Messages

Gurok: Haha, yeah. I never tried Inform 7 because I always thought, I know how to program, why not just do that instead?

What's your main issue with variables? Are Twine/Inkle/Tyrano missing some way of manipulating them?

Most of those engines make you script it via text which I find makes me loose track, it's kind of frustrating that twine lets me branch visually with the bubbles but I can't set flags/variables that way. I remember using Games Factory as a kid which did and I miss it.
Sun dogs does look cool, Nic did a really  good job with it. It's moddable too.

Yeah! It does seem like variables and flags might be hard to keep track of after a while. What do you do, write them down somewhere else?

There's a whole community for Interactive Fiction that's very supportive. I worked on a game called Sun Dogs as a writer and that was all  Unity ( Nic the game's designer coded it all though). Inkle the guys who did 80 days have a nice tool called Inkle Writer which I like to play around with. Inform is the most powerful I think if you want to do a room/inventory based parser game, but I do prefer stuff like Twine and Inkle for ease of use. No one's really implemented variables in a way that's easy for me to use yet though it always requires some scripting which I am bad at.
I am also experimenting with Tyrano for visual novels and I find it really nice to use.

Coolness! I just looked at Sun Dogs - never seen anything like it.

What's your main issue with variables? Are Twine/Inkle/Tyrano missing some way of manipulating them?

I've been thinking a lot about text-based games and how to write them. (By text-based I mean games where the primary medium is text and not visuals - things like 80 Days, Sorcery, the Gamebook Adventures series, Choice of Games's games, Fallen London, etc.) Twine is a pretty popular tool in the indie scene, as well as things like Undum, Ren'py (text...ish), and ChoiceScript.

When I searched through the Unity forums, I found a couple of mentions of more sophisticated software that are typically used for non-text-based games, like articy:draft and ChatMapper as well.

Have any of you made, or tried to make games that are primarily text-based?
What tools did you use? How did it turn out?
Are there good tools to make this sort of game that are accessible to total beginners? If not, what do you think is missing?