Posted February 04, 2024 by DesindaDev
After so many years of abandoning this project and keeping it to one side, I've decided to return this on my radar and pick up from where I left off. But, looking at the project this time around has me thinking: "How many useless features!?"
The first thing I've done to the development branch of Story Creator on GitHub is practically purge most of the codebase. All that is left is the Conversation Editor and a few utility classes that may come in handy later.
Story Creator started out as a niche interactive story editor for building stories. With how niche it was and how niche it is now, I'd like to keep to the standard principles we had before:
Haxe is great for web development and I would stick with that. C#, on the other hand, is my preferred language for desktop development and has a richer toolset than Haxe, albeit at the cost of it being supported by Microsoft. At least I try to avoid using most of their stuff, if not all of it.
I would like to expand Story Creator in a way that keeps it just a Story Creator, not some crazy idea that just becomes another game engine or editor. That's not what it's for. For this reason, the way I am considering expanding the project will be in the following ways:
There are things to be said about the difference between prototyping, developing and content building. Where does Story Creator come in? From what I gather, the consensus is that this software is useful for prototyping stories and ideas, for which this application does a very good job, so I'm told.
However, if you get past the prototyping stage and start developing your project further, you will want to keep using the tools you've been using to build your project faster and more efficiently. Therefore, just covering the "prototyping" stage is not ideal for most people serious about making a game using this tool for their stories.
More features will need to be brought in to allow people to work on their projects without looking for alternatives. That means looking at the planning of stories, bringing in features that suit long-term development for story-driven games, and getting a strong framework in place for generating outputs that your game/game engine can use for putting your story together.
Keep on eye on the development branch of StoryDev-Editor on GitHub for updates. I will most likely move this over to Codeberg at some point.