I have been starting to frame up a Choice of Games style interactive narrative using their choicescript tools over on github here: GitHub - dfabulich/choicescript: ChoiceScript is a language for developing multiple-choice games.
Well, sure drafting this up would probably be a good task for storyspace, but as the needs I have are pretty much text-focused I think this might be a good match for Tinderbox. (Also, I still have my license to Tinderbox 6, so I’m going to force myself to get started with this there, and if it works finally upgrade to the later version of Tinderbox.)
Here is the main thing I’m looking to get out of the opportunity to frame this up and write this in tinderbox. As with Python and similar, the indentation level is really critical for dividing up the blocks and knowing which option and stat metric is considered at what time, and where the narrative flows based on a choice.
but unlike a Python script where you can get a lot out of a screenful sometimes, so just a little code folding keeps you sane in plain text, with my choicescript project the blocks and bits of prose can be massive and have their own double-space gaps, indentations that mean things non actionable, and nexted choice options that don’t close under pages and pages and pages later.
So it seemed a lot more fun to set this up somewhere that would allow me to just write blocks at the base level and use links, nesting, and an output script to do all of the annoying indentation stuff upon output to plaintext files at the end!
And better than doing this in Scrivener, where I started with this, where the Scrivenings feature makes it crazy easy to read content nested even really deep within other notes that contain text, if I build this in Tinderbox I can potentially create visualizations of flow in the map view, and actually calculate various stats factors going up and down, to make sure I make an actually balanced experience.
But … I don’t actually know two things that are holding me back, and point to the fact that I seemed to have forgotten most of my tinderbox skills i haven’t used since Tinderbox 5 …
- how would one go about creating an export script that adds a tab for each level?
- Is it better to use nesting to increment tab level for each line? seems totally possible?
- Or is it better to assign a value to each block that already says what its level would be and then use some sort of link or outline series to select the order for output?
- is there a means of automatically and without a lot of visual tugging to include the title and all of the text in a note, and then the text linked or nexted into the note a deeper level? This is me being an idiot and not remembering anything not brute force about using Tinderbox, but a great answer to this might be to just link me to a project that does this well.
Anyhow, i’m hoping tinderbox will work for this, because then I get to force myself to aggressively use it again and potentially save up to do the update to make this a go-to tool like it was for me back in grad school!