This post originally appeared on my Patreon.
I feel like we're at the point where Twine 2, in its initial form, is pretty solid. The releases since then have all been what you'd call patch versions in the Semantic Versioning universe -- hence we're are 2.0.8, not 2.8. So once 2.0.9 is out the door, the question is: where to next?
We certainly have a ton of feature enhancements to consider. Right now I see a couple major things that need addressing:
- We have no nice way for people to include multimedia in Twine stories. You can do it by pasting in Base64-encoded data into your passages, but this is a horrible user experience. I think about WordPress as an aspiration goal for the UI for this, but I'm curious if there are other models people would suggest looking at.
- We need better ways for story formats to augment Twine so that it can better understand links. For example. It would be nice if a passage whose macros reference another one had a line between them in the story map. I have a spec for how to do this in draft form, which also includes other kinds of hooks for story formats. This doesn't have a huge benefit to users right away, but it will make life a lot better for story format authors.
- We need a better way to manage story map complexity. I've toyed with a lot of different ways to slice up a Twine story -- for example, splitting it out into tabs that you can swap between (though I'm not overly fond of that approach, because it's not spatial in the same way that the rest of Twine is). I feel like prototypes will be needed in order to decide what the best course of action will be.
- I want to add support for locales that use right-to-left text.
- We haven't looked into how accessible Twine is at all yet, which is a woeful omission.
The interesting part to me will be making a decision as to what to prioritize. I'm not sure there is a wrong answer here -- more a question of what will benefit the largest part of the user population.