How to make games with gist-txt
Disclaimer: content of this post is not original, most of it is taken from Anna Anthropy’s “How to make games with Twine”
What is gist-txt?
gist-txt is a web app that lets you host interactive stories.
Why is gist-txt so wonderful?
- It’s free
- You don’t need to know how to program
- You don’t need to install any program to use it
- Finished stories can be shared with a simple link
The basics
Every story is a Gist.
The first scene in your story is called index.markdown.
Other scenes can be named whatever you like, but the name of the first scene
has to be index.markdown.
A scene is the equivalent of a page in a Choose Your Own Adventure book, but it can be as long or short as you like. Click on the text area to write in it.
Radical! Now let’s create a link to another scene. The player can go to that scene by clicking on the link, like HTML pages hyperlink. Here’s what a link looks like:
The text inside the square brackets is what the player sees. The text inside the round brackets is the name of the scene she goes to when she clicks on it. Now if you were using Twine you would see an exclamation point in the corner of the scene saying that the scene pointed by the link is missing, but since you’re using gist-txt there’s no such thing!
Add a new file in the gist with the name you gave to the scene linked
(passage.markdown)
and write text of the scene in it.
If you go back to the first scene, add a new link to another scene, now you’ve got a branching story! Now the player has a choice!
Or at least she will when you publish the story. Click “Create public Gist”
and copy the id of the gist.
Now open http://potomak.github.io/gist-txt/#<gist-id> in a new tab to share
the story.
