GRIMDEV

📚 The Twine® Grimoire 💾 

The Twine Grimoire, created by G.C. “Grim” Baccaris (Hi!), is an unofficial guide to using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) to customize projects made in Twine 2. The Grimoire demonstrates how CSS and HTML can be used in a variety of Story Formats to fine-tune a game’s appearance and behavior, allowing users to develop new skills and create visually and mechanically unique interactive fiction.

✨ Features:

Both Vol. 1 & Vol. 2:

Are 100% free to download

Discuss both Harlowe & SugarCube Story Formats

Provide screenshots and examples of code with each tutorial

Contain sets of exercises to try yourself at the end of every tutorial

📖 Volume I

The first volume of the Twine® Grimoire is geared toward common features that many first-time users are interested in working into their projects, including text styling, link styling, and passage backgrounds.

84 pages

8 sections, including 6 detailed tutorials

Free PDF download

Covers topics like using the Story Stylesheet, tag-based styling, how to organize files, and more

📖 Volume II

The second volume of the Twine Grimoire® focuses on more intermediate and advanced ways to customize a project’s stylesheet. These tutorials are suitable for intermediate users who are familiar and confident with topics and skills introduced in Volume 1.

63 pages

6 detailed tutorials

Free PDF download

Covers topics like creating custom buttons and CSS-based animations, using cycling links, customizing SugarCube’s UI bar, and more

📝 Other Helpful Resources

Twinery.org

Twine Wiki

Twine Cookbook

TwineLab

Twine 2 Guide

Twinery Forums (Read-Only)

Twine Q&A

Intfiction.org Twine Category

More resources, including links to Story Format documentation, can be found in both PDFs.

💻 About Twine®

Twine® is an “an open-source tool for telling interactive, non-linear stories” originally created by Chris Kilmas in 2009; it is now maintained by “a whole bunch of people at several different repositories,” per Twinery.org. I am not personally affiliated with its development process.

Twine is a registered trademark of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation (IFTF), which “helps ensure the ongoing maintenance, improvement, and preservation of the tools and services crucial to the creation and distribution of interactive fiction, as well as the development of new projects to foster the continued growth of this art form.”

🔮 Supporting the Grimoire

The Twine® Grimoire project is made possible by the support of my patrons on Patreon, who enable me to take the time to write these tutorials, revise them, and compile them into free PDFs. All patrons pledging $2 or more gain early access to the first draft of each tutorial as I write it, and also have the opportunity to make tutorial requests every month.

In the interest of making this resource as accessible as possible to many users, the Grimoire will NEVER have a minimum donation required to download. However, if you would like to support my work, you can do so by either donating on itch, leaving a rating or comment on itch, or pledging on Patreon.

✏️ Enjoy!

I hope the Grimoire will come in handy for my fellow Twine wizards out there!

🪄 Grimoire Updates

Howdy! A bunch of new Twine Grimoire things have been happening!

📖 Volume III

The third volume of the Twine Grimoire® focuses on more intermediate ways to customize a project, as well as other aspects of game development, like data management and testing. Bonus: Resources for images, audio, software, and more. Free PDF, 57 pages!

📖 If And Only If

"If And Only If" is a presentation discussing the use of conditional logic in game design. This download includes a PDF of the full text transcript, a .ppt (Microsoft PowerPoint) file, and .png files of the 33 individual slides. 

This resource was originally a talk given at Narrascope 2022; it was later included in HandEyeSociety's SuperFESTival 2022, and has since then been used as a guest lecture to teach several cohorts of Writing Interactive students. It's now available to all in a convenient downloadable form.

📖 Twine Templates

In addition to making tutorials, I've been branching out into creating templates for Twine users to import, play with, and build upon! In the near future, this page will house a variety of Grimoire template builds and demos, but for now there's a single incantation.