When comparing Rainbow vs Twine, the Slant community recommends Twine for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?” Twine is ranked 38th while Rainbow is ranked 80th. The most important reason people chose Twine is:
The basics are very easy to grasp, and you can have a basic story up in minutes.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Open source
Distributed under the MIT License.
Pro Written in modern C++, is scriptable in Lua
Pro Cross-platform
With support for Android, iOS, Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.
Pro Optional FMOD audio engine
Pro Supports Spine
Pro Physics
Box2D integrated with Lua bindings.
Pro Easy to understand
The basics are very easy to grasp, and you can have a basic story up in minutes.
Pro Free for commercial projects
Twine is based on a GPL licence. You are free to download, modify and publish derivatives - even commercially.
Cons
Con Not as feature-rich as other engines
Con Small community
Being fairly new on the scene, there aren't much of a community to speak of.
Con Limited to interactive fiction
Twine is specialized to decision-based interactive fiction. Under the hood, a Twine game is just a flowchart for page transitions; the only way to add more complex behavior is to code it from scratch in JavaScript.
