Sidebars for Chapbook

Alright then, I want to start the technical side of my game development with a pretty bulky one! One that, in fact, is still being worked on and being tested, and hasn't been implemented into any of my text-adventures.

Yet.

A BIT OF CONTEXT

Chapbook is a good story format for beginners! If you're starting out with Twine, I'd suggest giving it a try.

• The documentation is a good place to start.

• This quick reference guide is too.

It is also unbelievably, staggeringly limited in its scope. This is good: limitations bring creativity out of a person. They push you to do rethink things through, and do better. It's just hard to believe it when this story format doesn't even support nested conditionals.

Not as much of a tragedy as it may seem: embeds make up for that fairly well. Logic in the variable section does too. But that's exactly it - it's limited, and finding ways to skirt around these limitations is stimulating! It activates my humongous 50 IQ brain. But even then, there are constraints you cannot skirt around, not within the default state Chapbook engine.

Say, for example, that I wanted to add an inventory. Or a map to the side of my main passage display - good luck with that, it simply isn't supported. Or is it? [VSauce music begins playing]

JAVASCRIPT AND ITS CONSEQUENCES FOR THE HUMAN RACE

Chapbook's functionality can theoretically be extended through the use of things called Custom Inserts and Modifiers. Pretty advanced tools! What you need to know about them is the fact that they basically allow you to write Javascript and CSS to add things. This is as much of an explanation I will give of them: you have plenty of documentation you can go through if you want to learn more. The sky really is the limit with these things.

What I will be providing you, at least at first, are scripts you can simply copy and paste into your own story - specifically the javascript/storysheet passage, which in Twine you can access from the story section.

SIDEBARS

[VSauce music keeps playing, but now at a brisk 120db]
So what if I tried adding sidebars to the engine?

Well, I kind of have! But why would I even do this?? A couple of reasons:

• I think heading into a whole other passage to get into your inventory is a fine solution, but doesn't beat being able to see it alongside the environment or an object description.

• All other story formats in Twine can add sidebars, and I feel left out :(

• They work best for actual, true text adventures. Other than the inventory, I could place stats, settings, maps, notes... you get the picture.

It took a lot of research into the inner systems of this story format, how it rendered and processed things, and a number of vibe-coding hours (thank you Claude and Gemini 2.5 love ya ~muah), but I think I've managed to arrive at a fairly polished and consistent design. It borrows from Chapbook's native one, after all, without being overly invasive. The only reason I haven't implemented it yet in Spirit of Hunger is that I am fearful of bugs, or unintented behaviour - it is still in development.

If you want to know more about its inner workings and design choices, I'm giving you a small test game to see it in action, and the .twee file itself. You can import the .twee file by opening Twine and heading into Library. Hitting import will open a window on the bottom right of your screen - once there, hit import and search for the .twee.

Enjoy :)