…so I’m learning Twine from my Twine book, just getting to the part where it goes all “HTML-like” - checkboxes and radio buttons and so forth, and…it strikes me - isn’t there any system which has a GUI (something “Dreamweaver-like”) to design such things? Because people sometimes like to write, without worrying about any of the coding. When you’re thinking of a story, you may even be thinking of the interactivity part, without worrying about how you’re going to set up the checkboxes or whatever - a GUI to design this would really help here. Someone must have made such a system, right? Is there one?
(I should point out that a side-effect is that Twine is excellent for -teaching kids programming- , but then there are lots of kids who are simply writers, and shouldn’t have their brains tampered with with the tech stuff in any way… - unthinkable, really, even if it IS interactive fiction!)
Most of the more GUI-like systems are more limited in what you can do with them. From my memory of doing web dev a while back, things like Dreamweaver let you graphically place interface elements, but hooking them up to make them do something still required code? I’m sure there are ways to make that more friendly/graphical, but I think it’s still a bit of an open research question. I feel like a lot of the Twine questions we see are “how do I create this somewhat complicated functionality?” and it seems like it would have been near impossible for a GUI to have anticipated the need for that particular thing. The attempts that I’ve seen (not necessarily in the IF realm) always seem to either turn into full-fledged programming languages, or into impenetrable mazes of configuration menus and dialogs. Though I can certainly see that you could have a GUI for layout and something else (also reasonably friendly) for behaviors. I just don’t think anyone has really done it yet?
But you might have a look at Inklewriter and Texture? They both do a good job of presenting a specific set of options with a helpful graphical interface, I think. And there are probably other tools out there that I’m forgetting…
Interface is the reason I chose AXMA over Twine. I just wanted to write my game and have it easily presentable in something that didn’t look like default Harlowe (or Sugarcane back in the day.) It also is very friendly for multimedia images and sounds and music. It provides an automatic in-game menu with text size and restore point and audio options. If you buy a license for about $20 USD, you can directly export and edit the HTML without first uploading to their library (which is how you use it for free) and you can probably do anything with CSS in the exported HTML. The game and individual passages are immediately testable in the UI with multimedia. There’s an online version of the editor which will allow you to quickly check out if it’s right for you.
I use 6.1 instead of the newer JavaScript version. It takes care of the UI with a few initial layout choices when you begin: you can present your game like a Visual Novel, or you can have just a page of text with pictures that pop up occasionally from an icon at the bottom, or you can have a main text page with a sidebar containing a small window image and a menu, or you can make the text window small with a big picture and a bigger side menu. You control the menu and pictures and sounds via easy macros with author UI buttons to insert the macro template for you.
My second choice would probably be Twine’s Chapbook format. I personally have found it the best-documented and feature-complete format for people who just want to write. There are easy options to change colors and layout and include multimedia. It’s a Twine format, but has great debugging and help with visual changes when you test your story via a “backstage” interface.