Forums » Advanced Editor Forum » Read Thread

Anybody know a smart place to export my game to once I'm done writing/re-writing it (which I'm sure will take another year or two)?

I know I'll have to export it by hand, but if my ultimate intention is to make an android and iphone app (via hiring a developer)... should I move it by hand to Inkle? Quest? CoG? A plain word or notepad document? 

Don't want to waste money hiring a developer to do the data transfer that I wouldn't mind doing myself anyways...

@Morgan_R was working on a project that could allegedly convert to Twine, but otherwise your best bet is probably copy pasting all your shit into a Word document

Never got as far as Advanced Editor support, sorry to say.

fyi, anything made here is property of Halogen (or some word like that) Studios. It's in CYS' terms of serveces. Legally, I think you may need to receive permission from Alex, but in reality I don't think he'd mind. idk, others know more about this than me.

except alex has literally said it doesn't matter, and the disclaimer is there to protect the members 

I actually emailed Alex about that when I started... He said I can still independently publish whatever I want (and that others had done so in the past?)...

I mean you are presumably keeping a backup in a document as you go anyway, right? If not, you probably should be.

I think Inkle went down the crapper recently and I know at some point @StrykerL pulled up data showing COG was kind of a not good place to publish with if you had making money in mind.

I don't really know much about turning a story into an app though, I mean Quest, ADRIFT, Twine whatever are all fine if you want a functioning game file that can be passed around but for I assume for transferring to an app you'll want to have the raw text around anyway.

I recommend Inkle if you're text only, twine if you're lazy to your detriment, gamemaker if you're planning to add more traditional game elements

There was something happening with Inkle a few months ago, I think it's not being supported anymore.

Damned if I can be bothered to look it up though.

Having worked with GameMaker for a while now, I can say with confidence that nothing's as simple yet flexible as Inkle if you know the scope of your game is limited. That said, unless your online name rhymes with BendMaster, you probably won't get many sales with a text only game, even Inkle's own works have some combat/magic/travel/animation to keep them engaging.

As in you have to manually learn how to code the engine to use more than a single font type, size, bold/italics, and the rest for every project. As in if you want the first Word to be a different font and the second to be another and the third to be the same as the first you have to calculate the pixel distance of the middle word, leave that much space between the first and third, run a draw call for the first style, then overlay that with a draw call for the second. It's so amazingly painful that unless you know what you want you'll happily curl up in a ball and go singing praises of Ink / Twine.

Thanks so much Stryker and all. :-D

I wouldn't have a clue how to calculate the number of pixies or whatever magic you said makes these computers 'go', so will see if I can twist a developer's arm to do it all for me, and then will keep Twine as a close second depending on the cost. 

With regards to sales, I'm actually pretty sure the app will be free (including no commercials). It's definitely more of a passion project.

I've actually been enjoying the book assembly and light coding/scripting aspects of this site's bookbuilder (although, ironically, I haven't been able to get font changes to stick!), so I think I would like Twine.

With regards to happily curling up in a ball and going around singing praises of ink/twine... Would I have to be rolling or can there be some sort of a wagon? :-)