Twine & Sugarcube

(Summary / TL;DR at the bottom)

So I’ve been working with Twine and having a great time of it.  Now, I knew there were different “modes” with Twine; “Jonah” and “Sugarcube” being the most popular.

I thought these were just different ways of displaying the Twine content.

Wrong-O.

Each is basically an extension of Twine.  Cool stuff!

Much of the nifty-neat-o, spifftastic fun stuff I’ve seen in Twine has been provided by the extensions.  My preferred add-on is Sugarcube, and I must say… It is awfully, awfully nice.  (Yes, I had to say it twice… cha-cha-cha.)

But, this explains why I haven’t been able to find documentation for a lot of things from the Twine site.   …I should have been checking the Sugarcube docs!

So I started perusing the new documentation and I have decided that I need to absorb more of Sugarcube’s offerings before I do too much more coding.  (Still writing scenes and events, though!)

It appears that many conventional programming elements, to which I am accustomed, are available courtesy of Sugarcube.

With said elements already made, I don’t have to go building my own processes… which is why I chose Twine/Sugarcube in the first place.  (I like having the option to build my own core routines, but it doesn’t mean I want to.)

I want the player of my games to have an experience with certain elements.  I have spent so much of my time trying to figure out how to facilitate those elements it has taken brain-time away from the story-side writing.  Now that I’ve had a chance to look at the docs for Sugarcube, I’m very relieved to know I have less to build and more time/attention to write and create.

SUMMARY / TL;DR:  Twine with Sugarcube is way cool. I now grasp the scope of the difference between the two, and understand why some features I’ve seen are not documented by Twine… they are Sugarcube features. Duh.

Progress continues.