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In looking for something to help with story planning I happened to stumble across this tool. Haven't actually downloaded it to try it, but thought I would share the article anyway.

https://www.viget.com/articles/building-a-choose-your-own-adventure-style-game-engine-in-48-hours/

Looks cool, I went ahead and mentioned this to the Songbird guy. I'm surprised we haven't seen more of these popping up honestly, Twine has been around for how long and yet nobody seems to like it.

The simplicity of CYOA style writing though means that it works with paper and dice as well as it does on a personal site with html as well as it works with a wiki page as well as it works with Google Slides. There isn't an IF tool out there that isn't capable of linking passages of text to other text. Whether they get off the ground for that purpose seems to depend on whether they get authors with the right kind of momentum and enough social media whoring around them.

....and since I just noticed midway through writing this post that it was made in 2018 and five years later no one has ever heard of it, I'm guessing that didn't happen. F.

Really I think the best thing these kind of people could do (although I've seen it done many times to not so great effect) is create an actual good game with their little engine and put it in the IFComp to try and garner some interest. But they'd have to write a lot more than a lazy single sentence of "you are a soldier and see some other soldiers, what do?" for their flagship project.


Also funny they linked some decrepit ass site that was last active in 2020. Front page is currently the guy going on a rant against racism and sexism in the comments, and he looks like he nuked his own forum over it.

Oh wow.  I hadn't continued digging past their writeup and story site.

I meant the list of "similar tools" they turned to which along with Twine included stuff as obscure as Quest and then some random little CYOA site that actually had the balls to use CYOA in the title.

You're supposed to use euphemisms like "choice based fiction" in anything official even if we all know what it means. But that's the one I was reading updates on, it looked like a cute little site in the minutes before realizing 2020 had broken the man and it was all pretty dead.

Viget itself doesn't seem to have ever gone anywhere even that entertaining. Twine clones are not hard to code from everything I've heard, it's creating a community that always seems to be the struggle, most of these projects seem to die in the water.

From my understanding this tool was made as part of their internal hackathon which they do/did yearly as a team building exercise. A lot of software houses do this kind of stuff (I even know of a few companies that do so many of them in a year it completely drains their funds and sends the company under) and they barely go beyond a quickly made toy that's abandoned a week later.

Also as Mizal mentioned making an IF engine is not that challenging from a technical standpoint, it's making people want to make games with it that's a challenge.

Far as something for planning I recommend draw.io as a free tool for flowcharts.

Thanks.  I was going to use DIA (open source) to work out the flow on my next big one (after I finish my MHD) entry, but know there is a free browser-based one is cool as well.

Yeah, I've used it for a few years now and am pretty happy with it especially since it has a seamless integration with Google Drive and other cloud storage solutions.