ℹ️What is Trialogue?

A gentle introduction to the Trialogue Story Format for Twine

Trialogue is a Story Format for Twine that let's you turn a branching narrative into an interactive chat story. Write a non-linear story in the Twine editor, add Trialogue as the Story Format and play your story in the form of an interactive chat.

A Story Format controls how a non-linear story created in the Twine editor, gets displayed to the end user in a web browser. Every Story Format also comes with its own way of defining more advanced functionality. Twine comes with several built Story Formats, like Chapbook, Harlowe, Snowman and SugarCube. Trialogue is based on Snowman and adds a new flavour to the mix of available formats.

New to Twine? This guide focusses on the specifics of the Trialogue Story Format and assumes some familiarity with Twine. For guidance to the Twine user interface, have a look at its reference.

You can learn more about managing Story Formats in the Twine reference .

The relationship between a Story written in Twine and a Story Format

Interactive Chat Story?

a very basic demo of the kind of story you can create with Trialogue

This demo shows the basic functionality of a story generated with the Trialogue Story format. Trialogue makes the user experience of the story similar to that of a messaging app such as WhatsApp or Signal. Chat messages can contain any content that is embeddable on the web, such as text, images or videos. Story authors can also customise the look and feel of the story, through features such as custom UI content, character avatars and a colour scheme.

Example stories powered by Trialogue

The following stories have been created with Trialogue:

• Chatterpast: Explore life in Iron Age and Roman Britannia with Enica and her friends.
• Filla Fulla Chat: Take part in an interactive conversation and explore life stories and key artworks of the iconic Czech and Slovak artists Emil Filla and Ľudovít Fulla.
• Mother Tongue: How to learn Tagalog in just one awkward conversation with your mom a day.

Twine terminology

If you are new to Twine, it's warmly recommended you familiarise yourself with its basic functionality before diving into the specifics of Trialogue. The Twine website and cookbook are excellent places to start.

That said, a quick into to some of Twine's basic terminology will be helpful, so it's included here. When you write a non-linear story in Twine, you are doing so by writing passages, and connecting them to each other via links. Together this forms your story.

Passages, Links and Story in the Twine editor

Trialogue takes these connected parts and turns them into an interactive chat format. See in the example below, how Trialogue renders passages and links as chat messages. The passages are send by the scripted chat bot(s), the links is what the user chooses as replies.

Passages, Links and Story rendered by Trialogue in the form of an interactive chat