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I'm Working on a Twine Alternative

A topic by monapdx created 13 days ago Views: 68 Replies: 5
Viewing posts 1 to 3
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Hi there,

I’ve been building/working on a visual, browser-based alternative to Twine.

I’d love to get feedback from users who create interactive fiction games or branching narrative stories.

StoryPlay is a work in progress, but I could really use some actual user feedback so I know what features to prioritize.

(6 edits) (+1)

This looks very interesting and promising! 

Love the design picture here! Did you use Figma?  

I looked at  the page and I think it'd be helpful if there was also a tutorial video. Or if you're going to run the tool let it be an empty one where there's tutorial features that can walk the player through how to start writing stuff vs just introducing them to a page where there's already stuff.  I think it'd be more immersive at least than having to pick and comb through a project that's already been started. I can see stuff and guess what it's for but a walkthrough would be nice.


Here's my thoughts on Twine and a few things I hate.

1.  How tedious it becomes to edit. 

Say for example I  don't like a character's name anymore and choose to change it, I can use the magnifying glass to find something in the passage and change it, but it's only for that single passage. This becomes incredibly tedious if you have multiple passages.  So if you're going to make something similar,  I'd say make sure users can edit things in bulk or an identifying feature  that allows characters/dialog sources/items etc to be defined, so little things like that can be easily fixed instead of having to comb through multiple plus passages. Also maybe add in an assistant proofreader?

2. Add different format template options. Learning about html and css has been fun at times, but other times I just want to be able to focus on my writing and not be distracted by formatting immediately. I'm a visual person so I'm the type who gets distracted if I can't fix. Having to burn through time looking up how to make those changes can be tedious depending on how readily available the information is out there- thankful google's ai has been most helpful to me in that regard but still. 

It's a huge time suck. Having a few premade templates, formats or features that allows you to  quickly edit font, text, borders, spacing etc, would be helpful, can edit in high detail later. 


Those are just my two tidbits you can take lightly. 

Thank you so much for taking the time to check out StoryPlay! Your feedback is very helpful, and I totally relate to your complaints.

I’m shocked that Twine doesn’t search all your blocks/nodes when you edit something as fundamental as a character name, that’s crazy.

And I agree, that it would help to have a start blank option rather than always loading with an example story.

I will work on getting a video tutorial up ASAP!

I don’t use Figma (being in web design for so long makes it feel like a redundant tool most of the time for me) all the images were made with ChatGPT, but we have a pretty good rapport after two years of deep conversations. It’s gotten much better at making graphics I like or that fit my style than it was just a year ago.

Demo

I’ve taken your advice and did an update, let me know what you think!

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I heard you could make images with chat gpt but I had no idea it could learn to make images this good, that's surprising. 

ChatGPT did all of these for me, although some took a few revisions to get how I wanted them.

I usually use a prompt that emphasizes “professional-quality product image, clean design that leans towards minimalist in dark/light theme”