

Development

If you want to hack on Twison itself:

Clone this repo and run npm install to install dependencies.
Make your changes to the unminified code in the src folder
Run npm run build to compile your source into a format.js file that Twine 2 can understand. It'll be placed in the dist folder. Alternatively, you can run npm run watch to watch the src directory for changes and auto-recompile every time you save.

Testing your changes locally

Running npm start will start the watch.js auto-compile behavior, and also start a local web server that serves the compiled format.js file. By default, this will be available at http://localhost:3000/format.js. Add that URL as a story format to your copy of Twine 2; every time you save a source file and then re-generate the "Play" view of your story in Twine, it should use the latest version of your code.

This is easier to do with the browser-based version of Twine 2 than with the downloadable copy, as you can just refresh your output page and it'll use the latest version of Twison.

All contributions are welcome! If making code changes, please be sure to run the test suite (npm test) before opening a pull request.

License

Twison is licensed under the MIT license. See the LICENSE file for more information.

lazerwalker/twison