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Welcome, writer! Tee-Wee is an editor (or authoring tool) for CYOA games, also known as choice-based or hypertext interactive fiction. These are text-based games made of passages with links between them, so that the story changes based on what players choose. As of 2020, many tools can make such games. Tee-Wee is different from them in a few ways:
- It runs on your desktop; you don't need to be online for it.
- It's very lightweight and fast.
- It uses the same story formats and data as Twine 2.
Wait, what's Twine? It's the premier authoring tool for making games of this type, available at the twinery.org website. It's also free to use, and may be better for some people. As you can move your stories back and forth between Twine and Tee-Wee, there's no risk in trying them both and choosing later.
Tee-Wee can also publish completed games as stand-alone web pages, also through story formats made for Twine 2. It can only load a few of them for technical reasons; the recommended story format for Tee-Wee is Chapbook. See the official Chapbook documentation for how to use its various features.
The very first story made with Tee-Wee is Let's build a Chapbook.
As of mid-2022, Tee-Wee isn't actively used or developed. Treat it as a proof of concept. Feedback is still welcome (see below).
System requirements
Tee-Wee Editor requires a Python runtime, version 3.6 or newer. Python comes preinstalled on most Linux distributions; Windows and Mac users can get it from the python.org website. You'll also need the Tkinter module, which is bundled with most Windows and Mac runtimes. On Linux you might need to add it yourself: look in your package manager for something called "tkinter", "python-tk" or the like.
Tee-Wee Editor comes as a Python archive that can be opened directly with the interpreter, or you can unpack it and run __main__.py; it's just a zip file with a different extension.
Recommended screen resolution: 1024x768.
Status
The latest version as of 27 October 2021 (after an 18-month wait) is 1.1, which comes with a number of important updates:
- Access to the game options in metadata, so you can enable debug mode
- Better looks when running under X11
- Improved search that works across passages
The new version hasn't been tested much; see contact info inside the archive.
Older news have been moved to their own file.
NOTE: Running the editor in KDE with a dark theme can make parts of the UI unreadable, such as the file selection dialogs. This is outside of my control.
License and credits
Tee-Wee Editor is free and open source software under the Artistic License 2.0; a copy is included in the archive. It's made with knowledge gained from TkDocs.com and the official Twine specifications, with some details reverse-engineered from Tweego exports.
Many thanks to JigmeDatse for the bug reports and other feedback, and to all my friends for the encouragement.
See the read-me file inside the archive for contact information, or the itch.io page.
