Want to storyboard more efficiently? Twine can help.

Twine is a tool to create interactive digital stories. It’s text-based, but you can add media to create visual narratives. It’s easy to use, free, and open-source.

See Part 1 of my Twine series.

Twine is commonly used for game prototyping and literary writing. I use it for storyboarding during learning design to replace word processors for text-based storyboards, or as an alternative to slideshow software for visual storyboards. I find Twine game-changing for branching scenarios, but it can be used to organize content for any type of instruction.

One of its most powerful features is how it visualizes the flow of the narrative in a storyboard. When writing learning content, you don’t have to keep scrolling up and down to keep track of your story. You can instead create interactive links from questions to choices, to consequences, or to the next prompt simply by typing brackets and an arrow—sort of like this: [[Question1->Option A]].

Notice how easy it is to follow the storyboard in the image in this post. Something so simple, yet something that can change how efficiently we write and how seamlessly we can ultimately move the learner through the content.