A Catalog of Twine Story Formats

I’ve written and heard of quite a few indie story formats for Twine, but not of a comprehensive listing of them (though there’s a need-to-know summary in the Twine wiki). So I decided to make one myself. If you’re not entirely sure what Twine story formats are, I give a brief introduction to Twine versions and story formats here. These lists are generated live in your browser from JSON source, also available on GitHub. (If you can’t see the lists below, try a newer browser.)

Twine 1-only formats are grayed out in the list, while the official formats are greened in. Formats are tagged if they are in beta or unavailable, well-documented, also available for Twine 1, and/or support markdown or stretchtext (where new passages are added to the existing text rather than replacing it). Utility formats (which are not intended to produce a playable story) are listed separately after the regular story formats. The icons link to the story format; if there is no icon, then the story format is not hosted online and you may need to download or build it yourself in order to use it.

Proofing and other utility formats

Twine 1 had no notion of a proofing format; these are all Twine 2 formats, though some do support Twine 1 as well. Many of them are intended to export to JSON or Twee (when Twine 2 did not). The latter task could also be accomplished with Twee2 or Tweego, but the proofing formats that did this only required interacting with the Twine GUI, not installing a command-line conversion program. (Twine 1 always supported built-in twee import/export.)