Storytelling does a lot of work in ABM, although we don’t really acknowledge it as such. When you insert a player into the middle of an ABM, storytelling is your way of equipping the player with what she needs to know in order to survive, much like Sweeper tells Sam Vimes. So, I’m experimenting with Cradle which enables Twine and Twine-like storytelling within Unity.

Things to know about Cradle:

the last release is out of date, so don’t bother using it download the repo, unzip, and use it to start a new Unity project (Start up unity, open a new project, and select the ‘cradle-master’ folder. Contrary to the readme, don’t try installing it in an existing Unity project yet. This is because the repo appears to be his actual project. I kept getting an error in the logs concerning some error in one of the ‘test’ files. I can’t recall at the moment, and I can’t check because I’m at the wrong machine, so I’ll have to come back to this point. Commenting out the offending line solved the problem. Drop your Twine file (twee or html) into the main Assets folder for your project. Cradle will convert that into C# for you. Drag TwinePlayer prefab into the scene and then make sure to inspect it; add script to get it to point to your C# twine file. Ta da. Export as package, and select the relevant files (ie, you don’t need all of the assets or example game files etc) and then you can drag it into any other projects you have on the run.