Returning to Story Creator

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:

• An editor that gives you a visual design on one side and dialogue building on the other.
• Simple project management by considering everything as files within a given directory.
• Keep to the original sd2 project, but migrate some of it to C#.

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:

• Add a Story Engine of some description that allows you to export your stories into your games. This Engine would be very simple with minimal functions, but would give you utility functions to load and execute your stories. SD2 does exist but that's for parsing the conversations themselves. The Story Engine will be for actually putting your story together.
  • Currently, you create conversations by creating files. These files are stored in a directory. I would keep it like this, but add an additional interface to allow selecting these files and using drag-and-drop to tell your game engine what conversation/file goes where.
  • Ideally, instead of creating conversations from the Conversation Editor as it currently stands, you create a story plan with ideas and use those ideas to expand your story.
• Expanding on the point above, I would put in place various "ideas" or "brainstorms" if you like, for when you are writing your story. Most story-driven video games, in particular, do not develop its features until certain parts of the story is written. For example, you don't write a script for a chase and run mini-game without knowing you are going to have a chase and run mini-game while you're writing your story.
• Although not specifically suited for the purposes of a story editor, there is a benefit to managing data or connecting your data sources to your story for when it's needed. There will need to be data management, but how this is done is ultimately up in the air. What is important at the moment is actually getting a version of StoryDev past it's "Beta" stage and into Release mode. Data Management will likely be a future patch, but I realise how important this is.

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.