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Songbird Editor is a new add-on for Unity that provides a toolset allowing anyone to create their own IF games without any programming knowledge. Designed with ease of use for those who shudder at the mere sight of computer code as well as expandability for those who like to tinker and customize it is designed with writers in mind.

Development is in full swing with the first major update containing new features, tweaks and fixes scheduled for early next week. Going with the idea of being a tool for writers I'm hoping to keep in close in contact with authors interested and shape it into a system that bring a breath of fresh air to the medium.

The first alpha release is currently up as a way to get the project rolling and start directing progress on it based on actual demand from user instead of what one person thinks matters and what doesn't. To become part of this first phase you can submit your application on my website where you can see how the tool looks at the moment: https://www.aokotorigames.com

The ultimate plan for Songbird is to become a free tool for non-commercial and hobbyist use while offering a fairly priced commercial license for people wanting to turn their passion into a carrier and maybe even a publishing offer for people not confident in their ability to do it on their own.

I'm hoping to continue shouting about Songbird from any rooftop that I manage to crawl up as I believe it can help all kinds of writers with realizing their vision and so I'll try to keep this thread up to date on development if you'll have me. I'll be here to answer any questions about the project so don't hesitate to ask.

I haven't been able to test it out yet, but Cavus has been talking about it a lot on a couple of IF servers and it seems like a pretty cool tool in concept. @AzBaz may be interested if he ever wanders back in. And various people have been talked about wanting to make downloadable games over the years.

I'm actually less interested in the "code free" part than what can be done to add more gamelike elements like RPG encounters and inventories, or if there are plans in that direction.

Once core systems are in place there's some plans for optional windows and features. Right now I'm mainly thinking about a codex and level up screen, but other elements could be added too. And of course people will be free to tinker with it on their own as well within limits.

Oh great, another bot.

I actually really would like someone who has more focus abilities than me to go sign up for this and report back. One of you kids make yourselves useful.

Signed up for the testing and joined their discord server. Will report back with more information once I get ahold of the editor.

Why Songbird Editor? Just curious more than anything considering the name doesn't make me think of interactive fiction.

Songbird was my internal codename for the project (when you work on 5 things at once those are useful) and I mentioned it a few times among friends which caused it to pick up with that name. It's not unfitting as it still circles around the idea of freedom and art which are at the core of this project. At this point I don't see a reason to change it unless I get a lawsuit fired at me which I doubt.

I just assumed it was a Bioshock reference.

This is, at the very least, a cool concept, and I wish you luck in your endeavors. I might even check it out, since I have Unity already.

I've now taken some time to play around with the editor, so you all can get an idea of how it's like.

Overall, I'm happy to say that the functionality is pretty straightforward after you get a bit more accustomed to it and take a glance over the short documentation. It's actually quite similar to the CYS documentation, with scenes corresponding to chapters and pages to... well, pages. Even the "feature" of not being able to specify pages out of the root scene is the same, as well. It's like the CYS experience with more button clicking and less new tabs+popups.

Now, starting with installation. If you don't have Unity already, you can only use SB with it. The installation process is not too bad but may be slightly confusing if you're not too well versed with tech-y stuff. The steps of the Readme and documentation make the process pretty clear, though.

The main editor after setup looks a bit like this, cutting out all of the unity stuff:

click

It's split into 2 parts - the game itself and the page/variable/stats editor which are both resizable. The game updates in real time as you change the right hand side, which is nice so you can see your writing/scripting in action. There is no style customization at the time of writing, so you can only have the large choice texts and the dark blue background.

You're given a scene and a page to begin, and to swap from page to page, you use the "edit page" button. Then, if you want to edit the content of the page itself, you will have to click the dropdown menu of "Contents of page X". All text that it displays is based on "chunks", which I like. You can essentially piece together the page with text chunks and variable display/conditional chunks in between.

Also similar to CYS editor - there are on page scripts via commands(variable editing) and conditional text, and link scripts. At the time of writing this, there is no way to limit the visibility of choices based on variables, but I have received word that it is already being made.

A list of functionalities that I tested with a short, 4 page game:
- text displaying based on variable value
- stats page text displaying based on variable value
- changing variable value upon entering page
- changing variable value upon specific condition in page
- common operators working, including modulo(%)
and most other basic things.

Final thoughts? Definitely promising. I like the auto-updating display and the block-style writing + scripting. It's definitely a bit overwhelming at first, but the process is pretty clean once you get used to it. That being said, it's definitely more of a "game" designing experience rather than a "story" writing one. Take my words with a grain of salt, though. I haven't done any extensive branching or any particularly complex variable fiddling, so there might be problems or features that I overlooked.

Thanks for the review. I'll just make a quick correction: It is possible to customize the style there's just no guide for it yet. You can change the background color or put in an image as well as edit fonts and how buttons looks. More advanced users can outright redo the UI if they keep the core elements attached where they should be. This will be expanded over time and once there are some extra features to it I'll make appropriate documentation for that as well.

And whether it's more of a game design experience I don't think I'm one to made that decision given my years of experience as a game dev, but my goal is to make both possible depending on user preference.

Thanks for the correction, I had just assumed since there were no steps listed to. That’s good to hear.

It’s definitely possible to write pure word stories on there. I think I made that remark because it made the game-y aspects more accessible, and since I am accustomed to writing word only things here, it naturally drew me to tinker with those a bit more.

Have you written any stories? Are there any that you can link to that we can read?

There a two things that are published:
A short story on AO3

A demo of an IF I'm working on in CS. Though I'm not sure how long it will be till COG finds some excuse to ban me since I'm technically their competitor now.

Both are middlingly average I'd say, but some people seemed to like them.

Just gonna throw a short update since I'm doing it everywhere anyway and mention I just finished the final part of the core guide for Songbird this time explaining the basics of customizing the game's looks.

https://forum.aokotorigames.com/d/12-songbird-editor-core-guide-visual-customization-of-your-game

Update 0.3.1 is ready. Here are all changes and new features it brings.

Bug fixes:

Fixed accessibility mode turning on randomly when starting the game.

Fixed incorrect scaling of choice buttons on some resolutions.

Quality of life changes:

Cleaned up the console logs to better inform users if they make a mistake in their commands.

Added the setting to scale in game text. The setting can be found in the Menu window. Currently the game doesn't save font size changes between sessions, but this will be implemented later.

New features:

Choices can now be hidden or shown based on a condition. If a condition is not met the choice will not appear for the reader. If choices are set to single conditions are ignored, leaving the condition field empty means the choice is always displayed. Uses the same syntax as conditional blocks in pages.

Implemented the ability to capitalize displayed text variables. You can now capitalize variables by placing one exclamation mark (!) in front of its name for first letter capitalization or two (!!) for full capitalization. Additionally placing a dot (.) or a comma (,) at the end will insert those plus a single space behind the variable. Those operators are to be used without spaces and function only in “Display variable” blocks and can be applied only to text variables.

Implemented random, round, round down and round up methods into the command system. You can now get a random number between 0 and X by writing rand:X and round numbers by writing either round:X, roundD:X, roundU:X. Round methods can take in number type variables as X. For both roundU and roundD method capitalization of the last letter matters.

Wow, you weren't kidding when you said there was new IF drama every week. I see you're no longer in the IFC server.

That isn't really IF related drama. More like Motoko related drama.

Update 0.4.1 is ready. It is the final update of this closed alpha and brings a bunch of big features like image insertion and text input fields that complete this roadmap. Once all legal and licensing things are sorted the open access beta will begin. Current projection for that is the first half of May. All changes can be found in the forum post as there is quite a bit of text attached to them: https://forum.aokotorigames.com/d/6-songbird-editor-development-log-updated-041-is-out/7

This is coming along pretty fast. I'll probably check it out in May once all the major features are in.

Far as major features go everything is pretty much there. The first beta update will include some minor tweaks and a prebuild game that explains the system since a few people suggested it.

Implementing user feedback AND working quickly? I can see why they wouldn't want you at CoG.

Will definitely be checking this out once the beta goes live.

Is it safe to install the editor?

The editor itself is just a Unity package file that can be imported into the engine. No executables or hidden files so I'd say it's as safe as can be provided you get it directly from me or download from the official website once the public beta starts.

Interesting stuff just when I'm exploring alternatives for interactive fiction. I'm curious; what does Songbird offer that something free like Inklewriter doesn't, which I haven't used but hear is geared towards your target audience?

Inklewriter is more of a basic tool for smaller stories. Writing something complex mechanically or extremely branching might be a challenge though I only played with it for a little bit so I can be wrong on that. Also a game made with Songbird can be easily built into an app for multiple platforms like Android, IOS etc. Most other engines either don't offer such versatility or require extra steps and knowledge to use. Of course Songbird isn't perfect either but that has more to do with getting apps signed and certified so that a store will even accept it being a chore for new users.

Well everything is ready. Open beta starts on the 31st so I figured I could bump this thread a bit before the day.

And it's here. You can download the first beta build for free here: https://www.aokotorigames.com/download
Completely free for non commercial stuff now and (hopefully) forever.

I totally forgot this thread exists, but anyway I just threw out the second update for the open beta which includes a hopefully idiotproof module for adding a leveling system into any IF you make with Songbird.

Full patch notes: https://forum.aokotorigames.com/d/6-songbird-editor-development-log/14

Nice to see it's coming along. :)

Well today I finally managed to drag my sleep deprived self over the finish line and pull Songbird out of beta. At this point the feature set is rather extensive and I admit seeing it complete fills me with some satisfaction. For those interested in seeing how it looks currently here's a link:
https://www.aokotorigames.com/download

Also I am kinda running a sale where any paid games made till the end of the month aren't subject to any royalty fees and ones made till end of year have it significantly reduced forever. If anyone wants to make something with it that is.

Nice, hadn't seen you around in a bit so wasn't sure how progress was coming. Hope it catches on.

Some personal stuff came up that forced me to rework my schedule, but I'm still around mostly lurking and working on things. There's been a bunch of mostly regular updates to the editor in the meantime I simply didn't mention in this thread.

You probably should try to convince Flame to actually produce his game on it.

I get that he’s reluctant to recode, wants money and all that, but seriously it still would be better than publishing under CoG which is pretty well established of being assholes to writers and taking more than a fair share of a percentage. (And didn’t they recently make some statement about more tightening up restrictions of what’s allowed in HG shit now)

He’s probably gathered the most amount of writers (and fans) under his flag, you lot could actually put another dent in the whole unstable CoG Kingdom. And from what you’ve said, your creation is supposed to be easier than Twine, so I imagine that would be a welcome addition to potential writers.

Well in any case, at the end of the day, you managed to create something you really wanted to do, so congrats on that front.

Oh interesting, I had missed all that with CoG but releasing this right as they're pissing off authors again is smart.

They've never cared to police even the quality of HG games let alone content, and Jason has always been so quick to distance CoG titles from them, dunno why "grey" choices and violence in particular would bother them now. Especially when some of their highest selling games violate that in lots of places, just underlines how inconsistent their policies always have been and makes it look like they're playing favorites.

I'm sure lots of devs will appreciate a platform that is a tool they can use to just publish their game free of all additional bullshit and having to step and fetch for Jason.

I'd seriously consider it if Flame actually made an update to KAE in the last few months huehue. But in all seriousness the next step for me is seeing if there are any authors interested in making more than a quarter of what they're owed. Hence the launch part sale and also me making plans for individually negotiated deals for people who bring with them something to help kickstart the whole thing.

Nice! Seems like you added a lot more features and improvements from the time I tried it out. Hope you find success attracting authors.