I only suggest the browser’s spell checker for reasons that others have mentioned. If you can teach the spellchecker your custom words, then by all means. If I’m constantly having to ignore words incorrectly popping up as wrongly spelled, I’m going to be frustrated by the feature.
If I were to use the browser’s spell checker, I would have a toggle for it in the editor. If I feel that I need to review all content for spelling and grammar, maybe produce a single page that presents all game content. Then just scroll down and change any text that needs to be changed and it would automatically update the corresponding game content.
Anyway, I think you’re a smart cookie. I may be overstepping and assuming things incorrectly. Sorry if that’s the case. I will check out your software soon!
I have toyed around with Storyfall for just a bit to see what it does. Here are my impressions - forgive me if I’ve missed something and let me know if I just haven’t found a feature yet. I’m using MacOS in Safari.
I like the UI and creation process and if it were full-featured I could see using it.
I’m glad to have the option to include images and sound.
Genre selection is necessary - could we have an “other” if our story doesn’t fit one of the genres offered?
The “block quote” style doesn’t seem to do anything - should it indent or offset or sidebar text?
The “apply sound to all scenes” in a chapter didn’t seem to work, but I could manually assign audio to each individual scene.
Is there a way to play a single sound as an effect separate from background ambience/music? For example, if I am in an elevator hearing continuous elevator music and press a button, could I play a “ding” sound over the other audio?
I like that there are discreet “navigation” choices as well as “interaction” choices that don’t change the current scene/text. I created a true/false UniformWorn variable and was able to alter the scene text saying there was a uniform you could put on. Interacting works correctly, and I have two choices - one to wear the uniform, the other to take it off. However if I wear and and take off the uniform I don’t get those choices again, even if I return to the scene. Are interact choices one-off only?
I appreciate choice conditions with optional “why you can’t click this” text, however is there any option to hide a choice the player doesn’t qualify for instead of showing it greyed out?
Would there be a way to suggest a default character name (that the player could change) possibly to give an idea of the type of names in the world instead of making the player guess one completely? (I name my character Jim-Bob, which is out of character when I continue and discover I’m a mythical sea creature…) Can a player use the same name another player is using in the same story?
Can an author set story initial conditions like “no typewriter effect” or does each player need to choose it?
Any future plans for random number generation or dice rolls? Text input so a player can set a variable string to name their dog or type in an answer to a riddle?
Similarly any possible chance for a macro with a a link in scene text that the player can click or hover over for an informational pop-up window or tooltip text? (Essentially as an “examine” function - it’s not a choice, just shows more information about the word or phrase clicked. Like “you see a Portrait[1]” and if the player clicks portrait, an optional non-interactive text-block description of it (or image?) pops up?) (I’ve done it here with the “footnote” feature. )
Longshot request - any future possibility an author could export the entire story as a playable webpage? I understand this removes Storyfall monetization possibilities, but if the tool worked really well I would definitely pay $5-10 to make a story “independent” so I could offer it separately from the Storyfall website, or submit it to a competition. Or maybe offer a “pro license” subscription fee to do this while creating and playing stories live on the Storyfall website is free for creators.
I like the conditional text based on variables, but is there any future option for random or cycling text variation not based on a variable? I notice there is a code-block option…
What I mean is similar to text variation macros in Inform 7 and Ink, like:
You feel [one of]happy[or]sad[or]fine[at random].
The stoplight turns [one of]red[or]yellow[or]green[cycling].
You pull a card; it's a[one of]n Ace[or] King[or] Jack[or] Queen[in random order].
Inform 7 text variation options:
The portrait stares down at you with a regal countenance. ↩︎
Thanks for the explanation. Spell check isn’t my only reason for wanting to export and re-import. In general, I’d find it a good way to polish the text in a way that lets me edit the whole game in one file. Since with spell-check, you’re bound to want to change some of the text as well because you’re right there.
However, I don’t think you should be distracted from your main development by the idea of fixing export/import except to make sure you can actually re-import something that was exported.
It turned out to be just a few lines of code to get the HTML and text fields to re-generate based off of the JSON file. Plus I found and fixed a couple of bugs with importing along the way - so you should be good now to just update the JSON sections and the rest will get synced on import.
Wow, thank you for the detailed testing and feedback!
I’m glad you like the UI and multimedia capabilities.
That’s a good idea about an “Other” genre, I just added that.
Odd, block quotes works for me. I’m using Safari in MacOS too as my default browser. Can you maybe take a screenshot of what you see when you select some text and click block quote? Here’s what I see
There’s currently no way to play a single sound as an effect - but you’re the second person to inquire about that so I’ll add it to my TODO list.
The way I coded them, interact choices were one-off. I imagined scenarios like “pick up the flashlight” which once click shouldn’t show up again, but I hadn’t thought of repeat actions you might actually want to do multiple times. I’ll add this to my list too!
Good idea, and I was wondering if someone would want this or not, and someone did! Haha, so I’ll add it to my list.
Player names aren’t checked for uniqueness, two players can use the same name. But good point about inappropriate names - I know in a lot of IF names are chosen via multiple-choice. I was wondering the other day whether I should make the {playerName} variable collection an optional setting. Added to my list.
This is a reader choice right now. Once set by the reader it applies across all stories. I figured it would be better to leave this up to the reader.
Yes I was planning on adding free text input, but I hadn’t considered random number generation/dice rolls. Can you give me an example of how you’d use this?
That sounds like I’d just need to create a TipTap extension for a tooltip function, should be relatively straightforward (famous last words when it comes to TipTap, haha). I’ll add this.
A few people have asked whether this was planned. In short, yes I want to do this, but it’s quite a bit lower priority on my list than some other ideas I had floating around. For instance, I’d probably build a mobile app before I build a standalone story renderer. I like the idea of portability - being able to take your stories anywhere you want, so I do want to make the export file more than just a backup, but it’s a pretty big project to do this.
I hadn’t planned on this actually, but I can add this too
Thanks for all the feedback! I definitely appreciate it - it’s much better than me just blindly building stuff without knowing what folks actually want.
Here’s what I’ve done:
I’ve changed the import functionality to now re-generate the html and plain text fields, so you only need to edit the contentJson field. This should make it easier to do any kind of custom spellchecking you want on your entire story.
I enabled the browser spellchecker and this is the default option.
I added an optional spell checker feature to Storyfall, but this is disabled for new stories by default (because it would interfere with the browser’s spellchecker which some people prefer, or annoy people writing in other languages since it only supports US English right now). If people like this I can add more dictionaries later.
If you enable the Storyfall spellchecker, it has two modes: it’ll detect misspellings as you type and you can click on the word, go with a suggestion, add it to your dictionary (which persists across all your stories across all devices), or ignore it for this session. There’s also a global spellchecker, which scans all your scenes and choices (it also groups words, so if the same word re-appears multiple times, you can add it to dictionary with one click for instance). I also added keyboard shortcut support here so you can quickly go through the spellchecker’s results and take action.
This is likely not a usual thing for choice narratives - in most cases you want someone to pick up an item and keep it, but in the case of changing costumes the action could be repeatable. I wouldn’t be too put off as long as I’m aware that interact choices are one-off because there are uses for that, and I could make my changing costumes routine into a tree of regular choices that don’t disappear when used. But it would be good utility if every choice had a box to check to make it a one-off choice that would disappear because those have good use also.
This is mainly a pet peeve of mine - if a story makes me create a name before I’m immersed I’m always afraid I’m going to make it weird - first and last name? Normal first name? Fantasy name? When I’m getting started it’s always nice if there’s a default player name available so I can just click through if I have no ideas and don’t have to think about it so early in the story. Maybe in the story setup an author could choose to leave it blank or suggest a default name.
Combat and randomization! Since you have characters and factions, it makes sense there should be reasons to build or lose reputation with them. Attacking should have a chance to fail. If I have a speech statistic a risky dialogue option might have a chance to win or fail based on a dice roll against my speech stat adjusted by reputation. Similarly for loot - not every NPC goblin will have the same amount of copper in their pockets.
And that’s fine. Knowing that work we do isn’t necessarily forever locked on a website and there will be way to off-load it in the future would make me more willing to put in the effort. Sadly many of us are quite familiar with promising IF engines that are abandoned or closed down, and at least knowing that work we do won’t just go into a memory hole if there’s a problem is encouraging. Even if this is planned for future, it’s good to know you’re thinking about it.
One other thing that occurred to me is that you want to allow authors to disallow certain player names (usually because they already belong to other characters in the story). This was a problem with one of the IFComp games this year - OVER had a fairly expansive cast but you had to name one of the characters yourself before you’d met the rest of them, and a few people picked names already in use which made the whole thing incomprehensible and forced them to restart.
I had a thought - you have icons as an arrow for movement choices and a hand for interactions - what if you had a hand with a number 1 inside for a use-once choice, and a hand with a symbol in it meaning it can be used multiple times?
I also added an input type choice, so you can collect free text from readers (for names or anything else you want). You can select the input target variable in the fx (effects) menu like you would for any other variable effects.
If you leave the default name collection enabled, you can put in a suggestion to help readers pick the right name based on your story’s thematic elements.
You also wanted a way to hide choices that are unavailable instead of still displaying the disabled choice with some text. This can now be done via a toggle in the choice conditions dropdown.
I thought this was a good idea - all NPC names are now “reserved” within a story, so to speak, so users can’t pick them when first creating their character.
symbol in it meaning it can be used multiple times?
